According to the Hollywood Reporter, the latest round of layoffs brings the company's total payroll down to 70 or 80. Just for perspective, Nikki Finke reported that they had 224 staffers in November 2008. How many more tear-filled dinners can they stand before they go from the Weinstein Co. to just the Weinsteins?

Donald Sutherland breathlessly narrating the whole thing! James Woods-as-Harry Truman washing down painkillers with scotch before drunkenly deciding to drop the bomb! That annoying guy from Scrubs and the Miller Lite ads who is not James Woods also being involved, somehow! It will be wonderful.

We're still not getting Showtime, obv, but eventually we'll watch clips of it on the internet.

New York Times writer David Segal goes for the jugular with some of the contextualizing work done here. There're the great anecdotes from filmmakers the Weinsteins have worked with, like Quentin Tarantino's story about the time Harvey wanted to buy a restaurant just so he could blow smoke in the fire marshall's face:

The story killed, and when the laughing died down, Bob smiled, waited a beat and added another punch line. "A million dollars," he sighed, "for a cigarette."

Ah, the flush years. They must seem kind of distant now.

Or Weinstein loyalists like Kevin Smith sounding "wistful" about a failure to promote a film:

"They had impeccable taste when they were hungry," Mr. Smith says. "The problem is that they're not really hungry anymore. They're starving and desperate."

Or guys like the producer of Fanboys going on the record about how terribly trite he thinks the Weinstein's tastes have become:

To Dana Brunetti, who produced "Fanboys," the whole episode was a blown opportunity. "I don't think the Weinsteins understood that they had this stalwart audience of ‘Star Wars' fans in their back pocket," he says. "They just wanted the movie to be whatever had been hot the previous weekend. It was ‘Superbad' one weekend, something else the next."

All things that would've never have been mentioned in public - or private, maybe - by the talent in the Weinsteins employed in their heyday. The Weinsteins' strange fraternal relationship with each other is documented; so are moments of affability, to push home the point that Harvey and Bob aren't the bulldogs they used to be. But key to understanding the Weinsteins, and the way they keep getting by despite hemorrhaging money on failure after failure, is a scene in which Harvey's rattling off the company's slate of current and upcoming releases.

...the brothers were downright generous with me when it came to screening their coming movies. In fact, they shared as much of their slate as was ready - six movies in all, as well as ads, DVDs and rough cuts of unfinished products. The goal, they said, was to demonstrate the strength of these films. For Harvey, it also seemed as if the screenings were supposed to bolster his case if - or, perhaps in his mind, when - he had to complain about this article. We showed him everything and he still said we're doomed, was the subtext. If there is such a thing as prevenge, this is it. "You see this?" Harvey asks, pounding a finger against a sheet of paper. It's a Nielsen NRG tracking poll, a gauge of public interest in coming movies. He points to figures besides "Inglourious Basterds." Here's the G-rated version of what he says next: "This is called ‘smash hit'!"

Or the "next big thing" strategy, which is what they've been riding on for a while, now: sell investors on the idea that whatever comes next will, in fact, be the great success, just based on concept alone: a new Kevin Smith movie, starring the fat Jewish guy from all the Judd Apatow movies: huge! A new Holocaust movie, starring the Academy-loved Kate Winslet: blockbuster! And so on. They even take to admitting that they're nothing more than film producers, which is something they failed to realize when they tried to diversify into a multimedia company.

"What happened was, I got more fascinated by these other businesses and I figured, ‘Making movies, I can do that in my sleep,' " he says in an interview in his office in downtown Manhattan. "I kind of delegated the process of production and acquisitions. Yes, I had a say in it, but was I 100 percent concentrating? Absolutely not. I thought I could build the company and delegate authority, and that's where it went wrong."

But while they now praise the virtues of being scrappy, independent film producers again, it has to bruise the egos of the Weinstein Brothers. So much so, that they'd let a New York Times reporter in their buisness to get the story of their next success strategy out, and in the process, risk having to read damaging anecdotes about themselves like this one, delivered by Kevin Smith:

At the premiere [of Zach And Miri Make A Porno], he introduced Mr. Smith to the actress Sarah Chalke, which was awkward because the woman was actually Traci Lords, a co-star of the movie. "The old Harvey would never would have made those kinds of mistakes," he says. "He just wasn't as present, he wasn't minding the farm, so to speak."

