After four days of bargaining with the AMPTP, we are writing to let you know that, though we are still at the table, the press blackout has been lifted.

Our inability to communicate with our members has left a vacuum of information that has been filled with rumors, both well intentioned and deceptive

Among the rumors was the assertion that the AMPTP had a groundbreaking proposal that would make this negotiation a “done deal.” In fact, for the first three days of this week, the companies presented in essence their November 4 package with not an iota of movement on any of the issues that matter to writers.

Thursday morning, the first new proposal was finally presented to us. It dealt only with streaming and made-for-Internet jurisdiction, and it amounts to a massive rollback.

For streaming television episodes, the companies proposed a residual structure of a single fixed payment of less than $250 for a year’s reuse of an hour-long program (compared to over $20,000 payable for a network rerun). For theatrical product they are offering no residuals whatsoever for streaming.

For made-for-Internet material, they offered minimums that would allow a studio to produce up to a 15-minute episode of network-derived web content for a script fee of $1300. They continued to refuse to grant jurisdiction over original content for the Internet.

In their new proposal, they made absolutely no move on the download formula (which they propose to pay at the DVD rate), and continue to assert that they can deem any reuse “promotional,” and pay no residual (even if they replay the entire film or TV episode and even if they make money).

The AMPTP says it will have additional proposals to make but, as of Thursday evening, they have not been presented to us. We are scheduled to meet with them again on Tuesday.

In the meantime, we felt it was essential to update you accurately on where negotiations stand. On Wednesday we presented a comprehensive economic justification for our proposals. Our entire package would cost this industry $151 million over three years. That’s a little over a 3% increase in writer earnings each year, while company revenues are projected to grow at a rate of 10%. We are falling behind.

For Sony, this entire deal would cost $1.68 million per year. For Disney $6.25 million. Paramount and CBS would each pay about $4.66 million, Warner about $11.2 million, Fox $6.04 million, and NBC/Universal $7.44 million. MGM would pay $320,000 and the entire universe of remaining companies would assume the remainder of about $8.3 million per year. As we’ve stated repeatedly, our proposals are more than reasonable and the companies have no excuse for denying it.

The AMPTP’s intractability is dispiriting news but it must also be motivating. Any movement on the part of these multinational conglomerates has been the result of the collective action of our membership, with the support of SAG, other unions, supportive politicians, and the general public. We must fight on, returning to the lines on Monday in force to make it clear that we will not back down, that we will not accept a bad deal, and that we are all in this together.

In Solidarity,

Michael Winship
President
Writers Guild of America, East

Matthew Perry will play a grown-up version of co-star Zac Efron in New Line’s teen comedy 17. Director Burr Steers (Igby Goes Down) will helm the project, about a middle-aged father who wakes up to find he’s 17 again and enrolls in high school to get closer to his kids. Writer Jason Filardi (Bringing Down the House) penned the script. Production is scheduled to start next month. Efron was tapped to star when the project was set up, and Leslia Mann (Knocked Up, The 40-Year-Old Virgin), who will play Perry’s wife, was cast in October. Perry recently finished work on the indie drama The Laws of Motion, which also stars Ginnifer Goodwin, Hilary Swank, and Ben Foster. (Hollywood Reporter)

From the upcoming movies Indiana Jones and Sweeny Todd

The Independent Spirit Award Nominations were announced today. Congrats to all the nominees.

Best feature
“The Diving Bell and the Butterfly”
“I’m Not There”
“Juno”
“A Mighty Heart”
“Paranoid Park”

Best director
Todd Haynes, “I’m Not There”
Tamara Jenkins, “The Savages”
Jason Reitman, “Juno”
Julian Schnabel, “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly”
Gus Van Sant, “Paranoid Park”

Best first feature
“2 Days in Paris”
“Great World of Sound”
“The Lookout”
“Rocket Science”
“Vanaja”

John Cassavetes Award
“August Evening”
“Owl and the Sparrow”
“The Pool”
“Quiet City”
“Shotgun Stories”

