• With his retro football rom-com Leatherheads is expected to top the weekend box office, George Clooney is finally speaking out about the fact that the WGA’s decision to exclude him from screenplay credit on the film pushed the actor/director to go financial core, or give up his rights as a voting member in order to pay fewer dues. The complexities of the story, outlined here, offer a pretty interesting glimpse into the intricacies of WGA policy.
• Are you ready for designer, non-disposable 3D glasses? Are we sure this didn’t already happen in the 80s, or am I once again conflating the events of Back to the Future 2 with the events of recent cultural history?
• Speaking of the relics of two-decade-old futurism, Bob Weinstein has bought the remake rights to Short Circuit.

The WGA strike is over, the Director’s Guild just signed an agreement, eyes turn to the the Screen Actors Guild whose contract expires this June and everyone is making statements laden with slippery subtext.

The Writers Guild made a statement about how their contract is ratified and everyone can expect them to work well with others now. P.S. Thanks to all the actors, producers and directors who lost work because of the strike. (Translation: We’ll be really, really, really cooperative with studios now. Unless, of course, our Screen Actor’s Guild brothers and sisters hit the picket line this summer.)

An AMPTP (studios) statement basically says what a pleasure it has been to work with the Director’s Guild. (Translation: If SAG strikes this summer, they’ll look like the thespian prima-donnas they are.)

CBS’s CEO makes a statement saying the strike was great! Kind of like a bad stomach flu that gets you to your bathing suit weight, CBS had no idea how much money it was wasting on writing new shows until they tightened their belts for strike time. Meanwhile, NBC leaves dozens biting their nails as Vegas’ season finale cliffhanger becomes strike casualty. (Translation: No more posh gigs for strikers.)

• Did you hear? Reed Elsevier is planning to sell Reed Business Information, the trade magazine pubishing division that includes such titles as Packaging Digest, Test & Measurement World, and Variety! No buyers have yet expressed interest, there’s no time table for the sale, blah blah. But I hope they sell to NBC/Universal, because as I’ve said before, Variety would be the perfect subject for a reality webseries version of 30 Rock.
• “There’s been an unusually strong awards box office bump this year,” says Pamela McClintock, “With the five best picture contenders combining to gross $97 million domestically since Academy Award nominations were announced Jan. 22.” All the more incredible, when you consider that literally the day before yesterday, this was the year that nobody was going to watch the Oscars because they haven’t seen the movies.
• Alex Gibney has made a deal to have Taxi to the Dark Side shown on HBO in the coming months, as much as a year before the film is scheduled to debut on its original cable home, the Discovery Channel. For whatever reason, Discovery announced after pacting with Gibney that they had no intention of airing the film until 2009; eager to get his film into living rooms befor the election, Gibney then sought out a side deal with HBO.
• Hey, it turns out that writers were actually allowed to write during the strike! But most of them didn’t, and now there’s a lot of hand-wringing because it’s been a week since the strike ended, and there have been no deals.

• Paramount has reshuffled its 2008-2009 release calendar, and the big headline is the move of JJ Abrams’ Star Trek from December 2008 to Spring 2009, in order to position the film as a summer tentpole instead of a Christmas/awards offering. Which seems like a no-brainer, but this project has been so slow getting off the ground that we’re sure SOMEONE will cry red flag. But really, isn’t the bigger red flag the bumping of Eddie Murphy’s Nowhereland from Sept. 26, 2008, to June 12, 2009? I guess the fate of Eddie Murphy projects is not at the top of the list of nerd concerns.
• The middling-to-good post-strike news: most writers whose deals were terminated by the strike will now find themselves “free agents,” and the spec script market is apparently expected to shortly be on fire. The bad news: TV networks and studios are planning to be extremely frugal about pushing projects into development and signing long-term deals.
• Major stars like George Clooney and Tom Haks pitched in on an a full-page ad in today’s Variety, encouraging SAG to come to the negotiation table as soon as possible before the actors’ contracts run out on June 30.
• In a think piece on actors who “thrive on the ambiguity of their multiethnic heritage,” Peter DeBruge informs us that “there’s a new kind of hero in town”––typified by none other than Vin Diesel. Is he even still in town?

