According to the Hollywood Reporter, representatives of Sin City creator Frank Miller are shopping the sequel rights around to various producers in Hollywood. The Weinstein Company produced the original film, which grossed $159 million worldwide. A Weinstein rep insisted to THR that the company still owns the rights to a follow-up, but if that's true why would Miller be offering them to someone else?

THR speculates that the Weinsteins either couldn't afford to pay a contractually obligated re-up fee, or simply doesn't have the resources to get the movie off the ground. Traditionally, contracts for sequel rights include a requirement that the option holder—in this case, the Weinsteins—keep the film in active development. If it sits on a shelf because, say, the company can't pony up the cash to hire an A-list screenwriter, then the rights can revert to the original owner.

Asked for comment, a Weinstein Company rep forwarded Gawker the same statement from lawyer Bert Fields that the company issued to THR:

TWC's rights to produce sequels to Sin City remain intact as they always have been. Any suggestion to the contrary is complete hogwash.

A close reading of that statement would allow for it to be narrowly true even if the Weinsteins have lost exclusivity over the film. They may have the right to produce the sequel contingent upon meeting certain development goals, like hiring a writer within a certain timeframe. If they haven't met those goals yet, the rights could still be said to be "intact."

If true, the loss of the Sin City rights would be just the latest sign that the Weinsteins are barely keeping their heads above water. Earlier this month, they settled a lawsuit by paying an "undisclosed sum" to NBC Universal over their attempt to move Project Runway from Bravo to Lifetime. Who knows what that sum was, but NBC had the Weinsteins over a barrel after having successfully won an injunction to stop Runway from airing, so it was likely more than a token fee.

In December, Fidelity Investments marked down its shares in the Weinstein Co. by 25%; a month before that, the company laid of 24 people, or 11% of its staff. The company has quietly laid off other staff since then.

While the Weinsteins have shown some signs of business life recently, such as buying John Lennon biopic Nowhere Boy, they're said to be out of the market for new material such as scripts and book rights. And despite the Weinstein reputation for letting movies sit on the shelf for years, there's even been stories circulating of them offering producers their movies back if they can find someone to pay them whatever TWC has spent so far.

Still, Harvey has his glittery future projects to hold out as argument that turnaround is just up ahead. There's this summer's Inglorious Basterds, whose Cannes premiere was just announced today, and of course, Rob Marshall's musical Nine which Harvey is already positioning for next year's Oscars.

But this is an old trick. The Weinstein Company's CFO crowed in a letter to the New York Times two years ago that the company's 70 percent investment in the home video firm Genius Products was worth $400 million. Last quarter, Genius Products recorded an operating loss of $29 million, and the company that owns the other 30 percent wrote down the value of its share by $35 million, citing an "other than temporary decline" in its worth. In January, the British company Entertainment Rights, which had a contract with Genius Products as a home-video distributor of its films, announced that it wasn't confident that Genius could pay its debts.

Musk, apparently eager to give the magazine an exclusive and reassure buyers who must put down a sizeable $40,000 deposit for a car that they won't see until 2011 at the earliest, said that GE Capital was an investor:

Q: What can you say to reassure buyers fearing you might go under?

A: Even in the worst case of an Armageddon scenario, I'll personally refund people [their money] if need be. I think there's very little danger of that. We've raised around $40 million, and a bit of news that hasn't come out yet [is] General Electric is investing in Tesla. [GE Capital] will be the second-largest investor in this round, after me. Our business plan that we presented to investors gets us to profitability by the middle of this year, even if some negative stuff happens.

A Car and Driver spokeswoman confirms that the magazine is running a story on Tesla in its May issue.

Musk appears to speaking about Tesla's long-delayed $40 million debt financing round which just closed this month. We asked GE if they had invested in the company. Andy Katell, a spokesman for the GE Energy Financial Services unit said no:

We have not invested in Tesla, although we are closely watching it and several other companies in this area.

In January, speaking at a town-hall-style event for Tesla buyers, Musk had hinted that a major player with a "household name" would soon announce an investment in Tesla. So add this to the list of Musk's statements which later prove inoperative.

