The Hollywood Reporter: Risky Biz Blog

It's Twilight: Do you know where your children are?

By Steven Zeitchik

What if you went to a sweet sixteen party and a movie premiere broke out?

The answer, we suspect, might look something like the "Twilight" debut.

We've been to many a movie launch over the years and have seen our share of the sublime and the squealing. But nothing quite prepared us for the spectacle that met us in Westwood on Monday night.

All around town Monday, agency and studio assistants were frantic as they tried to secure for their bosses, all with expectant children waiting at home, both screening and party tickets for the Summit vampire picture. A prominent studio exec and equally prominent producer, each with their kids in tow, shared a conversation in the back of the Mann Village before the screening in which they shook their head at how hard tickets were to come by, but then indulged in a sigh of relief that they were able to pull it off. A dinged reputation in the boardroom is one thing; sliding down a notch at the kitchen table is another.

We even got a few calls from suburban moms -- now you _know_ they're reaching -- assuring us their tween daughters were "very talented journalists" and could we please, just please, make a few calls and see if we could get their daughters in.

Hundreds were lining the street in Westwood hours before the premiere started, and were still hanging round when the movie was over, eager not only for a glimpse of the stars who played their favorite characters but also for any morsel of information about the movie itself (we didn't have the heart to comprehensively answer one such innocent who asked us if we thought it was the best movie ever...though on that subject, the film adaptation is surprisingly entertaining, not exactly the cleanest presentation -- a hodgepodge of vampire and supernatural conventions mixed with the stuff of high-school cliquishness, all in a package that's better written and (sometimes) acted than it is directed -- but appealing enough.)

The afterparty, around the corner at the Hammer Museum, continued the teenybopper theme so completely it could make a Jonas Brothers concert look like the London Philharmonic. Packs of tween girls huddled all around the party, the more brave among them sidling up to "Twilight" heartthrob Robert Pattinson to ask if he might do such things as bite them. (He declined, as far as we could tell).

But the strangest part of the scene was that, the tween girls notwithstanding, the party resembled pretty much any Hollywood premiere, with the drinking, schmoozing and preening -- not to mention the high-end decorating, food and lighting -- of any such gathering. (Good news bit from media-shy "Twilight" author Stephenie Meyer, who told us definitively that there would indeed be no fifth book in the series. "Maybe in ten years I'll get lonely without vampires," she said. "Right now I want to do other things.")

The guests also went beyond the teen idols to include the stars you'd see at most adult-themed parties. Larry David turned out (he was with Ned Bellamy, the Seinfeld guest star who once played Elaine's bald, militaristic co-worker at the catalogue and has a small part in the film) though was stopped at the door to the party until a publicist informed security he was, well, Larry David.

Seth Green was there - of course -- complete with vampire fangs we could have sworn came from Buffy circa 1999. Jamie Foxx made a late entry and shared a spirited conversation with director Catherine Hardwicke right near the dessert table.

Before we left, a friend of Hardwicke's remarked how the affair featured so many tweens and teenagers, and then added that "everyone is so well-behaved." We were about to nod in agreement, assuming she meant the children, then realized she was referring to the execs. Apparently the best way to keep the powerbrokers in line is to have them bring along the kids.

A View to a Killing (But is it really James Bond?)

By Steven Zeitchik

The Quantum of Solace's recordbreaking weekend proves many things: the vitality of the Bond franchise, the ability of headline writers to conjure up every bad pun from a previous Bond title, the strangely beneficial effect an inscrutable title can have on box office (c.f., "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," "Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death").

It's worth noting that some of the box-office comparisons to "Casino Royale" shouldn't be made without some context. The first Daniel Craig-starrer opened against a strong Warners push for "Happy Feet" that siphoned away some of the Bond-loving parents, as well as against a still leggy "Borat," which took away many of the college students.  And adjust box-office for past releases and some of the movies drive circles around some of the newer Bond installments; three titles -- ""Goldfinger," Thunderball" and "Live and Let Die" -- earned more than $750 million worldwide in 2008 dollars.

Still, the $71 million U.S. opening is undeniably impressive, and won't be sneezed at by anyone, least of all MGM, which couldn't be taking over sole distribution of the franchise at a better time. ('Get that thing fast-tracked' has an M-like ring, doesn't it.)

But the creative side is worth looking at.

Bond, like all franchise characters, can and should evolve. And true, like all new iterations of a franchises, the newest Bond retains some of the timeless trappings of the original (he's still dispatched all over the world to find out information and knock people off, even if he does so with less joie de vivre than his predecessors).

Plus it's nice to darken up the character and link him emotionally to previous movies; this one is in mourning, after all.

But push the arc a little further -- and we'll see if that happens with #23 -- and he doesn't really look like Bond, not only because he has fewer gadgets and frivolous romances but because in giving him an air of such seriousness the character has lost some of the point of the whole enterprise: to gently poke fun at the very idea of an all-powerful spy, and at spy movies.

It's no accident that "Solace" is based on just a short story from Ian Fleming, and not really based very closely on it at that.

Some ink has already been given over to the Bourne-ification of the series -- the globehopping hit man, the frenetic action, the character's innate loneliness, the fact that Marc Forster used, well,  the second unit from Bourne.

All of this is not a bad thing; series need updates all time, and this one has style to burn. It just may not be a Bond thing.

West Egg, the sequel

By Jillian Karger

Can Baz take on F. Scott?

For his latest film project, "Australia" director Baz Luhrmann looked back sixty years and across an ocean. With his next project, he could be keeping it here in the U.S. -- and looking back even further.

As we began noting last week, the director was telling a MoMa tribute in New York last week about some twisting of the knobs he was still doing on "Australia" when he segued into talk of his next project. So what period work might get the Luhrmannish treatment (that is, slick and energetic direction that inspires followers and doubters in equal measure)? A "good little book," he said, one that just happens to be one of the classics of American literature -- "The Great Gatsby."

Luhrmann explained that he recently came across a very expensive copy of the
book inscribed by vaudeville star and silent-film director Herbert Brenon. Brenon had taken a stab at a Gatsby adaptation during the silent era, and though no print of that movie exists today, the book got Luhrmann thinking that maybe it's time for him to follow Brenon and Jack Clayton, who wrote the 1974 version, down the road to West Egg.

It's easy to see why the Fitzgerald's novel has attracted directors over the years: Gatsby's elegant parties and the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg offer plenty of visual possibilities, while the themes of upward mobility offer fodder for a certain kind of class-conscious filmmaker.

Despite some reason for skepticism, there are also plenty reasons why it might work. Luhrmann already showed he could shoot the wild parties during a roaring era, as he did in "Moulin Rouge," and found a succesful way to reimagine a classic for modern audiences with "Romeo + Juliet."