The diverse business approach for a film company becoming a media company was a new trick, weakly executed by an old dog, getting older. The question then becomes something along the lines of: will they keep up? As major studios have learned the hard (and Twittered) way, making and marketing films has become an entirely different game. Can the Brothers Weinstein get with it? Or have the innovations and advances in the realm of their fundamental business - just making movies, and nothing else - already passed them by?

You fool! It was announced yesterday that Werner Herzog's remake of the famous Harvey Kietel peen-flashing crime drama, The Bad Lieutenant, will premiere at the Toronto film festival in September! Lieutenant will be featured along with new films by the Coen Bros and Michael Moore. The original 1992 bad-cop-gets-worse flick is credited for deftly capturing New York's signature 1980's grit and for giving Harvey Keitel his 'Serious Actor' bona fides. The remake doesn't look, uh, as promising.

It features the thespian stylings of rapper/custom car enthusiast Xzibit and includes the line "What? You don't have a lucky crack pipe?" delivered in the mystifying way only Nicolas Cage could. See you in Toronto!

P.S. We're calling shenanigans if we don't see Cage's ween.

This is all sort of an experiment, but the idea is that you can follow everything our group — which includes, for starters, directors, producers, and other film industry types — tweets about the festival in our Tribeca Twitter Room or on Twitter itself by following StalkingTFF which will (soon, tech tells me) collect all of their Tribeca-related tweets.

As we go along, we may be adding more people (and if you're attending the festival and would like to be added to the list, email me) but without further ado, I'd like to introduce the fine group of people who've very nicely agreed to be a part of this:

Michelle Byrd (MByrd) has been Executive Director of Independent Filmmakers Project since 1997. The organization has fostered early work by filmmakers like Charles Burnett, Jim Jarmusch, Barbara Kopple, Michael Moore, Mira Nair, Kevin Smith and Edward Burns. Michelle has served as a juror at the Sundance Film Festival, been awarded the Made in New York tribute by Mayor Bloomberg and sits on the boards of Artists Public Domain, the Adrienne Shelly Foundation and the New York Production Alliance.

Matt Dentler (MattDentler) is the head of marketing and programming for Cinetic Rights Management, a sister company of Cinetic Media in New York. He spent five years as the producer of the SXSW Film Conference & Festival in Austin, Tex., and currently sits on the Board of Directors for the Austin Film Society. He is the executive producer of PJ Raval and Jay Hodges' documentary feature Trinidad.

Jeff Deutchman (JeffDeutchman) is manager of acquisitions at IFC Films where he acquires films for IFC's day-and-date program, as well as Festival Direct, an electronic arthouse for independent films. Films he has acquired include Barry Jenkins' Medicine for the Melancholy, Kim Ji-woon's The Good, The Bad, The Weird, Matthew Newton's Three Blind Mice, Hong Sang-soo's Night and Day and Bruce McDonald's Pontypool.

Howard Gertler (HowardGertler) is a partner with Tim Perell in Process which has produced the 2009 releases Last Chance Harvey, The Rebound and World's Greatest Dad, starring Robin Williams, which premiered at Sundance. Process' past features include Bart Freundlich's Trust the Man and John Cameron Mitchell's Shortbus. The company is currently putting together projects with directors including Scott Coffey, Kris Isacsson, Jesse Peretz, JT Petty and Chris Sivertson.

Armando Iannucci (Alannucci) is the director and cowriter of British political comedy In the Loop, which is screening in Tribeca's Spotlight section. He has written and directed the BAFTA-winning shows I'm Alan Partridge and The Thick of It and fronted his own satirical shows for BBC 2 and Channel 4. He started his career as a music and comedy presenter on Radio Scotland.

Ian Mohr (mohris) is VP at Goldsmith-Thomas Prods. in New York. He was formerly the Box Office Editor at Variety and a reporter covering the indie beat for the trade. He also served as the New York Bureau Chief at The Hollywood Reporter

Jared Moshé (jaredmoshe) is a NY based producer and the president of Sidetrack Films. He has produced films such as Beautiful Losers, Low and Behold, Destricted and Kurt Cobain About a Son. Current productions include Give Us This Day and The King of the B's: The Independent Life of Roger Corman.