Update: Tesla now says GE had promised an investment at the time Musk gave the interview to Car and Driver, but backed out the day it was supposed to wire funds to the company.

In what appear to be leaked excerpts from the May issue of Car & Driver, CEO Elon Musk says that GE Capital participated in a recent round of convertible-debt financing for the troubled company.

Welcome news indeed. Under Musk, Tesla Motors has been running on financial fumes. An engineer troubled by the company's mismanagement leaked word that the company was down to $9 million last October. In response, Musk announced that the company would raise $40 million in debt financing. He also told Tesla buyers that he would personally guarantee their deposits.

Musk has been saying publicly, since November, that the company had raised the money, implying it was a done deal. But tipsters tell us that he actually didn't close the round until two weeks ago. He may well have been delaying the news so he could include word of a deep-pocketed investor like GE in the round.

It's just another sign of Musk's troubling relationship with reality. Every entrepreneur must dream of things that have not yet come to pass. But Musk has a history of presenting futuristic fictions as facts on the ground — like the time he claimed the government had approved his company's $350 million loan application. It hadn't, and his flack was forced to issue a retraction.

Musk is now asking Tesla buyers to pony up $40,000 in deposits for the new Model S, even though he has yet to reveal a site for the factory where he plans to build them or financing for production. It's eerily reminiscent of the career of automotive entrepreneur Preston Tucker.

With Tesla desperately short on cash, and breaking even at best on its sales of its Roadster sports car, Musk is clearly planning to use Model S buyers' deposits as a source of capital. It's a sneaky way of turning them into lenders, without giving them the recourse that, say, GE Capital might have.

And Musk is not being straight with buyers on how safe their deposits are. On Thursday, when he unveiled the Model S in Los Angeles, he stated flatly that buyers could lose their money:

For those who are worried about what will happen to their deposits if the car is never produced, since the money will be spent on development and not held in escrow, Mr. Musk said: "The worst-case scenario is they would lose their money. They are at risk."

That's not what he told Car & Driver readers:

Even in the worst case of an Armageddon scenario, I'll personally refund people [their money] if need be. I think there's very little danger of that. We've raised around $40 million, and a bit of news that hasn't come out yet [is] General Electric is investing in Tesla. [GE Capital] will be the second-largest investor in this round, after me. Our business plan that we presented to investors gets us to profitability by the middle of this year, even if some negative stuff happens.

(A nice bit of misdirection, that — shifting the subject from the company's present losses to the "plan" for profitability.)

So which is it? Are buyers' deposits at risk, or aren't they? Is Musk good for the money, or isn't he?

One reason for Musk's ever-chaning answers may be his shifting fortunes. We hear he's been complaining to friends about being short on cash and having to sell investments at a loss in order to invest in Tesla's recent debt round. He's living in Los Angeles and flying up to the Bay Area to work at Tesla. We're told he's staying with friends — possibly a move to defray the costs of his commute. Add to that an almost certainly expensive divorce from his wife Justine. If buyers are going to rely on Musk's backing for their deposits, they should be asking him to open up his books.

Rose has deleted the pictures after someone at Tesla requested that he take them down. But Tesla flack Rachel Konrad seems thrilled with the leak, praising Jalopnik editor Ray Wert for his site's coverage of the leak. Here's Konrad's email to Wert (who took issue with recent coverage of Konrad's blogger-outreach strategy):

So was the leak a violation of Tesla's intellectual-property rights, or a "really, really nice job"? It's about as clear as anything at the electric-car startup these days.

For Tesla, any publicity is good publicity. The Model S unveiling is Tesla's last-ditch hope at a future in the business. Although it does not have financing for the production of the Model S, or even a site for a factory to produce it, Tesla plans to take deposits for the $58,000 vehicle from customers, a move at least one Tesla executive deemed fraudulent, prompting his departure.

We asked Tesla CEO Elon Musk who sent Rose the takedown request and he replied, "I think it was your mom." And then added, "By the way, I have a crow sandwich coming your way soon." Good to know that this standard-bearer of the green revolution isn't working himself to death to launch his new vehicle and still has time to toss playground insults at bloggers.