The question is: is this really going to happen? Is Luhrmann expressing a true goal, or is he, much like Jay Gatsby himself, presenting a fanciful illusion? Though directors frequently toss out an idea just to see how it lands, by Luhrmann's tone it seemed like he was expressing more than a whim.

Of course there is the little matter of rights. "Gatsby" doesn't go into the public domain for more than a decade. (Rights currently reside with Scribner.) So either Luhrmann has a deal in the works -- or it's going to be one of the director's famously long-gestating projects.

Andrew Rona's Silver Lining

By Steven Zeitchik

This is a juicy one. Andrew Rona, the current president of Rogue Pictures, one of the founders of Dimension Films and the studio overseer for some very big modern horror and comedy-horror franchises -- "Scream" and "Scary Movie," to name two --  is in talks to join Joel Silver's Silver Pictures.

Rona would replace Susan Downey as president of the company. (She's likely leaving in February, when her contract expires) He'd also assume the role of co-president of Dark Castle (the full scoop on THR).

So does this mean anything besides a round of musical chairs for film execs? In short, yes. Most obviously, it gives momentum to Silver Pictures at a time that it seems at risk of losing it -- not only because of the departure of Downey (off potentially to form a banner with husband Robert Jr.)  but because it's had several disappointments over the past few years with titles like "Speed Racer" and "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang." And it needs that momentum as it gets some big movies ready, like the Sherlock Holmes update (currently in production) and genre/comic titles like "The Losers," based on a popular DC Comics property.

But the move has equally large implications for Rogue. A genre label that took a little while to find its footing at Universal, the brand now will move to Relativity (expect a deal to be formalized over the coming weeks) in what amounts to a fresh start for the company.

With Rona potentially leaving, Relativity now will get a shot at installing a new spate of execs right off the bat. That allows for a type of pure experiment for the producer-financier. Until now it's been financing movies for other studios and banners. Now it's a self-contained studio (with a distribution assist from Universal) and whether it flourishes or it sputters, all credit or blame will flow back to Kavanaugh and his team.

So in the end it all works out neatly. In Rona, Silver gets an exec with serious credentials dating back to his Dimenson days and a person who can allay concerns over who would slip into Downey's shoes (even if his focus has been somewhat different at Rogue than some of the movies Silver does). And Relativity has a library, a distribution pipeline and a chance to finally be what it's wanted to be -- a studio in everything but name.

Well, maybe not entirely neatly, since Relativity and Silver/Dark Castle may find themselves entwined in other ways.  Sylvain White, the up-and-coming director (he did "Stomp the Yard") is on board to direct the high-profile Rogue property "Castlevania" was just in the last few weeks brought on to Dark Castle's "The Losers." Don't ever expect you've made a clean break -- wasn't that one of Scream's first rules of horror movies?

Non-Screenings are the new screenings

By Steven Zeitchik

Movies that no one has seen, at least the high profile ones, have an advantage in this age of instant blogging. As a studio, if you can belt out promotional arias and hear nothing but an echo you're always better off than having some hotheaded or agenda-driven blogger provide the response to your call. Or at least that's the thinking.

That may not be a conscious strategy for "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button." But it's how that movie's publicity is unfolding. No one's seen it, but that's not very interesting to talk/blog about. So people chat up what they've "heard" -- i.e., what may very well be what people involved with the film are saying. Or they just grease the wheel by talking about how much they'd _like_ to see it.

That seems like it should keep the advance word positive, a campaign's ultimate goal with these kinds of tactics. The problem with the strategy is that, as a studio, not only do you risk unreasonable expectations for when the movie actually begins to show (that's a relatively benign concern) but you create a feeding frenzy for leaks and assorted laymen -- actual laymen, not bloggers you happen not to like. In turn, you have early word defined by people even further out of your control (and, let's be honest, people whose backgrounds and taste are complete unknowns -- but who, because they are among the few who've seen it, get a disproportionate degree of publicity and credibility.)

The irony is pungent: in trying to avoid having semi-professionals get their hands on a movie, you actually turn the keys over to complete non-professionals . Think about what this assumes, and implies: that the more early publicity a movie gets, the more undesirable its coverage. What does that say about the movie? Or publicity?

In a worst case, you even end up with this, from a Spout blogger we're sure is well-meaning but whose post comes off as semi-absurd: a boast they've seen the movie but can't tell you what it's about because they're under embargo.

So this is what comes down to? Movie bloggers now blogging about the fact that they can't blog about a movie? This is what passes for advance word about a high profile movie like "Button?" We're not expecting the second coming of Pauline Kael, but there has to be a better way -- perhaps, maybe, democratizing the screening process by letting hundreds of media see it within a one or two-day span. Too hard to control, some will say. Nonsense. They managed it for Indiana Jones, the biggest movie on the planet. They can do it here.

Or maybe there's another creative solution. Either way,  the current method -- a mix of selective strictness and kneejerk control tactics -- not only leads to some truly bizarre coverage, it doesn't help the movie. It's time to rethink the model.

When Moore is more, and a monkey-spanking isn't a monkey-spanking

By Steven Zeitchik

Director reinvention has always struck us as a lot easier than the actor sort. As an actor you're playing against public perceptions as well as your craft; as someone behind the camera, it's mainly just about being able to pull it off creatively.

But sometimes directorial changes can be just as difficult, even monumental. Two very different directors are making just those sorts of shifts with upcoming projects.

The first, for the indie darling David O. Russell, has him moving between the deceptively disparate precincts of quirky comedy and broad comedy.

Russell's movies have always had a sort of universal appeal; though the characters are determinedly weird, they don't generally beg for our empathy so much as allow us to laugh from a distance (those antic moments at the end of "Flirting with Disaster" come to mind).

Still, it's a surprise to learn today that he's taking on that Black List spec sensation "The Grackle," a New Line project that Matthew McConaughey fell in love with and decided to produce and star in when it got all he studios excited a couple years ago,

People who've seen the spec say it's smart and funny -- that is, not like filmic gems such as "Failure to Launch" -- but still a fairly broad commercial comedy involving a high-concept idea (a pugilistic barfly decides to help legal clients settle scores, er, extralegally). That means Russell will have to go from soldiers searching for treasure, and all the metaphoric humor that comes with it, to the simple funny spectacle of a man whaling on his legal adversary. We'll see how that more literal kind of spanking goes over.

On a more political note, Michael Moore is also making a switch. In his case, he's adjusting his upcoming Vantage/Overture doc that was supposed to be about the post 9/11 world -- well, it's a sequel to "Fahrenheit 9/11", so let's say the post-post-9/11 world -- from a foreign-policy-centric film to a movie focusing more on domestic policy, especially the economy and the financial crisis. There are all sorts of questions about where Moore will find the culprits, whether audiences will find those discoveries new or redundant, etc.

