• A number of soap opera writers have announced plans to go “financial core.” This WGA loophole will allow them to “give up full membership in the guild and withhold the dues spent on political activities in order to continue writing during the strike.” This is still, apparently, the exception to rule, as virtually all primetime series and late night talk shows remain inactive.
• Jason Reitman and Diablo Cody have a super-special bond that us mortals cannot hope to understand. The Juno director will produce the latter’s latest project, the aforementioned Jennifer’s Body.
• Paul Verhoeven has been hired to direct a sequel to the remake of The Thomas Crown Affair, which may or may not still be titled The Topkapi Affair. Pierce Brosnan’s coming back, but Rene Russo is not; fanboys are whispering that Angelina Jolie is coming abord to play the love interest.
• The Weinstein Company has purchased the distribution rights to a parody of Kill Bill called Kill Buljo. The Norwegian-produced spoof cost about $250,000 to make; TWC will probably send it straight to DVD.

***The National Legal and Policy Center has released a report intended to “shame” Google for failing to block access to pirated films on Google Video. Among other things, the NLPC charges that Google gives preferential treatment to copyright holders “it makes business deals with.” In response, a Google spokesman implied that some companies don’t want their copyright material removed from the site. “Copyright status can only be determined by the copyright holder, and their preferences vary widely.”

***Michael Tolkin, the author of The Player, has been hired to adapt the Fellini-inspired Broadway musical Nine for the screen. The Weinstein Company is producing the film; Chicago helmer Rob Marshall will direct.

***September’s Toronto Film Festival will host a Gala screening of David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises. The thriller re-teams the director with his History of Violence star, Viggo Mortensen.

***Brian Grazer has hired Rush Hour auteur Brett Ratner to direct Playboy, a drama about the life and times of Hugh Hefner. It’s the third stab at a Hef biopic, after several drafts by Oliver Stone and a musical version (!) proposed by 8 Mile’s Scott Silver failed to pass muster. According to Variety, Ratner got the job by sending Grazer a Playboy pinball machine.

***Governator Arnold Schwarzenegger is expected to sign at least one two bills aimed at luring movie production back to California with tax incentives.

***ReelzChannel, a new movie-centric cable network, has picked up ten episodes of What I Learned About (Blank) From The Movies, a Best Week Ever-esque series in which “comedians comment on those ‘valuable life lessons’ hidden inside” classic films.

***The Weinstein Company’s quest to turn Tarantino’s half of Grindhouse into an overseas hit has failed. The extended cut of Death Proof has earned just $10 million in four weeks across ten European markets. Variety adds insult to injury by noting that “French patrons were much more interested in maintaining support for Shrek the Third in its second frame.”

Poor, poor Michael Moore. The millionaire Oscar winner, whose Sicko opens June 29th, has already been saddled with the twin burdens of bailing The Weinstein Company out of their flop hole and saving a commercially sagging genre, neither of which will be an easy task considering the fact that Sicko is already available online. Then, this weekend, a reporter asked Moore to comment on an independent documentary critiquing his filmmaking methods. Moore responded by calling the makers of that film “f-ing liar[s]“, and went on to accuse them of spreading misinformation about “a fictional character that’s been created with the name of Michael Moore.”

The documentary in question is called Manufacturing Dissent, and it was one of the most talked-about films heading into the SXSW Film Festival this past March. The film aims to unmask Michael Moore as an unethical documentarian, a Capitalist hypocrite and, perhaps most egregious in the minds of the filmmakers, a not-very-nice guy. Dissent was dramatically billed as an attack on the Left (or, at least, on one of the American Left’s most visible icons) from the Left. Directors Debbie Melnyk and Rick Caine, self-professed ‘liberals”, start out as fans of Moore, but end up painting an unflattering portrait of the filmmaker after failing to secure access to his inner circle. The picture ends up vaguely alluding to some interesting academic questions about the nature of truth-telling on film, but is ultimately unable to accuse Moore of anything other than being a really, really good propagandist.

Dissent sparked a bit of controversy at SXSW, but not for the intended reasons. At the time, filmmaker AJ Schnack (who attended SXSW 2007 with his documentary Kurt Cobain: About a Son) pulled together a lengthy blog post summarizing some of the discussion surrounding the film. He spoke for a lot of us who saw (and were disappointed by) the film when he called BS on the filmmakers supposed mid-production shift in slant. “How in the world can anyone who is making documentaries, particularly documentaries on somewhat political or tabloidy subjects, not be aware of all the arguments against Michael Moore?” Schnack wrote. (Schnack was summarily accused by a colleague of “bad form” for questioning a fellow filmmaker.)

I was reminded of Schnack’s argument against Dissent when reading about Moore’s screed against Melnyk and Caine. On the one hand, Michael Moore is not known for his restraint, and it’s implausible that he would be so oblivious to an attack on his character and livelihood that he’d wait three months after the source of the attack was profiled in the NY Times to respond. This outburst was clearly timed to coincide with the release of Sicko–Moore actually gains credibility with a segment of his core audience by defining himself as the ultimate truth-teller surrounded by vicious liars.