Like Detroit, cash-strapped Tesla is currently a supplicant to the government, counting on money earmarked for alternative energy to carry it through its trying times. In other words, a good time to have a political celebrity in their corner, right? Alas, no.

Schwarzenegger frequently cited Tesla as an example of California's nascent green industries in speeches in previous years, and appeared with Tesla CEO Elon Musk at various events. But he's been quiet on the subject lately. With good reason. Two sources close to the company say Schwarzenegger aides have been talking to Tesla since at least the fall about returning the Governator's Roadster. Given the company's financial troubles, Tesla executives asked them to hold off, fearing bad publicity.

Tesla, the troubled Silicon Valley electric-car startup, has been struggling to come up with financing for production of its planned Model S sedan, a prototype of which will be unveiled tomorrow in Los Angeles. The company nearly ran out of cash last fall, and cancelled plans for a car factory in San Jose. It is currently pinning its hopes on winning loans from the Department of Energy, but that is far from a sure thing — and the loans themselves, in a bit of a catch-22, are granted based on the recipient's financial viability.

So why doesn't Schwarzenegger like the Roadster? Built on a Lotus Elise body, the car is not easy to get in and out of, especially for someone with the former bodybuilder's robust frame. "He's more of a Hummer guy," one tipster tells us.

(Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

How fitting, since Second Life, a piece of software which allows users to move "avatars" representing themselves around in a three-dimensional space and decorate themselves and their virtual land, resembles nothing so much as a failed academic experiment.

Linden Lab, the maker of Second Life, has raised $19 million in venture capital from a star-studded list of backers, including Benchmark Capital, the backers of eBay; eBay founder Pierre Omidyar; Mitch Kapor, the founder of Lotus; and Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos. But the last infusion came nearly three years ago. The company charges fees on people and companies who own virtual land in Second Life, and also issues a currency, Linden dollars, used to trade goods in-world. Kapor, the company's chairman, told the Financial Times last year that it was "absolutely in the ballpark of profitability."

Second Life may well be on the verge of profitability. But it is firmly headed into irrelevance. It is impossible to imagine another BusinessWeek cover story like the one it garnered in 2006. Reuters closed its Second Life bureau last year. The former bureau chief, Adam Pasick, told PBS's Mark Glaser that there was no longer a there there:

We were primarily interested in Second Life as a business/commerce/finance phenomenon, covering it like we would any small but fast-growing economy in the real world. The bureau is now closed. Essentially the story we were there to cover has moved on.

His reporter, Eric Krangel, who now writes for Silicon Alley Insider, was more trenchant:

The very things that most appeal to Second Life's hardcore enthusiasts are either boring or creepy for most people: Spending hundreds of hours of effort to make insignificant amounts of money selling virtual clothes, experimenting with changing your gender or species, getting into random conversations with strangers from around the world, or having pseudo-nonymous sex (and let's not kid ourselves, sex is a huge draw into Second Life). As part of walking my 'beat,' I'd get invited by sources to virtual nightclubs, where I'd right-click the dancefloor to send my avatar gyrating as I sat at home at my computer. It was about as fun as watching paint dry.

What's left for Second Life? Community meetings, underattended cultural events, and education. CNN uses its Second Life "island" to hold meetings with volunteer reporters. WGBH threw a virtual concert with a grand total of 70 attendees. And the Modern Language Association, that bastion of English-department wonkery, is pursuing the idea of using it to hold meetings.

Imagine a dry academic conference enlivened with a few space-alien avatars. Deans with mohawks and tight leather pants! Only compared to the life of a university professor might Second Life actually seem exciting. We look forward to the news that Linden Lab has sold itself to an academic consortium. It's where the virtual world belongs.

Tesla's lead investor, Elon Musk, installed himself as CEO last fall. That's just one of the many parallels between his story and that of Preston Tucker, the doomed automotive entrepreneur whose dream of an innovative new car died amid charges that he was taking people's money for cars he couldn't build. Musk's Tesla Roadster, a $109,000 sportscar which races from 0 to 60 miles per hour in less than 4 seconds, could be the next Tucker Torpedo.