Ryan Werner (ryanatifc) is VP of Marketing at IFC Films. He has been involved with the launch of IFC's day-and-date theatrical and video-on- demand program, and IFC FESTIVAL DIRECT, an electronic film festival available on your movies on demand channel. Recent and upcoming films he's worked on are Steven Soderbergh's Che, Gus Van Sant's Paranoid Park, Christian Mungiu's 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days and Matteo Garrone's Gomorrah.

Rob Williams (robbywilliams09) Rob Williams is VP Film Acquisitions and Distribution for Liberation Entertainment, a Los Angeles based media company. Current releases include Tokyo! directed by Michel Gondry, Leos Carax and Bong Joon ho and Frost/Nixon: The Complete Interviews.

Behold: the after-party for the film My Suicide, Saturday night at Home. Gabriel Sunday (right) is the lead in My Suicide and winner of the Gen Art Stargazer award for ass-whoopin' performance by an emerging thespian. Next to Gabriel is Laura Breckenridge of Gossip Girl fame. Nanoseconds after this photo was taken the two people on the left were renditioned to dank cells in Gstaad, but it was apparently a clerical error, and they are now safe at home with their families.

Interior: Williamsburg, Saturday night, post-My Suicide after-party. A dive-bar called Daddy's. So what, right? Turns out the caballero on the left is Michael Izquierdo, and he's in Ang Lee's soon-to-be released Taking Woodstock, which also stars Paul Dano and the aforementioned Gabriel Sunday, both of whom were also in films in the Gen Art fest. Stoney.

Monday's after-party for the documentary Picture Me spilled over from the Greenhouse to the Room. Those legs belong to Jess, a musician, who, like many Indonesians only goes by one name. And partaking in the visual allure of Jess's legs is the gentleman jewelry-designer Rick Toscano.

The after-party for Finding Bliss and the award ceremony at BLVD Tuesday night. Va va voom, et cetera.

At the awards ceremony, you could see and actually taste the suspense.

Moby shortly before presenting the award for best use of music Tuesday night. The award went to Punching the Clown, which he said was also his favorite film of the festival.

The money shot. My Suicide took the honor for best film this year. Jordan Miller in flannel wrote the puppy, his dad David (center) directed, and did we mention Gabriel Sunday was the lead? These guys kind of cleaned up, dominating the festival physically and metaphorically. Heh. Metaphors. Best short film went to Adelaide, directed by Liliana Greenfield-Sanders.

Jennifer Love-Hewitt beating a hasty retreat from the closing night festivities with Jamie Kennedy, who was in the closing night flick Finding Bliss. Kennedy had a sausage shot in the movie. The dude is hung like Graydon Carter.

Meet Claude Laniado. Claude was dancing last night at the final shin-dig at BLVD and he was given an extremely wide berth on the dance floor. He needed the space, actually. I asked him what his story was. "My name is Claude. I am an actor and a psychologist and a film-producer."

You can find more of Stephen's work here.

Wii is the new booze. Nick (left) and Trevor got all up into virtual tennis at the after-party for Lymelife at The Park Wednesday night. They were a little shy after I told them I was covering the party for Black Inches, but I was able to glean that Trevor is an event manager at NYU, and Nick works for Sixty USA, makers of casual European sportswear for over 50 species.


Derick Martini directed Lymelife, and through the miracle of digital representation, he is herein reproduced while imbibing at The Park. And this just in: the Japanese word for arm-pit is "wakinoshita" (wah-kee-NO-shta).


Behold: the producer of Lymelife, Jonathan Cornick at the after-party, with his friend Laurie. Jonathan may be the force behind Frau Alec Baldwin's star turn in "Lymelife." They had a production company together at one point, you see.


Michael Brown, the creative director of Lot 71, consults with a well-haired woman at the Lymelife after-party Wednesday. I didn't exactly ask, but, to my knowledge neither of them had any blow, and if they did, they might not have shared with Gawker. Sad : (


Gigantic director Matt Aselton hob-nobs before ducking into his screening Thursday night. Unfortunately his star John Goodman was a no-show, waaaaaaaaah.