But there's a bigger artistic and tonal question -- namely, in an age when a Democrat who's simpatico with Moore's world-view is in power, can the filmmaker go form rabblerousing upstart to a man with all the answers? There's some evidence to the contrary. "Sicko," for all its effective indictments of the health-care system, was notable for its lack of prescription; you came out wondering, 'huge problem, lots of greed, but what the heck should we do about it?' (And no, moving to France doesn't qualify as a policy suggestion.)

The realization that you need to change tone or direction to keep up is admirable. But it remains to be seen whether merely having the desire to change is enough.

It's just like that blog Frisky Business

By Steven Zeitchik

We've always wondered who, exactly, are the people who buy enough product from the Asylum -- the company that makes straight-to-DVD knock-offs like "Snakes on a Train" and "Transmorphers" -- to keep it in business. Shut-ins? Masochists? Dyslexics?

THR's Matthew Belloni doesn't answer that question; we're afraid no one can. But he does offer an incisive, entertaining look at the legal limits and ambiguities of marketing a movie that has a similar title and/or trailer to another film. (These are not satires, which are protected under copyright law, but movies that confuse the average filmgoer -- um, we mean movies that offer delicate, loving homages.)

The Asylum has been churning out these titles for years, but the issue has reared its head with Fox's upcoming release of "The Day the Earth Stood Still." The studio is sending its lawyers after the Asylum, which has -- what else? -- a movie titled "The Day the Earth Stopped," featuring a similar trailer, coming out just about the same time that Fox is releasing its Keanu Reeves remake.

It's hard to say how successful Fox will be with its cease-and-desist tactics -- presumably studios have tried this before and the Asylum just keeps on trucking. As Belloni notes, there's a lot of murkiness to copyright and trademark law. If a title doesn't find "secondary meaning" -- lawyerspeak for cultural resonance -- alleged infringement victims have a hard time making their case. Which means that studios may continue to be frustrated.

Those film fans who want their snakes on every conceivable mode of transportation, on the other hand, will be well taken care of.

Slumdog Millionaire, that movie with just a few small expectations

By Steven Zeitchik

Seeing the Indian epic "Slumdog Millionaire" a second time Tuesday night, at its L.A. premiere at the West Side Landmark, we were reminded not only how much we liked the movie but what we liked about the movie -- namely, that it's really four or five different movies.

Previous Danny Boyle films took specific genres -- zombie movies, drug pictures -- and gave them enough twists to make them fresh (while keeping them squarely enough in the  original genre to reminds us of just what he was reinventing).

This film pulls off its originality not so much by giving one genre fresh twists but by combining disparate genres in the first place. A coming-of-age story, a romantic fairy-tale, a Kite Runner-ish saga of class and religious tension, a media critique and sendup, a gangster epic, a Bollywood allegory -- all these elements, peeled away and turned into their own film, would be effective in their own right. Boyle is able to juggle them all in one movie.

Of course these kinds of media lovefests  -- and if you think you've seen a lot already, be prepared for more as the movie rolls out in limited release over the coming weeks -- could hardly be anticipated when the movie was orphaned at Warner Independent this summer, just before Searchlight got involved. (The shuttered WIP gave Searchlight all distribution rights and responsibilities in exchange for a 50-50 revenue split; has there ever been a distribution deal constructed under more unique circumstances)?

"We were dead and buried 8-10 weeks ago. We were on DVD, to be honest," Boyle said before the screening, then added in an interview with Risky Biz that he wasn't embellishing. "I really didn't know. Parts of the business were collapsing. The end of the movie has the line 'It Is written.' i thought our fate was written." (A Q&A from THR's Gregg Goldstein appears in Wednesday's paper; check it out here.)

Boyle may have been exaggerating, for reasons of humility, how much he really worried about the film's fate. But his worry also seemed genuine and was no doubt rooted in a certain reality -- which speaks to how far the movie has come from a late summer curiosity to a bona fide best-picture contender. Reporters and bloggers tend to over-rely on the "It's a rags-to-riches story that could have come from the movie itself" conceit. It's hard to avoid it here.

There have been anwd will inevitably be more punditry about Slumdog's future during with awards voters. we know the counterarguments -- no stars, foreign setting, no easy marketing hook. And the expectations are a lot to saddle atop any film with (hello, Ben Button), particularly one with some built-in obstacles.

But consider some of the parallels to other Searchlight breakouts, particularly a certain $150 million juggernaut last year. Think of other times a movie no one heard of became, seemingly instantaneously, a can't-miss phenomenon, offered up a starmaking lever (Dev Patel is the new Ellen Page...in the discovery sense, anyway) and was the movie that earned awards spots in part because it's so different from all other awards movies.

Then think about Searchlight's unique mix of aggressive commercial marketing and delicate positioning...and try not to call it Juno's Little Miss Napeolon Millionaire. Given Slumdog's penchant to juggle movies within movies, that seems just about right.

David Duchovny finds a good egg

By Steven Zeitchik

With all due respect to the people who run sites like this, we're not usually the type to get excited by the Easter egg -- the inside joke or shout-out in a movie or a TV show.

They can be clever enough, we suppose -- the movie marquee has the name of the director's other movie! -- and fun when used to impress easily impressed friends. But they also can feel a little navelgazing.

Still, we have to admit we got a laugh out of an upcoming episode of the guilty pleasure "Californication," which buries a good movie nugget in one of the lines of womanzing main character Hank Moody.

In the episode, which is scheduled to air later this month, Duchovny's character finds himself in some trouble of his own making, as he so often does (it involves his overactive libido, a Spanish maid, and her misogynistic boss -- what else?). In a liverbal free association, Moody makes reference to Spanglish as a language and then adds, for no apparent reason, the non-sequitir "An underrated movie in my opinion."

Which is just about perfect, since Duchovny's wife Tea Leoni of course starred in the James L. Brooks comedy, a movie that wasn't exactly embraced by critics and whom Duchovny is clearly getting in a little shot at.

As for whether this was actually in the script of the Tom Kapinos show or an ad-lib is hard to tell-- Duchovny's Moody is such a quip-ready wiseguy that sometimes every line seems ad-libbed -- but points either way for the inside joke. And, needless to say, we're now waiting for the Skinner reference.

Baz Luhrmann on a trip to...West Egg?

By Steven Zeitchik

Those aghast at Baz Luhrmann taking on the Shakespeare canon may have new reason for indignation. Luhrmann is considering tackling a classic of a more recent century. Are you ready ('cause we're not sure that you are). He's considering shooting a version of...The Great Gatsby.

As THR's intrepid Jillian Karger reports from the MoMA tribute to the Aussie auteur in New York Monday night, Luhrmann has been toying with the idea of adapting the Fitzgerald classic about Jay Gatsby, Nick Carraway and the other happenings at West Egg. "I probably shouldn't let the cat out of the bag, but I've been thinking about 'The Great Gatsby,'" he told the audience.