In October, Valleywag reported that Tesla Motors was down to $9 million in the bank. Musk confirmed the company's cash position, and promised he would raise another $40 million in convertible debt from existing investors. But the fundraising is taking longer than planned. At a recent town hall meeting with customers, Musk reportedly told Tesla buyers that the company almost ran out of money in December, before it raised part of the round. Tesla is still seeking new funds.

And it has turned to existing customers as a source of those funds. The company is losing money on every Roadster sold, Musk says. Having already spent their deposits, Musk ordered a price hike on the $90,000-plus car's options, adding charges for everything from delivery to the car's electric charger to its sound system. (It is rather like Tucker's move to sell accessories to car buyers before he had even built one.)

Musk claimed he needed to raise prices to assure the company's viability. If the company does not look like it will make money soon, it will not be eligible for some $400 million in Department of Energy-guaranteed loans on which Musk has been counting to start production of a mainstream $50,000 sedan, the Model S, which has already been delayed until 2012.

But according to a Tesla tipster, Musk's decision to raise prices has caused severe damage to the company's operations. Production ceased while manufacturing waited to hear what options to install. And the company's salespeople were consumed by the task of calling back customers and asking for more money, rather than pursuing new sales. While cars stopped going out, money stopped going in. He also faces a real risk of customers asking for their deposits back; California's vehicle code provides strict consumer protections against such fiddling with prices. Tesla buyers, though, tend to be wealthy true believers, so they may well pony up more money — if they can still afford the car at all, that is.

Now Tesla has cancelled plans to build a factory in San Jose where it planned to build its Model S, a mass-market sedan. Musk is still planning to take deposits from Model S customers starting March 5.

This sounds exactly like the sort of trouble Tucker (left) found himself in, with an engineer accusing him of never bothering to buy production machinery for a factory he'd never bothered to build, while taking money from investors and customers.

Tesla and Musk may somehow pull through this. But he has already told customers they may lose any money they've given him. In November, he offered to personally guarantee the deposits of any Roadster buyer should the company fail. But at this week's town hall meeting, he told customers their deposit money would be at risk if they did not go along with his price hike and Tesla went bankrupt.

Musk, a successful Web entrepreneur whose PayPal sold to eBay for $1.5 billion, is also in the business of building rocket ships through his other company, SpaceX. He's talked about carrying out a privately funded mission to Mars. At this point, that looks more likely than Tesla getting off the ground.

The lukewarm reaction to The Reader is not the only barometer of the perilous state where the Weinstein Co., which he and brother Bob launched in 2005, finds itself.

A much less subjective measure is a report from Bloomberg News that one of their early backers, Fidelity Investments, has marked down the shares it owns by 25%.

"When valuing private-company holdings," says the Fidelity flack, "we consider the purchase price, changes in market conditions and other factors, such as the fundamentals of the business." The move by Fidelity doesn't put the Weinsteins in very glamorous company: "Of the 11 privately issued stocks held by the two Fidelity funds at Sept. 30, only Weinstein Co. and mining company B2Gold Corp. are no longer carried at their original cost, according to the filing."

While Weinstein will no doubt now turn to talking about what sensations Robb Marshall musical Nine and Quentin Tarantino's Inglorious Basterds will be when they're released next year, it's those pesky "fundamentals" that led the Weinstein Co. to trim staff by 11% last month.

The reason cited today was, of course, "the economy." But all of the bright spots the Weinsteins once pointed to at their company are dimming. The biggest potential break-out movie on this year's slate was Zack and Miri Make a Porno starring Seth Rogen and Elizabeth Banks. As a Kevin Smith film, it's done fine since opening over Halloween weekend, with just over $27 million at the box office. But that's nowhere near the kind of return they'll need to convince tight-fisted investors to pump more money into TWC. Their cash-generating Project Runway is tied up in a nasty law suit that will keep it from returning to the air any time soon.

And the boring side of the business, the 70% stake in straight-to-video distribution arm Genius Products, is now literally a penny stock, closing on Friday at 4 cents per share, valuing the whole operation, which they once touted as a potential billion-dollar enterprise, at less than $3 million.