• Around 7pm PST last night, WGA West president Patrick Varrone made the announement: “The strike is over. Our membership has voted. Writers can go back to work.” Only 283 of 3,775 voting guild members cast a ballot in favor of prolonging the strike.
• But the Hollywood Labor Wars are hardly over. The Screen Actors Guild will start negotiating a new contract soon, and a number of super-famous people (including Ben Affleck, Charlie Sheen and Sally Field) are lobbying the guild to make sure only super-famous people are able to vote on the contract that will cover the entire acting caste system.
• Steven Spielberg has backed out of its commitment as an “Artistic Advisor” to the Beijing Summer Olympics, on the grounds that China has failed to use its influence to intervene in the genocide in Darfur. “At this point, my time and energy must be spent not on Olympic ceremonies but doing all I can to help bring an end to the unspeakable crimes against humanity that continue to be committed in Darfur.” Oh Steve––this is totally the “my dog ate my homework” of socially conscious mogul excuses. You can do better than that.

Fox Searchlight has sent a cease and desist notice to CC2K, a fanboy-friendly pop culture site, demanding that they take down a review of recent WGA winner Diablo Cody’s script for the upcoming teen horror flick, Jennifer’s Body. A message from the site’s editors where the review used to be notes that the C & D was “very polite,” but the net result is, all the same, “no snarky review of Diablo Cody’s new script for you!”

Kate Coe is tracking some of the surrounding chatter at FishbowlLA, including a snarky comment from a Hollywood Elsewhere reader implying that the C & D’s are part of a wider conspiracy on the part of Fox Searchlight to “prevent anything or anyone from getting in the way of this processed fairytale.” We’re all for pointing fingers at Searchlight’s processing department, but what seems even more interesting are signs that, in this case, there might be a double standard. This can’t be a pure issue of copyright, because it seems that Searchlight has ordered the removal of one script review, whilst letting another’s site’s script review stand.
…Read more

• The strike may not be legally over, but in an industry desperate to return to some sense of normalcy, this is apparently the sound of a fat lady singing: The WGA’s still needs their members to officially vote on the new AMPTP deal, but TV showrunners are nonetheless expected to return to work today, with regular writers back in the office on Wednesday. More in our frame of concern, the Oscars will go forth with writers and without picket lines.
• Meanwhile, writers seem to generally think the prolonged strike, which will net them each about $1500 per streamed television episode, was “worth it,” nevermind the losses incurred by those crew members who lost their jobs, or the hit taken to the Hollywood economy as a whole. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the strike is responsible for up to $2 billion in local losses.
• Fool’s Gold easily beat holdover Hannah Montana at the box office this weekend, with a respectable $22 million. Meanwhile, the Paris Hilton-starrer The Hottie and the Nottie, which garnered some of the best bad reviews I’ve read in a while (why did they even screen it for critics?), earned a disastrous $234 on each of its 111 screens.
• Berlin deals: Arthouse Films has acquired Christina Clausen’s doc The Universe of Keith Haring; the Jason Statham crime pic The Bank Job sold release rights to various distributors in 40 territories.

The WGA and the AMPTP apparently reached a tentative deal sometime between 3 and 4 AM PST this morning.  Nikki Finke (who, BTW, really knows how to rock the stock photography) seemed to say in her last post that last night’s talks eliminate the need for tonight’s proposed bi-coastal WGA meetings, but as of this morning United Hollywood says those meetings are still on. Everyone seems to be stopping *just* short of saying the strike is definitively over. Variety has the full points of the proposed deal in PDF form (it will begin to download when you click that link), and United Hollywood [via indieWIRE] has the letter sent by WGA West president Patrick Varone to union members early this morning.

• The Academy’s Sid Ganis, desperate to come to some sort of revealable conclusion as to what kind of Oscars he’s going to preside over, has been pestering the WGA to grant a waiver to allow the producers to use writers/put on a show and not get picketed. So far he’s been denied, and it sounds like his hands are wringing fairly fervently. “I’m nervous. We’re getting down to the final moments; we need to make plans.”
• In the second remake of a 1950s Fritz Lang film announced in as many weeks, Michael Douglas and Amber Tamblyn have been cast in a do-over of Beyond a Reasonable Doubt.
• Do Sonic Youth get to make any money off of this?