On the one hand, the book has the kind of flash that Luhrmann revels in. And with its depiction of glamour and new wealth it has a surprising degree of modern relevance (or did until the fiancial markets collapsed). And, come to think of it, Luhrmann is sort of a Gatsby-esque figure in his own right.

But aren't some things sacred? Or, what we really mean, shouldn't some things be protected from Luhrmannish hands? (And didn't Jack Clayton's 1974 version, complete with the Coppola-penned screenplay, offer a definitive word on the classic novel?)

That said, we'd actually be interested to see what Luhrmann does with it, though we can already hear the howsl of protest, the ones in the vein of: If Luhrmann does this, what other stalwart works of American literature might he want to take on -- Huck Finn? The Old Man and the Sea? The mind races at the possibilities, even as the ghosts of Hemingway and Twain might race the other way.

Maybe it's not so hard to hold a candle in the cold November rain

By Steven Zeitchik

Like the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, who for years famously couldn't win when the temperature dipped below forty degrees, animated movies have fared a lot better when the weather is warmer.

Sure, lately the toons have been opening in this Thanksgiving-filled, school-dazed month with some gusto; "Bee Movie," "Happy Feet" and "Chicken Little" all posted respectable November victories. But they don't put points up like the spring and summer openings, movies like  "Cars" ($60m) and "Finding Nemo" ($70m).

This weekend, though, "Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa" hit a high point for movies released when mercury is at a low ebb (not to mention movies with Prince-inspired, texting-friendly subtitles). The DreamWorks Animation title to make zoologists everywhere giddy/apoplectic turned in a $63.5 million weekend, a number on par with summer animated openings and a demolition of those high-thirty and low-forty openings of "Bee Movie" et al.

("Monsters, Inc." had an almost-comparable opening at $62.5 million in 2001, but the competition was especially weak that weekend, filled with enduring classics like "Domestic Disturbance" and "K-Pax.")

All that is a testament to the "Madagascar" franchise, but also, counterintuitively, to the calendar. With November long thought to be a month that could support only or or two big movies for the Osh Kosh set, many studios have steered clear. Turns out that the wisdom is wrong, and the clear-steering actually helps the movies that do brave the cold November rain.

With Madagascar's numbers as strong as they are, it will be interesting to see who else jumps into the November void next year. Of course when everyone moves in, there's a few less dollars to go around. Don't you know you need some time, on your own, don't you know you need some time, all alone...

Do Oscar bloggers matter?

By Steven Zeitchik

Now that we've become Oscar bloggers -- or Oscar-bloggers-in-print, a level lower -- we watch with deep investment/bemusement the closest thing to a pundit foodfight this side of a post-screening flicking of celery sticks in the Academy lobby.

David Poland, Patrick Goldstein and Dave Karger are the key players in this hurling of bloggy hors d'oeuvres. And it's a tough one to figure out. Because, see, normally when people argue over the relevance of a new medium, it's the supporters who say said medium is relevant and critics who say that such relevance is overstated.

But in the topsy-turvy world of blogs, the opposite happens. Here, commentators who level Oscar pundits for endless "moronic" posts imply those pundits have plenty of power, while the bloggers defend themselves by saying they don't have much power at all.

"Anyone who doesn't believe that the Oscars haven't been thoroughly hijacked by a gang of daffy, clown-suit-clad Oscar bloggers making endlessly moronic best picture predictions just hasn't been paying attention," is how Goldstein describes the non-inkstained set in a post that somewhat unwieldily laments the problem of too much Oscar media and two very specific posts he doesn't like all at the same time.

On the other side, defending bloggers' importance with an unlikely argument, is Poland. He writes: "'If "Oscar bloggers" had hijacked the Oscars, we/they would have an awful lot of power, no?"

The putative reason for all this chopping of trees in the Web forest is a post from EW's Karger which argued that real-world events like Obama's landslide and the passage of Prop 8 will affect Oscar voting -- the former because Obamoptimism would align with a movie that showcases humanity's goodness, and the latter because Oscar voters enraged by Prop 8 would vote correctively for "Milk".

We'll admit that the "Knight" point, imaginative though it may be, is a stretch, especially when there are so many tangible real-world factors at play for the film (like a desire to give the statue to a studio movie after it's resided for four of the last five years in specialty-ville, or the impulse to honor not just Heath Ledger but Chris Nolan, who has never been nominated as a director).

But the Prop 8 argument rings true. Regular readers may recall that in our debut Open Season column about the positioning of "Milk" that got just, oh, a little bit of attention, we addressed this very topic.

The main point of that column - not the three grafs about the quiet around the movie ahead of the San Francisco premiere but the bulk of the column, about the chatter sure to come after -- was that, with "Milk," real-world events would interact with an awards campaign in ways we hadn't seen in a long while.

Exhibit A for this, we wrote, was the battle over Prop 8.

"Milk's fight against California's anti-gay-rights Proposition 6 -- a drama the movie deals with in great detail -- spookily parallels the current California fight over the anti-gay-rights Proposition 8," we said. "A win for John McCain or Prop 8 may drive voters to cast a ballot for Penn (a lock for an Oscar nom) or best picture."

Karger is right, and Goldstein's argument that the theory is bunk because the voters don't take into account the real world doesn't hold up.

As for the battle over whether Oscar bloggers matter or are less relevant than a panhandler at a Treasury meeting, no one seems to acknowledge a third possibility: Both arguments are true.

There's yet to be an unambiguous case where bloggers decidedly swing an election away from the direction print reporters and ads were already tilting it -- no documentable evidence that they've been the decisive factor in producing or destroying a major awards possibility at any point in their history. Does anyone really think that the eight-month juggernaut that was "No Country for Old Men," the outpouring of Marty love for the "The Departed" or the late-surging "Crash" -- the three Best Picture winners in the blog era -- would have found a different fate had bloggers or the Internet not yet been invented?

And yet Web journalism, as it has so many other places, has changed the game. It has affected how consultants position movies and when they screen them, how competitors react to those movies, how print media review them. As a result of all this and more, they're a factor. Those "moronic predictions" -- whatever you think of their volume and accuracy -- have impacted the process.

Of course it's impossible to prove definitive parallels between blogging and voting, just as it's difficult to prove how outside events figure into a race.

But given the role that the zeitgeist has historically played in Best Picture votes -- where "Ordinary People" and "Kramer Vs. Kramer" took statues because divorce was entering the mainstream as both a phenomenon and social topic; where "Platoon" won because as a country we were finally beginnning to reconcile ourselves to the painful legacy of Vietnam; where "Crash" drew voters intent on declaring their racial awareness in a still-ethnically stratified Los Angeles --  the real world is undoubtedly a factor in the race, and a more potent one than any of us noodling around on the Web.