Best screenplay
Ronald Harwood, “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly”
Tamara Jenkins, “The Savages”
Fred Parnes & Andrew Wagner, “Starting Out in the Evening”
Adrienne Shelly, “Waitress”
Mike White, “Year of the Dog”

Best first screenplay
Jeffrey Blitz, “Rocket Science”
Zoe Cassavetes, “Broken English”
Diablo Cody, “Juno”
Kelly Masterson, “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead”
John Orloff, “A Mighty Heart”

Best female lead
Angelina Jolie, “A Mighty Heart”
Sienna Miller, “Interview”
Ellen Page, “Juno”
Parker Posey, “Broken English”
Tang Wei, “Lust, Caution”

Best male lead
Pedro Castaneda, “August Evening”
Don Cheadle, “Talk to Me”
Philip Seymour Hoffman, “The Savages”
Frank Langella, “Starting Out in the Evening”
Tony Leung, “Lust, Caution”

Best supporting female
Cate Blanchett, “I’m Not There”
Anna Kendrick, “Rocket Science”
Jennifer Jason Leigh, “Margot at the Wedding”
Tamara Podemski, “Four Sheets to the Wind”
Marisa Tomei, “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead”

Best supporting male
Chiwetel Ejiofor, “Talk to Me”
Marcus Carl Franklin, “I’m Not There”
Kene Holliday, “Great World of Sound”
Irrfan Khan, “The Namesake”
Steve Zahn, “Rescue Dawn”

Best cinematography
Mott Hupfel, “The Savages”
Janusz Kaminski, “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly”
Milton Kam, “Vanaja”
Mihai Malaimare, Jr., “Youth Without Youth”
Rodrigo Prieto, “Lust, Caution”

Best documentary
“Crazy Love”
“Lake of Fire”
“Manufactured Landscapes”
“The Monastery”
“The Prisoner or: How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair”

Best foreign film
“4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days,” Romania
“The Band’s Visit,” Israel
“Lady Chatterley,” France
“Once,” Ireland
“Persepolis,” France

Robert Altman Award
“I’m Not There,” Todd Haynes (director); Laura Rosenthal (casting director); Cate Blanchett, Christian Bale, Richard Gere, Heath Ledger, Ben Whishaw, Marcus Carl Franklin, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Bruce Greenwood (ensemble cast)

I am sure alot of these actors would like you to forget about these movies.

1. Town & Country
Budget: $90 million
Domestic Gross: $6.7 million
Reportedly, Warren Beatty’s demands for multiple takes, rewrites and reshoots were primarily responsible for more than doubling the original $44 mil budget of what should have been a simple ensemble dramedy. Add in estimated marketing and distribution expenses and this staggering ‘01 failure lost its studio more than $100 million. If you say Beatty is just a perfectionist, then you obviously haven’t seen this movie.

2. The Adventures of Pluto Nash
Budget: $100 million
Domestic Gross: $4.4 million
Loss? What loss? As our friends on Wikipedia put it, “the film grossed negative 95 million dollars,” that’s all. Believe it or not, the project floated around Hollywood for nearly 15 years before it was finally produced and made its subsequent historic crash. Don’t feel bad for star Eddie Murphy, though. His last film, ‘Norbit,’ grossed a mind-boggling $95 million earlier this year. Look for more fat suits to come.

3. Ishtar
Budget: $55 million
Domestic Gross: $14.5 million
It must’ve sounded like a fun, quirky idea for a comedy: Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman as inept lounge singers who take a gig in Morocco and stumble into a CIA plot. But “lost in the desert” became more than a metaphor as production problems pushed the already high $40 million budget even higher, and negative word-of-mouth skewered the film even before its 1987 release. Beatty and Hoffman went on to better things … but they’ll always have Ishtar.

