• Get out your violins: Hollywood is depressed! Seems that an expected post-WGA strike production boom hasn’t happened, due to some mix of the shitty economy and impending SAG-strike anxiety. An anonymous lawyer quoted in this story describes the situation thusly: “There’s a huge amount of crankiness right now, and everybody — particularly agents — feels like they’re getting screwed.”
• The Weinstein Company, acquiescing to protests from Star Wars nerds, has announced they’ll release both the director’s version of Fanboys (which includes a subplot about cancer), and the studio’s cancer-free cut on DVD. The nerds have yet to release a statement, but Fanboys producer Keith Mann is not pleased. “This is more about avoiding picket lines at [Weinstein's Superhero Movie, which opens this weekend] than it was about making a decision about the release of our movie,” he told The Hollywood Reporter.
• Killer Films and Moxie Films are joining forces to spin a feature out of Anthony DePalma’s book, The Man Who Invented Fidel: Castro, Cuba, and Herbert Matthews of the New York Times.

• Vanity Fair has canceled their annual post-Oscars party, as a show of solidarity for the striking writers, and also presumably because there may not be a “real” Oscars to throw a party after.
• That said: the WGA is planning a “bicoastal powwow” for Saturday in order to present a tentative contract plan to their members, and if all goes well, says Dave McNary, “the boards could quickly start the ratification process — and possibly issue a back-to-work order that could take effect as early as Monday.”
• Welcome to the seventh circle of hell: an awards show honoring publicists, hosted by Billy Bush. It would almost be irresponsible to craft a joke around the following: “‘This is an event by publicists, for publicists, honoring publicists yet nobody knows about it because it’s not publicized,’ host Billy Bush joked in his opening remarks at the luncheon, to the delight of the flack-filled room.”

• Who knows whether or not anyone had to use their AK, but according to a “well-placed” WGA strike insider, “Friday was a good day.” The labor dispute is by no means over, but both sides are apparently circling a decision on streaming residuals that no one, as of yet, seems to have a major problem with.
• That Hannah Montana 3D concert film made ridiculous money over the weekend––$42,460 at each of its 683 locations––thus robbing Titanic of the record for best Super Bowl box office of all time.
• Each of the five Best Picture nominees have enjoyed a significant bump at the box office since the noms were announced two weeks ago, but No Country For Old Men “seemingly affirmed its status as Oscar frontrunner” by nabbing the Producers Guild prize over the weekend. 

• Above, a memo from United Hollywood: the WGA strike is about Maggie Gyllenhaal and two other pretty girls getting drunk and having threesomes.
• While I was at Sundance, the next James Bond film got a stupid title. Dirty Harry says it doesn’t matter: “As long as Bond kills for kicks, bags babes for laughs, and makes the world safe for democracy, Wal-Mart, and Exxon, I really don’t care.”
• In other news I missed, Mark Romanek is apparently no longer directing a Wolfman remake. Jeff Wells blames the strike.
• Four Eyed Monster Arin Crumley had his coat, passport, video recorder, wallet and bike stolen at “one of the best parties I’ve been to in a long time.” It’s got him thinking about socialism, colonialism and “balance,” all of which is encapsulated in the video after the jump. If you stole his stuff, he’ll give you a hug and a handshake if you give it back.

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• Will the strike motivate buyers to stock up on content, or will the rough recent art house climate discourage them from picking up all but the safest work? When it comes to the marketplace at the Sundance Film Festival (which begins today), all that seems certain is that star heavy, light-leaning comedies like What Just Happened? and Sunshine Cleaning are expected to have an easier time leaving Park City with a deal. So, in other words, no news to report yet.
• AMPAS is planning two separate Oscar shows: one in case the WGA makes nice with the studios or grants them a waiver to use writers, and an “alternative” strike-proof telecast. Oscar telecast producer Gil Cates is keeping quiet on what form the “alternative” show could take, but Variety speculates that it would probably “rely on industry heavyweights penning their own speeches and presenting the awards.”
• “Anticipation of a DGA deal is amping up the pressure from all sides on the leadership of the Writers Guild,” says Dave McNary. The AMPTP is expected to hand down an offer this week, and writers are apparently threatening that they’ll resign from the WGA and go “financial core,” allowing them to go back to work without union protections, if the DGA rejects it out of hand.