Solid like Barack?

By Steven Zeitchik

Your guess is as good as ours on what the Amy Rice-Alicia Sams' Obama doc, acquired today by HBO,  will feel like.

Begun several years ago, after the keynote speech that vaulted the president-elect (it still feels weird to write that) to prominence, will it feel like a refreshing blast of water, a deep and thorough portrait of a man we tend to know, like so many politicians, only by their most recent impressions? Or will its age make it feel like it's publishing textbooks we've already read?

The duo's movie, produced by Ed Norton, offers unprecedented access -- will that give us unprecedented insight, or feel like the kind of campaign verite we've seen before from the likes of Alexandra Pelosi ("Diary of a Political Tourist," about the '04 election)?

And ultimately, how it will play when it unspools in early '09 -- will the appetite for Obamania prove insatiable, so insatiable there's interest in his rise even during his first 100 days? Or will it feel like stories from another chapter, almost quaint?

Questions, we ask questions.

Swashbuckling and Puppetry: The Steve Carell Story

By Steven Zeitchik

You can wonder if Steve Carell is taking a similar role a lot recently -- not the sweet, vulnerable, gently comic character we saw in "The 40 Year-Old Virgin" and "Dan In Real Life," the kind of person who comedy happens around, but the swaggering, dopey delusional from "The Office" and "Get Smart" (and perhaps the upcoming "Brigadier Gerard," in which he plays a clueless swashbuckler, if he decides to do it), the kind of person whose comic energy consumes everything within its vortex.

But it's hard to chart where on this spectrum a potential new project, a whimsical dramedy called "The Beaver," would land him.

Carell is attached to the Anonymous Content script from debut scribe Kyle Killen, which tells of a man who treats his beaver hand-puppet like it was a real person.

On the one hand, the logline sounds like a classic  latter-day Carell, the man  disconnected from reality (but not so disconnected as to realize he's actually disconnected). "The Office" Carell, in other words.

On the other hand, it's hard not to find in a man who believes in the humanity of an animal puppet anything other than sweetness and vulnerability. (It's certainly not machonness and grit.) The puppet actually isn't a far cry from the action figures of "Virgin," Freudian-ly speaking.

So maybe what this new project signifies -- and we've always wanted to write this phrase -- is that there's a way for Carell to find balance through a beaver.

Carell is debating which role to fill his spring vacation (ie, May hiatus) with. It may be a a "Get Smart" sequel. It may be a Napoleonic solider from "Gerard." But as he wonders whether to follow-up his "Office" cluelessness comedy with more in that vein, we wonder if perhaps we'd get the best Carell if he switched to something more human, more beaver-like.

Finding Forsterland

By Steven Zeitchik

Marc Forster always struck us as the kind of director who's more than his critics say he is but less than his supporters want him to be.

The man who has directed five movies in the last four years -- an Eastwoodian pace if ever there was one -- has had movies that are stronger than awards-voters actions would imply (the underappreciated "The Kite Runner"), those less than the seven Oscars would suggest ("Finding Neverland") and those where the praiseworthy assessments are just about right ("Monster's Ball").

Now he's poised to have one of the biggest fall action movies in history when "Quantum of Solace" opens domestically this weekend. We're afraid we're with many of the critics on the film -- while the many action scenes are  technically impressive (a fact fueled in part by the choice to use some of the team from the "Bourne" movies), the movie lacks much of the panache and humor of earlier Bond movie, including "Casino Royale." The main character's ennui, an otherwise interesting development for an icon so freewheeling and self-assured, spills into a mechanical tedium in the scenes themselves.

In any event, Forster is leaving little mystery to the direction he wants his career to go in: the director has just signed on for a Korean gangster/action remake at Uni called -- with what we can only assume is mistranslation -- "Die Bad." And he's pondering at least one other studio action project.

The German-Swiss director needs to be careful, though. Many a talented director from his part of the world began with arthouse promise, moved to action movies and soon found themselves yearning to be back in more specialized territory.

In particular, think of Paul Verhoeven, who made great European movies in the 70's like "Turkish Delight" and "Soldier of Orange," had a nice little run in Hollywood with titles like "Basic instinct" and "Robocop," but soon found himself in a "Showgirls" netherworld that sent him screaming back to Europe.

Here's hoping Forster finds a way to mix in the tones of his early work without needing a quantum of solace.

Are Republican presidents bad for the movie business?

By Steven Zeitchik

Since people love to find correlations between presidential administrations and everything else (the stock market, the Super Bowl, the temperature in Duluth), we thought we'd try it with box office.

What we found  was surprising -- or, more specifically, surprisingly meaningful. Judging by the data, there is a relationship between the party that's elected to the White House and how the film business fares after that election.

It's a relationship that should bring to a studio exec a wider smile than that of Oprah Winfrey in Grant Park.

The average change in box office the year after a Democrat is elected swings higher than if it's a Republican. Going back to 1980 -- seven elections -- the two occasions on which a Democrat was inaugurated each brought a box-office uptick that year.

Republicans? Box-office rose three times and fell twice.

As an average, box-office spiked 6.8% after a Dem was elected but crept up only 3.2% after a Republican took office.

Most striking, the two worst years for box-office in past thirty years came the year after a Republican candidate was re-elected (after Reagan and Bush were given second terms).

Of course causation is always hard to prove on these slippery matters. But here's one freakonomic theory: when a Republican administration comes to power, middle-class consumers are more concerned about their pocketbooks and tighten their spending on things like moviegoing.

More subtly -- but maybe no less influentially -- Dem administrations historically tend to be more favorable to creative expression, which creates a more robust filmmaking and moviegoing climate (and yes, we do need to take into account that it takes most films more than a year to actually get made).

Still, if forms holds, that means we're looking at an increase in '09 to rival the box-office glory days of the Clinton era -- three straight years ('97-'99) when box-office rose at least 7%. That may rep the power of Obama or just the power of odd statistics -- but either way, it'll make many studio execs become overnight fans of former Illinois junior Senators.

Oscar Pundits: Like John King, with lower stakes

By Steven Zeitchik

The Oscar race is just like the presidential race. Except for the fact that one involves pictures on a screen and the other a leader of the free world; one is decided by a few thousand people who've been hanging around for Hollywood for a while and the other by 300 million American citizens who have fought wars and pay taxes; and one involves hundreds of millions of dollars in media spending and the other some newspaper and trade ads, really, apart from that, they're exactly the same.

Of course that's not stopping us from drawing our own comparisons on this sacred day. Why should the television people have all the fun? And so, below, our unexpurgated and unofficial comparisons between political candidates and best picture ones.

