Every kid imagines the floor is lava, that Lego gun is really a Star Wars blaster, or they've really got Batman's grappling hook. But not every kid has a Dreamworks animator for a dad.
Hollywood correspondent Nicole Laporte has a tell-all book coming out on May 4 about the DreamWorks triumvirate of Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen.
This week the Roundup covered the most indie film ever. "Spider-Man" is like the opposite of that, right? What if we told you that Marc Webb, director of Indie rom-com "(500) Days of Summer," will direct the new Spidey flick?
The White House is set to announce the guest list for its first state dinner, and among the few invitees from Hollywood are Messieurs Spielberg, Katzenberg and Geffen, sealing the DreamWorks trio's rep as any Democratic President's BFFs in Hollywood.
• Nell Scovell, a writer on Dave Letterman's show in the late '80s, has stepped forward to detail the show's "hostile, sexually charged atmosphere." [VF]
• Layoffs: Yesterday's cuts at Forbes claimed 30-40 people; reality TV-focused Teen Vogue laid off half a dozen staffers today; the cuts continue this week at W; and…
Last week, we reported that Hollywood has begun taking steps to wipe out the first outbreak of free-speech showbiz has seen since the Hays Code, eradicating the threat of stars communicating directly to the pubic via Twitter.
• More trouble at Condé Nast: Ad pages at Vogue are down 31 percent this year and Vanity Fair experienced a 52 percent drop in May alone. The silver lining: Graydon Carter's lavish expense account remains unaffected. [NYP]
• The Sun really may be returning after all. As a website, that is. Seth Lipsky says "there's a…
Disney and DreamWorks today sent out official confirmation of their shotgun wedding, issuing a release around town raising more questions about its relationship than it answers.
• Magazine newsstand sales tumbled during the second half of 2008. [NYT]
• The Grammys were seen by an estimated 19.1 million people last night. [AP]
• The Times reports on the Times's recent troubles, conveniently concluding the paper's "positioned itself well to ride out another year of recession." [NYT]
• Steve…
Remember all those questions we had last year about how DreamWorks and Universal might bridge the financing gap in their tenuous new relationship? The answer's simpler than anyone thought: They won't.
• A round of staff cuts at the Journal may come next week. [Portfolio]
• CBS and David Letterman are negotiating a new deal to keep him on the network after his contract expires in 2010. [B&C]
• Is The New Yorker in trouble? [Gawker]
• Gannett, the largest U.S. newspaper company, is writing off $5 billion. [E&P]
•…
Variety today offers a disturbing memo to anyone who had "DreamWorks' resurgence FTW" in their forecast of industry predictions for 2009: Maybe next year.
The spectacle of ordinary people coping with extraordinary forces runs throughout the cinematic work of Steven Spielberg. And now Spielberg himself is dealing with an unexpected crisis: A credit drought that could kill his studio.
Soloist Silenced Even Longer: Paramount announced Tuesday that it's pushing back The Soloist yet again, this time to April 24. The studio surprised even its former DreamWorks partners last month by drop-kicking the Robert Downey Jr./Jamie Foxx drama into 2009, culminating in an unceremonious dump-and-run in March and…
Though Hillary Clinton was once seen as the inevitable pick in this year's presidential election, the first stain on her pantsuit may have come as early as February 2007, when gay mafia don/beach hog David Geffen broke ranks with the Clintons to endorse Barack Obama. "I don't think that another incredibly polarizing…
A tender postmortem in today's New York Times reminds the world yet again that seriously — like, really, this time — David Geffen is leaving DreamWorks. Having shepherded the monolith through the Hollywood establishment from conception to its first marriage (and divorce) before giving the frazzled bride away a second…
♦ Campbell Brown is reportedly pregnant. [TVNewser]
♦ Arianna Huffington and Tina Brown aren't in competition. They're best friends! [NYT]
♦ The Robb Report is on the market. The price? "Upwards of $100 million." [Folio]
♦ NBC has exiled the struggling Lipstick Jungle to Friday nights. [Variety]
♦ CNN's new (and…
· Taylor Hackford is shopping around Love Ranch—a brothel drama starring wife Helen Mirren (oooh!) and Joe Pesci (ewww!)—to studios in search of a distribution partner. [Variety] · Javier Barden has signed on for Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's new movie, Biutiful, a Spanish-language film about "a man embroiled in shady…
The fallout from Paramount's recent release-date shuffle continues today, with agents and saber-rattling DreamWorks brass continuing their protest over The Soloist's move to 2009. While we sustain our first impression that the Jamie Foxx/Robert Downey Jr. tearjerker will in fact be better than the diabetic-coma…
What a mess: Paramount's reshuffling of 2008 awards bait including Defiance and The Soloist — the latter of which now won't open until next March — has left devastated Oscar watchers (including us) tossing out their carefully wrought Trophynomics™ calculations for the fall movies season. Few are more dismayed than the…