• Specialty divisions are expecting this Sunday’s stripped-down Golden Globes to deliver a serious hit in the usual visibility for their Oscar-hopeful product. But one exec quoted in this piece says some of his colleagues are “secretly thrilled” that they don’t have to take their minds off the strike and the election in order to attend one more black-tie schmoozefest. Here’s the kicker: “I had heard that stars weren’t even planning to dress up should the telecast have happened,” he said.
• Although film studios have thus far managed to remain fairly active over the course of the strike, Warner Brothers laid off more than 1,000 employees yesterday, citing an impending “decline in production activity.” At other studios, crew members from struck TV shows have been repurposed  to work on films, but the stock pile of shootable scripts can only last so long.
• Nicole Kidman is pregnant, so Kate Winslet will take the part she was scheduled to play in Stephen Dalry’s The Reader. Winslet was Daldry’s first choice for the role but had been initially unavailable.

If you’re on the East Coast or time zones further down the clock, you may have been already out the door by the time the Hollywood Foreign Press Association and NBC finally, officially conceded their mutual defeat: there will be no Golden Globes, there will only be Golden Globe winners, announced at a one-hour press conference telecasted by––gulp––NBC News. It took several hours for the film and entertainment blog worlds to chew up this news and thoroughly spit it out. Here then, a timeline, culled from my RSS reader, of the blogosphere’s coming to terms with The Fall of Globes, without a doubt the greatest tragedy of our…week. So far.

6:02 PM EST––The Cold Hard Facts: “The mechanics of the one-hour announcement itself are muddled. The original idea was that at some point during the parties the HFPA would stop the proceedings and make the declaration of the winners. Cameras would be poised on the nominees at the different parties, so that there would be reaction from Atonement’s Keira Knightley, for example, at the Universal/Focus party. This concept was scratched by the WGA.” — Anne Thompson

7:21 PM––Let’s Focus On What’s Really Important: “Who aren’t you wearing?! … Sorta hard to have a ceremony when no stars are gonna show … we’re just sayin’.” — TMZ

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• This year’s Sundance juries will be more star studded than I’ve seen them, particularly the Dramatic Competition Jury, which will include five boldfaced names: Quentin Tarantino, Mary Harron, Sandra Oh, Diego Luna and Marica Gay Harden. Other notable names on the other three prize-awarding panels: Eugene Jarecki, Heidi Ewing, Jason Reitman and Alan Alda.
• Marc Graser examines how the fall of the Golden Globes (which we mentioned here, but will go into in further depth later this morning) is going to have a devastating impact on the already-strike-crippled Los Angeles economy. In addition for seriously reduced paydays for party planners, photo agencies, the HFPA and NBC, there are “losses that are impossible to calculate: The film studios and networks use the event to publicize their kudos contenders.”
• Meanwhile, the strike climate may not get better before it gets worse. As Dave McNary puts it, “Despite much buzz in the blogosphere”––thanks for that––”the DGA is still far from reaching the bargaining table with studios and producers.”
• Daniel Day-Lewis, the Coen Brothers and Jonny Greenwood walked away from the Critic’s Choice Awards last night with trophies from the Broadcast Critics Association, for Best Actor, Best Picture/Best Director, and Best Score, respectively.

Nikki Finke says her sources tell her that the Hollywood Foreign Press Association and NBC have worked out a compromise to be able to produce a Golden Globes telecast that the WGA can’t picket. Nikki’s using the word “scraped” in her headline, but that doesn’t really sound accurate at all; it seems that the show will go on, just without the montage bloat.

The plan is to apparently throw “a news event where the actors can still get all glammed up”––basically, a glorified press conference, with most of the “content” stemming from the winners’ ostensibly improvised acceptence speeches.  Presumably, such a set up would allow NBC to keep their ad revenue whilst the HFPA gets to keep both their licensing fees and a teeny-tiny shred of dignity. Even better for us the viewers, Steven Spielberg will get to accept his Cecil B. DeMille lifetime achievement award, whilst we’ll be spared the clip reel attempt to legitimize Hook.