Just one caveat for those with horses in this race. They can't all be Barack Obama. But at least one, fortunately, can be Sarah Palin. Anyway, our polling below.

- Barack Obama/"The Curious Case of Benjamin Button": David Fincher's adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's short story, sight unseen, is positioned to play the great savior despite still being untested. That makes it the perfect analogy to ... the great savior who is still untested. Like Obama, "Button" has plenty of star power (Cate Blanchett, Brad Pitt). And wasn't the Illinois senator, like Button, also born under unusual circumstances?

-- John McCain/"Changeling" and "Gran Torino": Clint Eastwood and the Republican nominee could have come from the pen of the same screenwriter. One made his reputation as a war hero; the other firing (movie) guns. Both are elder statesmen you can't count out. McCain made a last hurrah this primary season when everyone thought his moment was up. Eastwood is now trying, trying, to do the same.

-- Sarah Palin/"Slumdog Millionaire": An out-of-left-field candidate rife with unknowns that suddenly has pundits buzzing? Perfect. Only unlike Palin, "Slumdog" will hold up a lot better under media scrutiny than she has. And unlike the vice presidential candidate, the main character in "Slumdog" answers TV questions correctly.

-- Joe Biden/"The Wrestler": Yes, Biden is better looking than Mickey Rourke. Heck, Joe the Plumber is better looking than Mickey Rourke. But the Biden-"Wrestler" comparison holds up: Both represent comebacks from the 1980s who earlier in their careers were forced to bow out in ignominy. Like Biden's short-lived presidential ambitions, some are writing off "Wrestler's" best-picture hopes. We wouldn't be so sure.

-- Hillary Clinton/"Frost/Nixon": Set in 1977, the film doesn't represent the flashiest idea or the newest face. But like the former first lady kept saying, it could be the most electable.

-- Ralph Nader/"The Visitor": Tom McCarthy's quiet drama about immigrants in New York isn't a movie that has a lot of big money behind it. But with contrarian appeal -- and a dose of eat-your-vegetables politics -- it might turn into a viable voter alternative, if a modestly performing one.

-- Mike Bloomberg/"The Dark Knight": A powerful outsider that has earned -- and spent -- more money than God. If that doesn't describe "Dark Knight," we don't know what does. But like New York's mayor, the big question facing 'Knight" is: just how fully will it be in the race?

See, we're just like David Gergen.

Married to the Mob

By Steven Zeitchik

Some genres seem tired after just a few entries -- we're looking at you, Vegas-bachelor comedy -- and some manage to refresh themselves tirelessly, beyond the point where they have any right to do so.

"The Wrestler," the best-directed movie we've seen in years, fits the category. Empty shell of a man, stripper with a heart of gold -- we've seen it more times than a bad Jeremiah Wright attack ad. And yet the movie blew us away. If awards voters have any sense, they'll be showering Darren Aronofsky with statues.

Mob movies, meanwhile, would have seemed to run their course sometime after "Goodfellas" made its triumphant exit out of theaters. But then came "The Sopranos" and, well, you know the rest. There have been gems in the post-Goodfellas era, particularly in the undercover-mob genre -- the underrated ("Donnie Brasco"), the solid but overrated ("The Departed") and the superfluous '("Analyze This").

Now Paramount, already invested in a couple of mob projects, is taking on a new one. It's called "Making Jack Falcone," and if you've caught a 60 Minutes segment recently, you know that it's about Jack Garcia, an undercover FBI agent who pulled off the impossible for way longer than he should have, infiltrating the Gambino crime family and coming within weeks of being a made man (he revealed his cover after a big bust).

The studio, along with producers Michael Shamberg and Stacey Sher, has acquired rights to a book Garcia wrote and hired Peter Buchman, the white-hot writer who sets new marks for versatility: he may be one of the few people who can write "Che," "Eragon" and a 19th century historical dramedy for Werner Herzog. Steven Soderbergh, who of course helmed the former, a four-hour Cuban-revolutionary epic, is even coming on to exec produce. (Restless types need not worry; "Falcone" will be a lot shorter than "Che.")

Buchman told Risky Biz that "Falcone" will a perfect vehicle for an actor with shapeshifting tendencies; this is a mob man, after all, who moved fluidly not only between scenes but ethnicities. His book is pretty amazing from what we've seen, and it seems like if you're going to make another undercover-mafia movie, this is the one to do it with.

Mob movies, we should hate you. And yet we can't get enough.

The more things Changeling

By Steven Zeitchik

We know Angelina Jolie doesn't do so well opening arthouse movies. But Clint Eastwood's "Changeling," which went wide this weekend, proves a rather interesting case because it markets two names -- Jolie, who has huge appeal to the under-40 set, and Eastwood, a baby-boomer icon who resonates with an older crowd (and who was marketed somewhat heavily here even though he's not in the film).

So how does the movie's $9.4 million take stack up to previous Jolie and Eastwood vehicles?

Well, outside of the flop "A Mighty Heart," "Changeling" is Jolie's lowest weekend total for a wide opening since the "Original Sin"/"Life or Something Like It" days of the early 00's. True, it is a more much prestige-y film than, say, "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow." And Halloween did take a toll. But not blowout numbers.

Eastwood followed a similar trajectory -- "Changeling" trumped the late 90'/early 00's openings of tepidness like "Blood Work" and "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil." But the tally came in lower than the first wide weekends of his last three English-language directorial efforts -- "Flags of Our Fathers," "Million Dollar Baby" and "Mystic River."

So why would the combined power of two huge names result in totals lower than that tallied for each individually? Here's one theory. Reviewers. They tend to matter in a surprisingly big way on Eastwood-directed movies. Three of his biggest earners ("Unforgiven," Mystic River" and "Million Dollar Baby") also earned his three highest scores on Rotten Tomatoes.

And that's exactly where "Changeling" is lacking -- unlike the 85% or higher on those movies, "Changeling" managed just a measly 53%.

Eastwood has shown potential to be the rare auteur who can earn money, pulling in $90 and $100 million with regularity. But when the critics don't like a movie such as "Changeling" -- and there were plenty that didn't -- he may just be pulling for, well, "Gran Torino."

Kevin Smith makes a career move

By Steven Zeitchik

Kevin Smith is changing.

If you watch "Zack and Miri Make a Porno," which opens today, there won't be much evidence of that. Apart from the fact that there's a woman at the center, the movie is a classic Smithian bromance, all pop-culture references and outrageous gags you're likely to hear repeated (and which of course originated) in the junior-high boys room. (The sweet uplift you've been reading about is there, but it's in the second half and not the movie's main deal).

But Smith is, make no mistake, evolving. The man who's always put the joke first and the idea second wants to reverse that order, if not upend the model entirely. It's a position he outlined, subtly but clearly, in a series of responses during a recent interview Risky Biz conducted with him at his Hollywood Hills home (which is filled with a giant painting of Mickey Mouse and frat-house kitsch like a foosball table, natch).

