• 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.

• Above: an ambitious aspiring film editor bought a fixer-upper and Hitchcockified the bathroom. More images here. Via BoingBoing.
• Jeff Wells finds a way to justify talking about “what a gutless dithering douchebag pussy John Edwards has turned out to be” on his movie blog by pulling a Chris Matthews, accusing the former presidential candidate of “acting like the softer, squishier, less decisive brother of Gregory Peck’s character in The Big Country.”
• UnitedHollywood links to a PDF version of an essay from Joan Didion’s After Henry, about the 1988 writers strike.  “Agree or disagree with how this strike has been waged, she puts her finger on realities that sound eerily familiar, 20 years later — and on some key differences as well.”
• Just in time for Valentine’s day, the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has reversed a Texas statute restricting sales of sex toys. Jette Kernion finds the movie angle at Slackerwood.
• I think this is what qualifies as “comedy” from Vanity Fair. Go easy on them–at least they’re trying.

• 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.

• 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 first trailer––really, the first bit of “official” marketing of any kind, because that sploogey Vanity Fair cover apparently doesn’t count––for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull will premiere on Valentine’s Day, in front of prints of The Spiderwick Chronicles. Variety says it’s part of a trend of studios waiting until a quarter in advance to show glimpses of their summer tentpoles; it could also have something to do with the fact that Indy 4 just wrapped, like, last week.
• You know it’s an unremarkable weekend when both Variety and The Hollywood Reporter bury their Friday morning box offic predix (yay, slanguage!) stories under a handful of other headlines. Variety says it’s a draw between Fool’s Gold, and the “far harder to predict” Hannah Montana concert film. THR says the abysmally reviewed Kate Hudson comedy will “probably cop the weekend’s bragging rights.”
• Berlin deals: Lionsgate has purchased Bangkok Dangerous,  starring Nic Cage as “as an anonymous assassin who travels to Bangkok to handle four kills for an underworld crime boss, but whose conscience becomes his enemy when he meets a local Thai girl.”
• Blah blah blah strike story, blah blah blah “what does it all mean?!?!”

• 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?

AdLand points to this print ad, purchased by Turner Classic Movies, which backhandedly “supports” the striking writers. A mock-up of a crumpled screenplay cover page, the ad encourages striking screenwriters to “keep it up” because, “After all, the greatest movies have already been written.”

It’s only surprising that TCM, a brand built on heavy fetishism of the old studio system, would so blatantly taunt the WGA, in that it’s a surprise to see ANYONE express an AMPTP-sympathetic position these days. But the ad has sparked an interesting conversation over at LAist. Of course, the ad is condescending. But is it actually more sinister than that?

…Read more

• “If the personalities of The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters weren’t real, Christopher Guest would have invented them.” So begins a gushing review of Seth Gordon’s doc from FourFour. “It made me believe that video game scores matter, and I don’t think that anything matters, really.”
• Kristin at E! Online says she has “exclusive” information that the Arrested Development movie is going forward. No word yet on whether or not they’re taking any of our plot suggestions.
• If Kenneth the Page says the strike is almost over, it’s probably true.
• I think the entire internet must be hungover, because those are pretty much the only blog posts I could find in two hours of combing through and refreshing my feed reader that weren’t about the Super Bowl, Super Bowl ads, or Heidi Montag. Sorry. I’m sure it’ll be better tomorrow.

• 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. 

• Informal strike talks are still slogging on––Robert Iger from Disney and Peter Chernin of News Corp will rep the AMPTP today––but without a set deadline for “officially” going back to the table, there are fears that the WGA will drag this out until June, when SAG’s contract expires, so that they can basically shut down Hollywood together until some time in the fall.
• The tech world is freaking out over Microsoft’s offer to buy Yahoo for $44.6 billion in cash and stock, which kind of takes the thunder from another Yahoo story from several hours before that story broke: former Warner Brothers chief Terry Semel announced he was leaving his position on the board at Yahoo. Earlier this week, Nikki Finke spread a rumor that Semel would soon leave Yahoo and possibly take over as head of New Line.
• Disney is releasing the 3D concert film Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert Tour theatrically for one week only beginning today. The tween sensation is expected to beat the box office competition, which includes the Jessica Alba horror film The Eye, which was withheld from film critics.

• Throwing a wrench into the WGA talks that neither side really needed, SAG has started talking shit about the recently-cemented DGA/AMPTP deal. SAG’s Alan Rosenberg wrote a letter to his guild warning them that the publicized details of the DGA pact were too vague to put much faith in, and that the pact may not actually be a victory on the digital download front. The DGA’s Michael Apted responded (and I’m paraphrasing), “If you don’t know the details, how come you’re sending letters, gettin’ all up our shit?”
• Variety has scant new details on Mark Romanek’s exit from Universal’s Wolfman remake: in this case, “creative differences” seem to translate to “money.”
• Oliver Stone’s not just talking about making a George Bush movie––he’s now found someone to fully finance the thing, so that it can be fast tracked into production by April, and possibly in theaters in time for the November election. Chris previously did a double take on this project here.

• With the fate of Heath Ledger’s final projects up in the air, Variety takes a look at some past films that were effected by the sudden deaths of their respective stars. Would Shrek have been as popular with Chris Farley as the voice of the titular ogre? Would Interview With the Vampire be better with River Phoenix? Should Jane Harlow’s final film, Saratoga, have been scrapped?
• WGA reps and studio execs enter a second day of informal talks today, which should be more exciting that it feels to me. Maybe it’s because I just read this detail of how badly the writer’s strike is effecting the economy, and now my head hurts.
• After confirming that Tony Gilroy had directed him to a second Oscar nomination, Tom Wilkinson has decided to reunite with the Michael Clayton director for the pharmaceutical company drama Duplicity. He is joined by Billy Bob Thornton and joins Julia Roberts and Clive Owen.
• Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida are now considered a “husband-and-wife team” for writing an original screenplay that Oscar-winner Sam Mendes will direct as a low-budget comedy. Currently untitled, the movie will be about a young couple trying to decide where in the U.S. is best to raise a child. It could be a very short film if the couple just reads the latest issue of Fit Pregnancy magazine.

The combo of last week’s DGA contract agreement and yesterday’s announcement of the Oscar noms may have set the WGA in a new direction towards ending the writer’s strike. Yesterday afternoon the WGA announced it had withdrawn demands for jurisdiction over reality and animation, which the AMTPT was dead against recognizing. The two sides are reportedly meeting together today.