The Weinsteins are running out of lifelines. But they still provide colorful stories. On Wednesday, some people at the Weinstein Co. were told to clean out their offices because a "special guest" would be coming through on Friday. Those same people learned this afternoon that it was just a ruse to speed their exit when they were told they were getting the ax.

Frame, a high-school dropout who'd nevertheless managed to get a job at Cisco, the networking-equipment maker, could have been at least a TV star himself; he looks eerily like Will Arnett's G.O.B. character on Arrested Development. And Ooma's products, the Hub and the Scout, are pleasant enough to look at, too. As if there wasn't enough of a Hollywood connection, Frame lied about the Palo Alto-based startup's age.

But a pretty face is not enough. Ooma's problem, minus the technical analysis, amounted to this: It was never as simple as a Hollywood pitch. Try as he might, Kutcher could never turn it into a movie trailer. (Perhaps if he'd hired the late voiceover artist Don LaFontaine to intone "In a world without phone bills ...", it might have had a chance.)

Cell-phone carriers long ago figured out that making phones cheap and charging more for monthly service helped win subscribers. Ooma tried to flip that around, charging $399.99 for a Hub device and offering phone service for free. It has since slashed the price to $249.99 — but enrolled all new customers in a $99.99/year service plan for extra voicemail features. (You have to cancel the service to after a 60-day free trial to avoid being charged for it.)

Frame tried to compensate for these flaws in his business plan with a crush of PR. Servile tech blogs like TechCrunch, eager to talk up the Kutcher connection, played along without asking hard questions about Ooma's product. Ultimately, that's what undid him. Our tipster tells us the board "is done with Frame's lack of integrity and moneywasting PR trips and took him out." Other executives have been reshuffled, and a former president of Vonage — a more conventional Internet-phone service that's also losing money — is trying to help the company raise money.

If this were a movie script, it would be time for the third act and a happy ending. But I don't think Ooma will go Hollywood in that way, either.

Update: Tim Weingarten, an Ooma board member and investor, has sent the following response:

I read your article today about Andrew Frame, and as an investor and ooma board member from when I first seed-funded ooma, I feel compelled to correct several inaccuracies. I think it's important you hear this directly from someone who is both a board member and also the largest investor in the company.

1. Andrew has not been fired from the company. The company has made substantial progress with Andrew as CEO. It has been Andrew's vision, leadership and guidance that made it clear to me and the other ooma investors to invest the $45m of capital that has gone into the company over the last 4 years. Andrew's involvement and vision for the future product direction is a critical aspect of the board's intent to invest more in ooma in the future.

2. Andrew's success and contribution at Cisco was the foundation for the original bet we placed on ooma. He joined Cisco at a very young age and excelled quickly to be a top respected technical expert and contributor throughout the organization. We place our bets on people and we performed significant due diligence on Andrew's accomplishments at Cisco and elsewhere and were very impressed with his references and contributions in companies small and large before ooma.

3. The company is growing revenue rapidly and we are pleased as a board with their progress.

In one sense, it's wise for the company to cut the dividend, because it needs to conserve all the cash it can get. But it's pretty apocalyptic for its stock, because it just makes it that much more unattractive to investors.

The company also released its October revenues just minutes ago. How are those? Horrible! Total revenues are down 9.4% from last year, and ad revenues are down more than 16%.

National advertising revenues decreased as weakness in the studio entertainment, healthcare and home furnishing manufacturer categories offset very strong growth in financial services advertising as well as increased advocacy advertising.

Yes, all those full-page ads by failing banks desperate to retain their customers were the bright spot for the NYT Co.

So here's the question: How long until the NYT Co. declares bankruptcy? "Never" is an acceptable answer for the optimists among you. A sale by the Sulzberger family is another obvious alternative. For the more hard-hearted, put your predictions in the comments. There will be some sort of reward for the winner. Though nobody really "wins" if it actually happens.

A well-capitalized ad broker would be able to pay its publishers promptly; it's part of the reason why such middlemen take a big cut of advertisers' payments. The only sensible reason why Glam can't pay Web publishers promptly is because it no longer has the capital to float its accounts receivable, despite raising $85 million earlier this year. I'm sure Arora will deny that he's running low on money — in which case he will be tacitly admitting that he's stiffing his partners.