Ole Schell, left, who co-directed the documentary Picture Me, fraternizes with two lasses at the after-party for Gigantic. Picture Me is a documentary about models, including but not limited to his co-director Sara Ziff, his girlfriend at the time. It will be screened on April 6, but that puppy is sold out.


"Her name was Kaki, she was a show girl, with yellow" ... Oh you know that tune. Kaki Stergiou is Gen Art's event coordinator, and she coordinated the shit out of this film festival. She was gracious enough to pose next to a pole made for stripping at the after-party for Gigantic at 1OAK Thursday night.


At the after-party for Gigantic, we begin with David Bates (aka Davidjunior.com), the Gen Art video wizard. On the right is Kimberly Freeman who is a video apprentice, and in the middle is Aryn Cole, who had an interesting role as an extra in one (1) scene in Gigantic. The scene is certainly one of the weirdest hand-job scenes you will ever see on the big screen. She said it was an awkward scene to shoot. There were a few men and a few women involved. Compounding the awkwardness was that it was so awkward that the actors could not discuss how awkward it was. "The men were sweating," she said. MOURN NOT FOR HER INJURED CHASTITY! Aryn did not actually touch a dorkus, of course, but instead manipulated a styrofoam man-unit.


Paul Dano stars in Gigantic, and for the sadists among you, yes, he does get the crap beaten out of him yet again on-screen. No milk-shake action in this one though.

You can find more of Stephen's work here.

Chaunce found time between feuds with Page Six to sit down with his childhood friend Tony and pen the screenplay for Lapdance. It's the dramatic tale of two high school buddies from Jersey, one of whom goes into gossip and the other into being a doorman at Scores. Chaunce wrote up a summary for us. Highlights:

Like working at Gawker, zing! Minus the sex and celebrities and girls. Chaunce knows how to turn a scoop—and how to turn a phrase:

The dramatic conclusion:

Yes.

One of the Bagger’s favorite movies this year is a very serious film aimed at adults involving people coming to terms with their sexuality and identities against a backdrop of profound cultural and political change.

That description would cover “Doubt,” “Revolutionary Road,” “The Reader” and “Milk.”

That description would also cover every New Yorker short story ever published! And it keeps going:

A remarkable debate between people skilled in the ways of rhetoric? “Frost/ Nixon” and “Doubt.” Guerrilla leader who slashes through big odds? “Che” and “Defiance.”

But why should we be so surprised? Oscar movies are often a bore because middle-aged people are obsessed with sex and their own neuroses. (That's why no one but the middle-aged reads the New Yorker's fiction.)

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.

Cool Stuff is a daily feature of slashfilm.com. Know of any geekarific creations or cool products which should be featured on Cool Stuff? E-Mail us at orfilms@gmail.com.

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1. Unfortunately, Brian Henson, the guy behind some of the worst of the Muppet movies (Treasure Island, Christmas Carol) is helming the project. To be fair, Henson directed episode of Stephen King’s Nightmares and Dreamscapes titled Battleground. It was filmed entirely without dialogue, and told the story of toy soldiers who come to life and kill a hit man played by William Hurt. Could be that children films just aren’t Henson’s area of expertise?

2. The film is being scripted by Todd Berger, the screenwriter behind the horrible 2005 Tom Arnold television movie Chasing Christmas. Berger most recently penned the direct to dvd Kung Fu Panda: Secrets of the Furious Five short film for Dreamworks Animation.

source: Variety

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If you’re not lucky enough to talk your way into the screening, check out Spike TV on Tuesday October 21st at 9:00pm for the SCREAM 2008 awards. Warner Bros will premiere exclusive footage from the Zack Snyder adaptation, as well as the upcoming Friday the 13th reboot. Check out the full press release after the jump.

Spike TV has announced that it will honor film star Anthony Hopkins with the first-ever Legend award during “SCREAM 2008.” Presented to a distinguished and legendary artist whose body of work includes outstanding performances in fantasy, horror and/or science fiction films, the Legend award will mark the third discretionary honor of the evening, as fellow industry giants Tim Burton and Wes Craven will also receive recognition. The third annual televised event tapes Saturday, October 18 at The Greek Theater in Los Angeles, CA and premieres Tuesday, October 21 (9:00-11:00 PM, ET/PT) on Spike TV.