The simple logline is that he wants to direct more serious films. But his desire is more than that, a fundamental shift not only in what he does but in how he's viewed.

Exhibit A is his next project, "Red State" a political drama about a domestic terrorist that he feels strongly enough about he's wiling to make even without the backing of a studio -- the first time he's done that since his first movie, "Clerks," fifteen years ago.

He describes "Red State" thusly: "It's political, it has something on its mind. It's a bleak movie, it's dark, its not commercial. Everyone dies. It deals with religious issues. It's just a tough pill to swallow. It's not funny."

And with a kind of drive that's at once mid-90's indie and mid-60's auteur -- but certainly not a typical position for a man with a half dozen comedic moneymakers under his belt -- he's pushing on despite the commercial ambivalence.

"I imagine by now i should be like 'If enough people say it stinks, it stinks. And they're not saying it stinks. But they're saying its commercial chances are small. I should be saying 'F%&* it," if enough people say it, it's gotta be true'. But for some reason it pumps me a little but more. I really feel this is what I should be doing right now. So as soon as they say no, they're quick to be like 'But do you have a comedy' and I'm like 'Okay, I get it. I'm the comedy guy.' And I love doing comedy and I'll totally do one after but when I got into indie film, I didn't get into it saying I want to make comic movies. I got into it saying I want to make films."

(BTW, his anecdote about how the Weinstein Company passed is hilariously telling: "They did it like this. Classic Harvey and Bob.  Harvey read it, says 'horror movie, it should go to Bob.' Okay, Bob reads it, goes, 'This is nothing like any horror movie I'd do, so I don't know how to market it. So both of them have this plausible deniability.")

But it's not just enough to get it made -- Smith needs it to work, commercially and critically, for reasons having to do with his...soul.

"'Red State' will be a true indicator of whether or not I'm truly a filmmaker. because most days i don't feel like a filmmaker, I feel like the guy that makes the d@#k and fart joke movies. But if I can pull off a movie in a completely different genre where have no net to fall into in terms of like 'Quick, I'll whip out a c@%k joke or something like that, then maybe i'll feel like a filmmaker."

Of course in the interim Smith has another movie -- "Zack and Miri," whose performance will tell another story.

"If it doesn't do better than our best movie theatrically then we've f@#%ing  failed somehow," Smith says (that amount is Dogma's $31 million).

So what is the over-under on this as a mainstream success for Smith and a company-redeeming play for the Weinstein Company? Smith may have put it at $30 million but we'd say reasonable expectations should be in the $50-60 million range. That will help establish Smith as a mainstream commercial filmmaker -- even if it risks pigeonholing him further as a raunchy-comedy guy.

A Quantum of...Social Relevance?

By Steven Zeitchik

Say this for "The Quantum of Solace:" It's certainly been reading the newspaper. Few movies in recent memory have made the stakes sound so much like something that might set the heart of a Sierra Cub activist atwitter.

Forget drug deals, political power or even poker kitties. What the villains are after in Columbia/MGM's new James Bond extravaganza -- a stylish set of action set pieces that's unfortunately a little more pedestrian in characterizations and plot than "Casino Royale" -- is raw materials. That means oil, to start with (there's even a very funny nod to "Goldfinger," with the visual joke communicating that oil is the new gold) and water, which is what the villains are really trying to control.

There have been some odd stakes in recent good-guy-vs.-bad-guy movies -- didn't "Superman Returns" have Lex Luthor's devilish plan turning on real estate? -- and nods to current political squabbles over oil in Middle East-set thrillers. But we can't remember a mainstream, high-stakes espionage picture ever getting so nitty grittty with the stuff common to newspaper editorialists.

For years the conventional wisdom was that it if you were going to give people something to fight over, best to make it drugs or obscene amounts of money, in part because villains don't generally pay much attention to NPR and in part because it's assumed viewers don't get that same thrill from watching characters' outmaneuver each other over life's necessities than over its vices.

But "Quantum" may signal a leap, with the new fashion to stage not just a carbon-neutral production but to turn the film itself into an environmental quest. That likely means one of two things: either movies have become more sober -- or filmgoers in tough times are starting to view the pursuit of life's necessities as a little more exciting.

Reporters Loving Reporters: The Frost/Nixon Story

By Steven Zeitchik

Get ready to read a lot of favorable pieces about "Frost/Nixon." That's not because the movie is flawless (it's good, with strong performances and cultural tonalities and a powerful sense of justice, but not flawless), but because no movie flatters the press like this one.

You have to go back to 90's entertainments like "The Paper" to see even traces of this kind of moral elevation, and all the way back to "All the President's Men" to find a heroism so comprehensive. Most journalistic movies in the past thirty years have been informed by more cynical conceptions: opportunism, ("The Insider"), naivete ("Absence of Malice") cheating ("Shattered Glass") shallowness ("The Devil Wears Prada"),
and all of the above ("Broadcast News")

A quick summary on F/N: The movie, based on Peter Morgan's play, takes a look at the verbal sparring -- more like a lopsided UFC match until the inevitable final-round comeback -- between Richard Nixon and David Frost in the months shortly after Nixon's resignation. But the real drama is between Frost and his team, the former of whom comes from a slick talk-show background and the latter of which are relentless (though not entirely humorless) truthseekers.

The movie, like so many about journalism, understands reporting as a mix of detective work and cross-examination, not as a quest for revelation and information. The great achievement comes when Frost corners Nixon, like some kind of debate-team champion,  into a confession, and the coup de grace is pulled off with some kind of muddy investigative triumph (the smoking gun was in federal papers...the...whole...time)

No matter. Frost wins his battle, and the team, which includes the righteous James Reston Jr. in Sam Rockwell's best turn in a long time, is celebrated not just onscreen but through viewer catharsis.

The timing couldn't be better for such a message of uplift. Journalists, you may have noticed, are taking a beating on all fronts. There's Sarah Palin, telling us how she'd rather go directly to the American people instead of through pesky and unnecessary filters; they just get in the way. There's the Tribune company, cutting meat and bone and the entire animal. And then there's all the media itself telling us, tendentiously, how all the other media is too tendentious to listen to.

Amid all this, what could be more comforting than a reminder -- no, a celebration -- of a time when journalists mattered, when they didn't just have the courage of their convictions but used those convictions to topple leaders, and were celebrated as rock stars for doing so. At the Westside media screening we attended Tuesday evening, there was knowing, sometimes showy, laughter to many of the media jokes, vocal reminders that the many press in the audience Get It and will happily crow about this movie to show that they Get It.