4. Heaven’s Gate
Budget: $44 million
Domestic Gross: $3.5 million
Having just earned a Best Director Oscar for ‘The Deer Hunter,’ Michael Cimino scored a stellar cast (Christopher Walken, John Hurt, Kris Kristofferson) and unprecedented creative control for his 1980 follow-up. And he squandered it all, reshooting so much that the $11.5 million budget quadrupled, and the film was heralded as a cinematic debacle. The movie’s failure forced the sale of United Artists to MGM, and reduced Cimino to directing bad Mickey Rourke movies.

5. Cleopatra
Budget: $44 million
Domestic Gross: $26 million
Although Elizabeth Taylor’s dramas — a marriage-ending affair, a near-death illness — were just the tip of the iceberg of troubles for this ‘63 epic, they may have been the nails in the coffin. Originally budgeted for $2 mil, the costs ballooned to $44 mil (current equivalent: about $295 mil), a cost that wasn’t recouped partly due to public disapproval for the star’s personal life. It was enough to almost bankrupt 20th Century Fox. Imagine a time when bad publicity was actually … bad.

6. Cutthroat Island
Budget: $98 million
Domestic Gross: $10 million
Geena Davis. Matthew Modine. They were both once hugely popular movie stars. Then came this excessive action-comedy about pirates who yada yada yada that actually ranks #1 on the Guinness World Book of Records more objective list of all-time box-office flops. But on the bright side, both actors have resurged lately with TV roles, and we all know the current state of bankability for movie pirates.

7. The Postman
Budget: $80 million
Domestic Gross: $17.6 million
What is it with Kevin Costner and post-apocalyptic sci-fi movies? He took another run at the genre with this misguided adaptation of David Brin’s novel, directing himself as the savior of civilization — a mythic messiah with a mailbag. Collapsing under the weight of its three-hour run time, jingoistic dialogue and Costner’s hubris, the 1997 flop gave new meaning to the term “going postal.”

8. Waterworld
Budget: $175 million
Domestic Gross: $88.2 million
The most expensive movie ever made when it came out in 1995, the post-apocalyptic epic came to stand for everything wrong with Hollywood fare: massive budget, self-indulgent star (Kevin Costner, who co-produced), all hype and no substance. It crashed and burned spectacularly; and though it made money overseas, in some ways Costner never lived down the failure (or the gills).

9. Gigli
Budget: $54 million
Domestic Gross: $6.1 million
It’s hard to say which factor contributed more to the demise of this celluloid punch line — America’s unhealthy obsession with (hatred of?) Bennifer Part I or the fact that it’s about a mob lackey who kidnaps a mentally retarded man and then falls in love with a lesbian assassin. But the lesson was clear: Gossip mag sales adversely affect box office dollars, and not even a little lesbian intrigue can change that.

10. Battlefield Earth
Budget: $73 million
Domestic Gross: $21.5 million
How do you say “epic disaster” in Psychlos? John Travolta squandered a chunk of the goodwill he’d garnered in his ‘Pulp Fiction’ comeback with this god-awful 2000 adaptation of L. Ron Hubbard’s Scientologist manifesto. In a nutshell: Travolta plays a dreadlocked alien named Terl. We’d rather take the free stress test any day.

Read the rest of this entry »

Interesting article from Variety about Beowulf and it’s chances at this year’s Academy Awards.

According to this, Yes.

Report: A Strike-ending Deal Is “Already Done”

Will the strike negotiators be home for Christmas? A “very reliable source” tells Nikki Finke’s Deadline Hollywood Daily blog that there appears to be a deal in place between both sides. “It’s already done, basically,” says the insider, crediting weeks’ worth of back channel note-sharing conducted by Hollywood agents. “I was told not to expect an agreement this week,” says Finke, “but my source thought it was possible that the strike could be settled before Christmas.”