Additionally, Spike TV has announced fresh talent added to this year’s star-studded roster. Appearing at “SCREAM 2008″ will be Malin Akerman, Selma Blair, Jon Favreau, Michael C. Hall and the cast of “Dexter,” Milla Jovovich, Jaime King, Frank Miller and Paz Vega, along with previously announced talent Kristen Bell, Julie Benz, Darren Lynn Bousman, Thomas Dekker, Guillermo Del Toro, Summer Glau, Samuel L. Jackson, Doug Jones, Kerli, Stan Lee, The Osbournes, Jared Padelecki, Ron Perlman, Amanda Righetti, Seth Rogen, Paul Rudd, Seann William Scott, Kevin Smith, Liv Tyler, Gerard Way and Rob Zombie. Many more to be announced shortly.

The Grammy Award-winning rock band Smashing Pumpkins will perform their new hit “G.L.O.W..” Currently the #1 most added song at Modern Rock Radio, “G.L.O.W.,” has already received ninety-four adds since its release two weeks ago and has logged over 850 spins in its first week alone. Their performance on the show precedes the October 31 launch of their North American “20th Anniversary Tour.”

Also taking the stage is Island Records pop sensation Kerli, performing her highly successful single “Walking On Air.” The song, from her debut album “Love Is Dead,” is the most downloaded single in history on iTunes. Kerli is featured as XBOX 360’s Emerging Artist of the Month for November and she also wrote and performed the title track for Activision’s upcoming 007 Bond video game, released simultaneously with the new 007 movie starring Daniel Craig.

“SCREAM 2008″ will feature exclusive world premiere footage from two of Warner Brothers’ most highly anticipated releases of the coming year - “Watchmen” and “Friday The 13th.” Based on the graphic novel by DC Comics, “Watchmen” is set in an alternate 1985 America in which costumed superheroes are part of the fabric of everyday society and the “Doomsday Clock” - which charts the USA’s tension with the Soviet Union - is permanently set at five minutes to midnight. Directed by Zack Snyder the complex, multi-layered mystery adventure stars Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Patrick Wilson and Malin Akerman. “Watchmen” hits theaters March 6.

“Friday The 13th” comes to “SCREAM” this year as Spike TV will premiere footage of the updated cult classic in theaters Friday, February 13. Directed by Marcus Nispel (”Pathfinder”) and starring television star Jared Padalecki (”Supernatural”), Jason will once again haunt the cursed campgrounds of Crystal Lake, but this time, hockey-masked Jason is the real killer.

Fan voting for this year’s awards began Friday, September 12 and remains open until Friday, October 17. To vote or to view exclusive red carpet and backstage coverage, visit Scream.Spike.com.

Michael Levitt, Casey Patterson and Cindy Levitt serve as executive producers for “SCREAM 2008.” Greg Sills is supervising producer, Gary Tellalian and Austin Reading are producers and Ryan Polito will direct.

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"Is this for real? You damn well bet it is. Clark Gregg and I got on the phone yesterday and decided that we needed to hit the ball out of the park this weekend with the box office numbers on CHOKE. You see, Hollywood does math a lot differently than you and I do. And we are, right now, in one of the most crowded seasons for the movie market. Last weekend, CHOKE opened against an $80 million dollar movie produced by Stephen Speilberg [sic] on a night when most of America was watching Barack Obama debate John McCain on almost every news channel on TV. And this weekend, CHOKE enters its second weekend on the three days when, according to Variety, "A whopping seven wide releases" hit the theaters, making it one of the worst bottlenecks for new releases in recent memory."

Whoa there! That is some bigshot Hollywood movie-lingo exec-speak that nobody cares about or understands!

We need everyone reading this post right now to go see CHOKE this weekend. But before you do, we need you to email this post to everyone you know. Contact everyone in your address book. Everyone you work with. All of your family and extended family. Everyone on your MySpace page. Your Facebook page. EVERYONE!!!