On the other hand, maybe Moore took so long to respond to Dissent because it’s just so not a legitimate threat. A muddled mix of personal travelogue and pseudo-investigative expose, Dissent turns on the meek, overly-earnest Melnyk’s inability to get Moore to consent to a lengthy on-camera interview. Why would someone of his stature assign credibility to the complaints of a disgruntled fan?

On the OTHER hand, by responding so vehemently to questions about Manufacturing Dissent, does Moore maybe protest too much?

I don’t know. I’ve never been a fan of Moore’s methods, but I’m fascinated by his ability to mainstreamize (no, that’s probably not a real word) niche debates. I’m going to see Sicko on Thursday, and I’ll report back post haste. In the meantime, watch the Sicko trailer above, and talk about your love/hate for Michael Moore on the Spout Documentary board.

So if you haven’t yet read the latest issue of Fast Company, you should. Alan Deutschman and Scott Kirsner cover the changing, bomb-shelled landscape of movie distribution. ("Hollywood’s New Wave" and "Maverick Mogul" only available in print right now)

Of course, for some of you the issue will be mostly review. They cover the usual names-Mark Cuban and Steven Soderbergh (2929 Entertainment and Landmark Theaters), Harvey Weinstein, Lloyd Braun (Yahoo!)-but they also give some back-story to what the studios are doing to keep up. Still, the coverage around film distribution and the digital age is heavily slanted toward the question, "How will Hollywood survive digital download?"

Who cares? Why is it that corporate brass monopolizes the discussion around the coming new age of film distribution? I really don’t care what happens to them, I care what happens to me. It’s no surprise to me that Chicken Little was released this year because the mood with these media execs seems to be "The sky is falling! And it’s raining every film ever made and they’re available for free! And Mark Cuban is the mad scientist controlling the weather!"

So silly. But as Steven Soderbergh and Mark Cuban are quick to point out, the Hollywood system is terrible at innovating and very skilled at reacting. So they’re reacting to what happened to the music industry and jumping on the the iTunes train to salvation. But what about me? Why doesn’t Anne Sweeney at Disney-ABC TV, Brian Roberts at Comcast, Kevin Tsujihara at Warner Bros and Blair Westlake at Microsoft sit back, take a deep breath and imagine what it is like to be a little fella like Paul-a father and film lover living in the gloriously snow covered Midwest?

Please, imagine me suddenly being able to get 100,000 films for $2.99 each downloaded onto my iBook over a wicked fast internet connection. Imagine me sitting in a cafe, sipping the House Blend, reading a one paragraph synopsis on a movie-a movie I will commit two hours of my life to. Now imagine me picking up my cell phone and calling one of my film club buddies and asking them if they’ve heard about any good films lately.

Bingo. The real winner in the coming age of Video Download is Verizon Wireless. That is, of course, unless there is a place called Spout to find out about what the people in the know are saying about the diamonds in the rough. Nonetheless, it’s exciting to see Fast Company covering some problems we’ve been working on for over a year now. Maybe it takes the whining of Hollywood brass to get the attention of a magazine like Fast Company, but it’s the rest of us who will determine the real future of film.

So with the Weinstein’s leaving Miramax to truly fill their movie Mogul ambitions, people like Mark Cuban are stepping in to fill the void in filmmaking that Miramax seemingly used to. With the film Bubble he is executing his plan of financing a group of films (by Steven Soderbergh this round) and then releasing them simultaneously in all three channels–theater, HD-TV, and DVD.  And now we read about this, a new Cuban venture called Truly Indie, which is a sort of self-service framework for filmmakers to essentially rent screens using Truly Indie’s established partnerships and systems with Landmark and other theaters. 

There are a number of interesting quotes in the article from "I believe the film distribution system is rather closed" to "plain and simple it’s a way for indie filmmakers to slide by the gatekeepers," both sentiments that I agree with.  I also find it interesting that they titled the venture "Truly Indie," which definitely draws attention to the truly non-indie-ness of the existing indie product out there (Garden State anyone?). So while Truly Indie is probably a good step for filmmakers, I see it as really an incremental one. On the upside, it streamlines for the filmmaker an old and risky tactic of renting theater screens on their own dime. It’s nice for a filmmaker to have a simple "plug and play" framework now, but that doesn’t change the inherent geographic limitations of theatrical release and non-existent marketing budgets that indie filmmakers must face.

The fact is that movies that are released via Truly Indie will most likely never be screened in a theater near my house. What I think will be interesting is if they combine the theatrical release with a DVD release, like Cuban is doing with Soderbergh. I think a step like that can really free a "truly indie" film from theater constraints, allowing it’s popularity to spread faster, and put some money into filmmakers’ pockets.