W: Letter of Apology
Elon Musk
Sent: Monday, November 03, 2008 4:22 PM
To: Everybody
Below is what I believe to be a sincere apology from Peng Zhou for the leak to Valleywag.
To: Elon Musk
Subject: Re: Letter of Apology
——————————————————————————————-
Dear Tesla Motors Employees,
Tesla Motors is a great company and is pioneering the green revolution. I have always been a proud Tesla employee and we all worked extremely hard towards the company mission. Throughout past two years, I also took a wild ride in the great emotional roller-coaster of WhiteStar 1.0, 2.0 and Model S. Having driven Model S mule few times, I truly believe this is the vehicle that will change the world.
However, macro economic climate changed so dramatically and Model S is getting delayed and the company is refocusing. The past month has been very difficult, sitting through planning meetings and watch employees make in or out of the layoff list. It is so sad to lose 87 employees in a week. I became very upset and did the very foolish thing of writing a letter to Valleywag. I have never thought this letter would create such an upsetting situation for Tesla Motors and I should have never sent that letter. When Elon asked the originator of the letter to step forward, I should have done so. I am deeply sorry things happened this way.
I have submitted my resignation with my manager, who had no knowledge of this. I’ll try my best to make situations better for Tesla Motors.
Again, my sincere apologies.
Best Regards,
Peng

Current Tesla shareholders have 30 days to choose, through a process known as a rights offering, whether to fund the debt, which is convertible, at a later round of financing, to shares. Tesla thereby avoids setting a new, presumably lower valuation for the company — almost a certainty if it had issued new shares, given Tesla's straitened financial condition. But the reality remains: Having raised $146 million in venture capital and tens of millions of dollars more from customers putting down deposits on the $109,000 Roadster, Tesla is now sinking into debt. In January, it may obtain a $200 million loan guarantee from the Department of Energy — meaning that it will be borrowing more cash. $9 million in the bank now, with $240 million in debt to come: Tesla will soon resemble, in miniature, the stumbling Detroit giants it hoped to overturn.

As a longtime employee of Tesla Motors, yesterday was the worst day since i joined Tesla Motors four years ago. A company all-hands meeting was called yesterday evening and a simple six-page company financial model was communicated. I was shocked to learn that we only had ~$9 million in the bank.

The first few hundred cars have been paid full in cash when they booked their vehicles. The reservations following that required from $4,000 to $60,000 of deposit. We have over 1,200 reservations, which manes we've taken multiples of tens of millions of cash from our customers and have spent them all. Meanwhile, we only delivered less than 50 cars.

I actually talked a close friend of mine into putting down $60,000 for a Tesla Roadster. I cannot conscientiously be a bystander anymore and allow my company to deceive the public and defraud our dear customers. Our customers and the general public are the reason Tesla is so loved. The fact that they are being lied to is just wrong.

Update: Tesla's Musk has confirmed his employee's report that the company only has $9 million in the bank.

(Photo by danegolden)

Besides Peerflix, the company started by jilted MySpacer Brad Greenspan has also purchased struggling companies PageFlakes and Revver in the last year, and Greenspan made a personal investment in Flurl, but was turned away by JumpTV.

All that wheeling and dealing while not paying attention to basic operations like payroll? Flashy products and technology that may or may not actually exist? "Out of touch" sounds about right.

Greenspan and friends will probably just blame the market as management shorts employees, since that's all the rage these days. But this looks a lot like a textbook case of "excess and lack of self-discipline" to me. Who may end up the winner in all this? The Hollywood Hills Cat Burglar, who seems to have gotten away from Greenspan's mess just in time. (Photo by Getty/Alberto E. Rodriguez)

Gator had changed its name to Claria, and raised some $40 million to launch a personalized homepage which never caught on. In the sneakiest move of all, it then raised $11.5 million under a new company name, JellyCloud, with the same set of executives as Claria — Scott Vandevelde and Scott Eagle among them. Was Jellycloud just Claria reborn? It's now a moot point, if our tipster's report is accurate. And a painful mistake for US Venture Partners, SoftBank, Sand Hill Capital and Crosslink Capital — who have managed to lose $11.5 million in just five months.