If you've already seen it, go see it again. If it's more than 50 miles away from where you live, leave enough time for the drive. If it's out of state, make it your day.

The person who gets the most people to go, gets a character named after them in Chuck's next book. Yes, this is for real. Clark and I spoke to Chuck on the phone yesterday, and he's completely on board with this.

Well, that's comforting. Fine, here's the contest. Go, make it your day.

Lee Kline, the Technical Director at The Criterion Collection, was in Italy. He had tracked down an original print of Il Posto, the classic 1961 Ermanno Olmi film, and he needed a digital master of it. The problem? It was far too valuable and delicate to ship to the States, so he had find a local studio to handle the transfer for him.

Sitting down in the lab, the local technician started the process of loading the film up, running it through the incredibly expensive machine to create a 2K super-high-def digital copy for Lee to take back to the States with him. The technician was deftly handling the irreplaceable film and the machine with both hands. All the while, a cigarette dangled from his lips. Lee, neither the owner of the print nor an employee of the lab, could only sit back and bite his tongue, hoping no wayward chunk of smoldering ash would find its way onto the decades-old piece of film. You could call it one tense moment in a film nerd's life.

When you go to the headquarters of the Criterion Collection, you sort of expect it to be a gigantic library. You know, one with lots of dark wood, a fireplace and a globe, complete with a dapper man in a smoking jacket sitting in an overstuffed chair. Instead of books, though, the walls would be lined with some of the greatest films ever made, DVDs that set the bar in terms of image quality and extras and packaging and liner notes. Criterion is the undisputed champ in all these things, yet the Criterion offices are simple, its walls adorned only with a collection of movie posters and framed letters from directors. There is a lovely screening room with a gigantic screen and projector setup, and there are edit suites, but it doesn't feel like you are entering into a world belonging to film historians. Until you talk to the historians.

Essentially, the people at Criterion are a combination of film geeks and A/V nerds, equally excited at the prospect of getting a great print of a classic Fellini film as they are about creating a killer 5.1 surround sound audio track.

These people act as a curator and a publisher, hand-selecting a wide variety of films, mostly foreign, classics and indies. They painstakingly create the definitive digital version of that film, completely restoring both the audio and video, gathering up the most complete supplementary features available and releasing it all in beautiful packaging. It's a film buff's dream.

The Criterion staff gathers their own supplementary features themselves, traveling to find talent and record original interviews and audio commentary tracks, finding scholars to write essays and gathering up any additional footage or video that they can find.

It's an incredible company, responsible not only for introducing hundreds of films to audiences who would otherwise have no other way to access them, but also pioneers who helped introduce many DVD features we take for granted now, such as commentary tracks, elaborate special editions and even letter boxing. And now they're preparing to deliver innovation to a new format: Blu-ray. And man, are they excited about it.

David Phillips, who works on DVD Development for Criterion, told me that "We're offering people the ability to see what is essentially 95% of the visual quality of our high-definition tape masters, something that we've dreamed of for a long time." After all, these guys have been working with digital masters that clock in at about 2K resolution for some time, which is far higher than HD. "As good as standard-def DVD looks, we've been looking at these HD images for so long and feeling like it's a shame that we can't share this." HD is the way most of these films are meant to be seen, and the people at Criterion get visibly excited when talking about the possibilities.

But with that huge uptick in resolution for the consumer, Criterion is faced with a lot of problems that they didn't have when their masters were converted to standard definition for DVD. After all, they're often dealing with old films, created before there was fancy low-grain filmstock and digital processing. And with the technology they have today, how much restoration and processing is too much?

Really, the mission of Criterion is "trying to replicate the original experience of seeing that movie when it was first released," according to Phillips. While they certainly have the ability to process old films until they look like they were shot on a DV cam, that's not the goal.

"Grain reduction has become such an industry standard that people, when they see grain, they think it's a problem rather than what film looks like. Film is a physical medium that has this grain structure to it," says Phillips. That being said, they realize that consumers buying restored HD films on Blu-ray are expecting near-pristine quality prints. It's a tough balance to strike. Essentially, "it's trying to stay on the side of not overprocessing but not leaving so much film artifact that it's distracting from getting engaged in the film."