In other words, maybe, just maybe, TV viewers won’t be handed a big lump of coal as this holiday season - at which time the fresh scripted offerings will really start to dry up - rolls around. “I don’t want to raise false hope,” Finke adds. “But this source has been very accurate in the past.” http://community.tvguide.com/blog/TVGuide-Editors-Blog/Wga-Strike-Watch/800059822

Is Brad developing a habit? This isn’t the first time he has done this as the article below mentions. A big stink was made when he pulled out of The Fountain as it caused production to go under for awhile until Hugh Jackman picked it up. Not very professional especially if it has nothing to do with the script. This also puts Universal in a bind to try to find a replace in the mist of the Writer’s Strike. As if they don’t have other things to deal with. Will be interesting to see who picks this one up or if it is canned all together. Has a great casting so hope it can be salvaged in some way.

Brad Pitt drops out of ‘State of Play’
Universal will try to recast by Nov. 29
By MICHAEL FLEMING

Brad Pitt has pulled out of a pay or play deal on “State of Play,” putting the Universal Pictures drama in a state of flux.

Pitt ankled the film early Wednesday, following two weeks of struggle and meetings with director Kevin Macdonald that prevented the film from making its original Nov. 15 production start date.

Studio will try to find a star to replace Pitt. While strike-related production postponements of films like “Angels & Demons” and “Shantaram” have made actors like Tom Hanks and Johnny Depp suddenly available, the studio has a very short window of time to work in. If Universal doesn’t recast and get the picture going by Nov. 29, it will begin losing the other actors in the film.

Pitt was set to star with Edward Norton, Helen Mirren, Rachel McAdams, Jason Bateman and Robin Wright Penn in the Matthew Michael Carnahan-scripted adaptation of the British miniseries. Pitt was playing a politico-turned-journalist who spearheads a newspaper’s investigation of a murder, a trail that leads to the fast-rising pol whose campaigns were once masterminded by Pitt’s character.

If the studio cannot recast the film, it is possible that Universal can bring a lawsuit against Pitt for bailing out of a pay or play deal. While several other films have been postponed due to an inability to get rewrites during the writer’s strike, the studio will maintain that the script wasn’t an issue. This isn’t the first time that Pitt has gotten cold feet on a film. He exited “The Fountain,” and considered doing so on “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” and “Fight Club.”

Universal confirmed Pitt’s exit in a statement.

“Brad Pitt has left the Universal Pictures production of `State of Play.’ We remain committed to this project and to the filmmakers, cast members, crew and others who are also involved in making the movie. We reserve all rights in this matter,” the U statement said.

Marley and Me set to star Owen Wilson and Jennifer Aniston has been given a December 2008 release date. It worries me when studios do this. I understand wanting to keep the momentum of a film buzz afloat and get the product out there, but when things happen to cause a fall back in production time I don’t think the best thing to do is rush a release. Owen Wilson’s upcoming film Marley and Me was suppose to film start production in January but because of his incident this year it was pushed back. That caused his co-star to take on another film instead. Fox Pictures seems to not have budge on the December 2008 release date even given the fact that that filming will not begin until spring. That would give the studio a good 5-6 months until it’s release. I don’t know but I just see a potentially good family film being ruined by not even time. Ocean’s 12 runs through my mine. With that filming was finished summer of 2004 and released 5 months later in December. No matter how many times I have seen it the plot to this day makes no sense to me. That was of course rectified with Ocean’s 13 which was filmed summer of 2006 and not released until the following summer, June 8th, 2007 giving time for everything to be done right. Ocean’s 13 was far better than its predecessor and I understood the plot Here’s to hoping the script to this is as solid as the studio heads seem to think it is.

By DAVE MCNARY

Duvall

New Line has tapped Robert Duvall for the holiday comedy “Four Christmases,” starring Vince Vaughn and Reese Witherspoon.The mini-major’s planning on a December production start for “Four Christmases,” which is set up at Spyglass with Gary Barber, Roger Birnbaum and Jonathan Glickman producing. Vaughn and Witherspoon also are producing the pic, in which a couple struggles to visit all four divorced parents on Christmas Day.

Seth Gordon is directing from a script by the writing team of Matt Allen and Caleb Wilson. New Line’s hopeful it can get “Four Christmases” into theaters during next year’s holiday season.

Variety