It looks like John Waters has a new muse. In an interview with Pop Candy’s Whitney Matheson, the filmmaker discusses his upcoming Christmas movie Fruitcake––“imagine The Little Rascals if John Waters had directed it”––and has nothing but effusive praise for the film’s star, Johnny Knoxville:

Yeah, I love Johnny. He really personifies every male character that’s a good guy that I could write that would live in Baltimore. I think Jackass is very much in the spirit of what my early films were. He’s an anarchist, and I’m always happy to hang around anarchists. He’s a cultural anarchist.

Knoxville, of course, starred in Waters’ most recent feature, A Dirty Shame. And Waters has been vocal about his admiration of the prank punk turned actor before; he memorably stuck Jackass Number 2 in the (wait for it) number 2 slot of his Top Ten Films of 2006 list for Artforum, declaring it a triumph that Knoxville and his boys had the “number-one-grossing movie in America on its opening weekend—and the male stars eat shit and drink horse semen for real. They’re nude a lot, too. If this isn’t cultural terrorism, I don’t know what is.”

By now, we’re used to Waters cheerfully celebrating mainstream culture for co-opting his once-shocking provocations. I’ve never been entirely sure how I feel about it––complimenting a product of a Viacom subsidiary as an act of “cultural terrorism” is a little much, don’t you think?––but I don’t know…there’s something vaguely interesting about the idea of him taking this superfamous guy who he’s convinced is an “anarchist”, and putting him in a children’s film. Maybe Waters is finally co-opting his aesthetic back.

The Underwire spots the strike-assisted irony in that story from last week about the online release of the next installment of the Jackass franchise:

The studios are locked in a death grip with the Writers Guild of America over the future of digital entertainment. When negotiations began, the studios claimed there wasn’t yet enough money being made online for them to keep track of such new-fangled bangs and whistles. So, to prove their point that they’re not making any money online, Viacom is releasing a major feature film through the internet. Doh!

I don’t know if we can really classify a glorified blooper reel that would have gone direct to DVD anyway as “a major feature film,” but the argument’s still pretty solid. And Jackass is a particularly interesting example of the contested territory that the writers are striking over––although, I’m afraid that if I were to think too hard about someone “writing” something like the above, my brain might explode. In any case, can’t wait for the YouTube dramatization of this little twist in the saga to pop up on United Hollywood.

• Talks resume today between the writers and the studios. The WGA’s chief priority is to “get a better proposal on the table”; the AMPTP seems most concern with stepping up their game on the PR front.
• Viacom is starting to hedge on earlier indications that they’re all but ready to unload Dreamworks. At the UBS Global Media Week & Communications Conference, Viacom’s Philippe Dauman talked sweetly about Steven Spielberg, whilst potential Dreamworks buyer Jeff Zucker of NBC/Universal focused on how his own company “is on a great trajectory, and we feel great about that.” Great.
• Anne Sweeney, co-chairman of Disney Media Network and president of Disney-ABC Television Group, has been named the most powerful woman in entertainment by The Hollywood Reporter. For her achievements, she gets to eat breakfast with John Travolta and Queen Latifah. Yay, girl power!
• Paul Haggis and writing/producing partner Robert Morescu have filed yet another lawsuit against Crash producer Bob Yuri, claiming he still owes them “$4.7 million in adjusted gross receipts for the film.” This is at least the fourth lawsuit to have followed the film’s 2006 Best Picture win, and you’d think it all would have been preventable––if anyone should know the ins and outs of inane misunderstandings, it’s the guys who wrote Crash.

I’ve previously expressed concerns that Google’s renewed commitment to cracking down on copyright infringement will have a disastrous impact on YouTube and GoogleVideo potential as teaching tools/living media archives. Today, via CinemaTech, comes this Wall Street Journal article (if you’re not a subscriber, try this link) about people hired by companies like Viacom to seek out and request the removal of copyright content from YouTube.

The company profiled says they earn as much as $500,000 a month from each of the media companies that employ them. Most of their focus seems to be on removing music videos that have been illegally uploaded by MTV viewers, and comedy sketches illegally sourced from Comedy Central. Since many of these videos are available for legal streaming on MTV’s Overdrive and other sites, you have to wonder: since the average YouTube “pirate” surely doesn’t care enough about a company like Viacom to try to deliberately hurt them, why would they bother uploading these clips at all? Why would anyone want to watch a choppy YouTube clip of Same Girl when MTV.com has the same video, in a slicker player and at a higher resolution?

My guess is that a big part of it is the demand for embeddable clips — you can link to MTV.com’s videos, for example, but you can’t display them on your own blog or MySpace/Facebook page. A big part of the appeal of watching online videos is being able to share them. Teenagers especially seem drawn to the practice of using YouTube clips of their favorite music videos and funny scenes as building blocks in constructing their online identities. When you’re 16, your MySpace page is your personal portal, your social resume, the one-stop shop where friends and crushes can receive all your sanctioned information. If you were that 16-year-old, would you really want to have to “express yourself” by directing your friends to go check out all your favorite videos on Comedy Central’s website?

My big concern with the YouTube crackdown is that it will make it impossible to share hard-to-find media detritus: rare interviews and TV clips, scenes from films that aren’t on DVD, etc. It’s nice to see Delaney heavily imply that media companies are taking a hands-off approach to fan-altered clips containing copyrighted content, and just about anything else that could reasonably fit under Fair Use. There’s a sense that the big media conglomerates have had to pick their battles. While Viacom pays $100,000 a month to make sure that clips of Chappelle Show aren’t allowed to circulate, there seem to be an awful lot of four-month-old, camcorder-sourced clips from subsidiary Paramount’s Disturbia.

Another interesting tidbit from the story: employees at the company hired by Viacom blow off steam by sharing vintage oddities. “They combat the monotony by passing links to quirky clips around the office,” Kevin J. Delaney writes. “One recent oddball favorite was a video of a flamboyant German disco-era group performing in Genghis Khan-inspired outfits.” Surely, somebody somewhere owns the copyright to that, too.