When "Sideways" made its unlikely run to awards and box-office glory four yeas ago, it did so on the backs of critics drawn to Paul Giamatti's inner critic and curmudgeon. Print  and broadcast reporters will be similarly enthused to see such glowing versions of themselves.

A Stealth Milk Run?

By Steven Zeitchik

"Milk" is one of the most promising movies of the year. Though it's a Gus Van Sant flick, it follows in the steps of his more focused previous efforts -- call it Good Milk Hunting. The movie is poignant and political. And given both Sean Penn's skill and the general polarized climate of November every four years, a culture-wars movie -- even one with a general message of love and understanding -- is always on point.

Yet before its San Francisco premiere Tuesday night, Focus is being more targeted in its media appriach; while it did do some ads around the presidential debates, it didn't take "Milk" to fall festivals and has been more restrained about showing the pic to short-lead media. Of course San Francisco will no doubt finally set the press in motion on the Van Sant title. (What's also clear about the future of Van Sant and scribe Dustin Lance Black, who came out of nowhere to write the spec for "Milk" and steal the thunder of the long-gestating Zadan/Merron project, is that the pair will again team up to chronicle the country's countercultural history; as Borys Kit reports, the duo will collaborate on a project that will finally move toward the goal of putting Tom Wolfe's "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" on the bigscreen.)

The quieter approach to "Milk," which we spent the last few days hunkering down in, has a specific goal: with all the politicking going on (not just the election but, here in California, with Proposition 8, a subject that mirrors eerily one of Harvey Milk's battles), the company was eager to avoid talk-radio defining the movie for it.

Lionsgate took a somewhat different tack with "W" and "Religulous." When you're promoting a smaller political picture (the budget for "Milk" is probably in the $20 million range, high for a Van Sant movie but humble given the movie's ambition of capturing an entire place and time), editorial page coverage isn't just a way to save on your publicity bills -- it's a chance for the movie to seem bigger than it is.

But the tradeoff is one Focus doesn't want. Maybe it's gunshyness from all the Brokeback culture wars -- which helped at the box office but probably led a little to the Brokebacklash that cost it a best picture Oscar. Or maybe it's just the realization that this movie, unlike that one, really is much more of a political firebomb at the Parents Television Council, the Yes on 8 crew and all their anti-gay-rights cohorts, so it would rather not tackle them head-on.

Either way, the movie world premieres in San Francisco, site of all the historymaking, Tuesday night. Expect the media coverage and Bill O'Reillyization to follow. And expect the movie to be as much of a political football as anything Peyton Manning has ever thrown.

HSM 3, Saw V, and the definition of torture

By Steven Zeitchik

The amazing thing about the "Saw" franchise is not so much that it continues to have life five movies in -- other series have done that, especially in horror -- but just how amazingly reliable it has become.

With its $30.5 million opening weekend, "Saw V" is not simply the fourth straight movie in the series to open in respectable territory, dollar-wise: it's the fourth straight opening that's within a few percentage points of the others. (By contrast, another long-running horror franchise, "Friday the 13th," shot up by 30% and then down by that much between its second and fifth iterations.)

Unless Lionsgate is spending wildly on P&A to prop up its numbers -- and it hardly seems like that's the case -- that means the franchise has now become the studio holy grail: the (nearly) automatic success. Saw has the consistency of a highly rated television show, only in the more slipper realm of theatrical openings.

Just another $30 million this time around and the movie will set a record for the highest grossing horror franchise of all time. With its recurring plots of victims trying to escape torture in small rooms, the success shows that the video-game approach (familiar format, new challenges) has a life on the bigscreen.

Some will say that the franchise benefits from the annual release schedule, since the zeitgeist and audience doesn't have a chance to outgrow it. There's something to that. But pushing against that is the fatigue factor; when you open a new movie every twelve months, you risk an audience backlash. The conventional wisdom is that, like an Italian dinner, a certain amount of time has to pass before filmgoers are hungry again. But Saw doesn't seem to prompt that (in fact, this new movie worked despite a switch in directors for the first time in three pictures).

There's also the conventional wisdom that a sequel hast to fall off twice in a row, or very precipitously, before an entire franchise is killed. Which means you pretty much can expect a Saw VII.

What has gone down is critics' approval. You wouldn't expect a franchise like Saw to ever be on David Edelstein's top ten list. But the first one played Sundance and earned a not-entirely-disrespectable 46% on Rotten Tomatoes. The last one scored a thin 15%.

Also on the sequel front this weekend came, of course, "High-School Musical 3," which earned a tuneful $42 million. It's not really surprising, given the tens of millions who watched even re-airings of the original two telepics, that the movie would pack such a wallop.

But the outgrowing factor may play a role here - -not for the audience, which seems to constantly replenish, but for the stars, at least some of whom will move on after this movie. If only Disney could find a way to trap them in a small room.

Put Ben Stiller on the train to Chicago

By Steven Zeitchik

We've been getting more than a few interesting responses to the notion that Ben Stiller could direct "The Trial of the Chicago 7," the DreamWorks passion project that's had big names like Spielberg and Greengrass associated with it over the past six months.

A lot of responses, we should say, but not necessarily diverse ones. Mostly the reaction has been -- Stiller? The Zoolander guy?

The idea is that Stiller would take the reins of the period political story about the 1968 Democratic-convention riots and their aftermath, and may or may not come on to star himself, though he usually does in his directorial efforts. (It should be noted this is a 50-50 proposition at best; the conversations are happening at least in part because DW is trying to show Stiller the full range of possibilities as it woos his Red Hour banner to come with them. There are other names we're hearing as well, including Bill Condon and Stephen Daldry.)

We get at some level the skepticism about Stiller, who's proven adept as a director but generally in the same satires that people associate with his roles. But we'll take the contrarian position and say he could pull this off.

First, Stiller would be working from an estimable foundation. The project as a script from Aaron Sorkin and pedigreed producers in Walter Parkes and Laurie MacDonald. Plus there's the source material: producers have bought Brett Morgan's "Chicago 10," the ambitious but uneven animated doc that opened Sundance a couple years back. That movie may have been flawed as a doc, but the characterizations were colorful and the history was powerful, and with the right twists it could make a hell of a feature.

Maybe more to the point, though, is Stiller's previous credits. Sure, he directed some pretty goofball comedies. But he also helmed "Reality Bites," which in many ways covered events and trends as defining to Generation X as the Chicago riots were to baby boomers. And even his high-concept comedies like "Tropic Thunder" and "Zoolander" take on some zeitgeisty topics that "Chicago 7" would inevitably tackle.

Plus there's this factor -- the comedy isn't a bad thing. With so many political pics taking deadly serious tones, he could bring some much-needed light-heartedness. Stiller's most-maligned directorial effort, "The Cable Guy," was maligned because it was too dark for a comedy. Maybe here he, mercifully, brings a little comedy to a drama.