Joe Swanberg’s BUTTERKNIFE Trailer

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• Karina has a thing for strike beards.
• Chris ponders his diminishing interest in Adam Sandler.
• Breaking the awful truth that Juno is a studio film.
• More hand-wringing re: the death of the great film auteurs.
• David Cross defends his work in Alvin and the Chipmunks against an alleged attack from Patton Oswalt. Patton Oswalt is all, “Dude, it was a joke.”
• Karina’s picks for the best films of 2007.
• Butterknife gets a release date. If you haven’t already, check out the trailer above.
• Which character from the Todd Solondz canon grew up to look like Pee Wee Herman?
• 5 Great Actors. 5 Crap James Bond Films.
• On the podcast: the best of 2007, and the inaugural Boxing Helena Award.
• Why is Be Kind Rewind opening a month late? It could have something to do with this.
• The Prom Night trailer causes Chris to wonder, “Has the PG-13 rating become something of a teaser for R-rated content?”
• “What great filmmaker of today seems the least likely to make a sci-fi film?”
• Could Lionsgate be the next production company to negotiate directly with the WGA?
• Chris looks at the populist picks on a number of critic’s Ten Best lists. Also: is a given year’s Best Comedy necessarily the same year’s funniest film?
• Karina wants some of whatever Cary Grant used to take to “feel good all the time.”

• Here they are, your last strike bites before Christmas: the AMPTP has produced the figure that 74 percent of Americans report that their viewing habits unaffected by the strike. Which is nice, but when 26 percent of Americans report something, isn’t that, like, a lot? Also: the WGA has granted a waiver to allow writers to work on the Independent Spirit Awards. Rainn Wilson from The Office will host. Which is, um, also nice.
• Speaking of events living or dying based on a WGA waiver: uncertainty over whether or not stars will cross the picket line to attend the Golden Globes has thrown party planners into a panic. Yes, it’s that slow of a news day.
• Lou Reed will be the keynote speaker at the SXSW Music Conference. In conjunction, the SXSW Film Festival will screen Julian Schnabel’s concert film, Lou Reed’s Berlin.

• Oh, the perils of being an organization built on starfucking: if the Hollywood Foreign Press Association can’t get the WGA to issue a waiver to allow writers to pen lame banter for the Golden Globes, then there’s a strong chance that most stars will refuse to cross the (real or theoretical) picket line to attend the ceremony. No stars=no photo ops=virtually no point in going through with the awards. Variety says the HFPA’s chances at landing a waver look slim, although the WGA just issued a similar pass to the SAG awards.
• In other awards news: Juno and Into the Wild lead the nominations for the Critics Choice Awards; Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg, one of my favorite films of this year, and Bruce Greenwood McDonald’s The Tracey Fragments made the Toronto International Film Festival Group’s list of the Top 10 Canadian Films of the Year. Winnipeg will also open the Forum sidebar at the Berlin Film Festival in February. It’s screen alongside Green Porno, a collection of three short films by Isabella Rosselini about the sex lives of insects.
• This story is days old, but I missed it: a German producer has acquired the remake rights to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.

Variety has the story.

There’s gotta be a whole panoply of emotions swirling through Hollywood in advance of the strike–anger, frustration, exhilaration–but here on the internet (ironically, one of the contested spaces from which the writers want a larger cut), we’re pretty much all looking from the outside in. So that means it’s business as usual…which means snark and opportunism. Here’s some of the best:

• There were no blogs in 1988, during the last WGA strike–there was only Moonlighting.
• AMC’s Future of Classic blog has a post about strike movies. There’s a poll where you can vote for your favorite, but seems to be busted, because my vote didn’t register. For the record, I chose Matewan.
• Also from FoC: A warning that the longer this goes on, the higher the probability of a Jackass 3.
• “I’m Brian Williams, and I’ll be hosting Saturday Night Live this week. And if the threatened writers’ strike takes place, I’ll be hosting My Name is Earl.” [Lost Remote]
• The masters of non-scripted content at World of Wonder use their latest podcast to, um, wonder if a strike could actually happen. But then Fenton Bailey remembers, “I was like, ‘War in Iraq? What war? There isn’t gonna be one!’ Don’t take my word for it!”