So how do they go about getting a film prepped for Blu-ray? Well, they start with the best version available, be that a camera negative, a positive or a print, depending on the qualities available. Most of the time, they need to travel to the negative rather than having it shipped to them, especially if it's an original print. So if it's a Kurosawa film, they go to Japan; if it's a Truffaut film they go to France; and if it's an Olmi film, well, they go to Italy.

Once they get their hands on the film, they use Thomson's Spirit DataCine to digitize the print at a local facility. If available, they'll try to get the director to consult on the color of the print, making sure it's accurate to the original as they digitize it to tape in 2K—sometimes even 4K—resolution. Once done, they have their tape master, which they then can bring back to their headquarters to begin the restoration.

Once they have their master back at their offices, it goes through what they call the restoration workflow, which involves painstakingly restoring both the audio and video frame by frame. For video, this involves using a system called MTI Film, which allows a technician to go through the film and not only remove dirt and edit marks, but also fix warped frames and things of that nature. This isn't some automated procedure, either. It involves a technician sitting at an edit station with a stylus going frame by frame, ensuring that each one looks as good as possible. With two shifts a day working on a film, it still takes weeks to get through this part of the process.

For audio, they work in ProTools HD to both create surround-sound audio tracks as well as to clean up the original audio. They often get prints with extremely hissy or distorted mono tracks, so much like with the picture, they need to go through with a fine tooth comb and clean it all up. Their goal, according to Kline, is to "create a track with the original acoustics, bringing it back to clean and straightforward mono that sounds crisp and clear." I stood in while an audio technician was working on the opening of Lars Von Trier's Europa (due on DVD in December), and the difference between the original print's audio and the restored audio made the narration and the sound effects resonate much more without feeling like the original had been sterilized.

What about films they've already restored for DVD? Can they just be released on Blu-ray without much extra effort? Unfortunately, not usually. The good news is that once they've done their tape master, they have a high-def copy of it on hand and don't need to re-transfer the original print. The bad news is that once they've got those masters, half of the process needs to be done again because the original restorations were just done in standard definition. Making a quick rerelease of all of Criterion's films to Blu-ray something that just isn't going to happen.

Once they've finished their process, though, it's like viewing a film for the first time. I got a chance to sit in on a quality-control screening of their restoration of Wong Kar-Wai's Chungking Express. A scene in a crowded marketplace seemed to jump off the screen, and the surround sound perfectly placed the bustling sounds of the market behind me while keeping the dialogue front-and-center. I felt like I was in a theater in Hong Kong, watching the first, perfect print of the movie when it was first released. It was breathtaking.

These are the releases that film buffs have been upgrading their home theater setups for. After all, the best way to take advantage of thousands of dollars of AV gear is to give it material pulled carefully from the source.

—-

Criterion is releasing its first Blu-ray films in November, starting with The Third Man, The Man Who Fell to Earth, The Last Emperor, Bottle Rocket and Chungking Express. They plan to release two films a month in Blu-ray next year, with HD releases ramping up as sales shift from DVD to Blu-ray. [Criterion Collection]

Soon after the lights went down, a source tells us, "a man in the audience started yelling, 'Don't touch me!' People looked around and shrugged. Ten minutes later, the voice yells again, 'I said don't touch me!'"

...But a few minutes later, says our source, "the guy stands up in the darkness and thwacks the guy behind him with a big festival binder. He hit him so hard everybody could hear it. Everyone freaked out and turned around."

...Though Lumenick seemed surprised to see whom he had struck, he offered no apology, according to another source.

Bully!

[Daily News]

"Brolin spent countless hours studying the president's speech patterns and body language but said he wasn't trying to concoct a spitting-image impression, which ran the potential of becoming a 'Saturday Night Live' caricature.

"I't's not for me to get the voice down perfectly,' the 40-year-old Brolin said, even though he came close. More important, the actor said, was to unearth Bush's inner voice—'Where is my place in this world? How do I get remembered?'

"Like other actors approached for the film (including Robert Duvall, who was asked but declined to play Vice President Dick Cheney), Brolin had more than vague misgivings about starring in 'W.' He was, in fact, dead set against it. 'When Oliver asked me, I said, 'Are you crazy? Why would I want to do this with my little moment in my career?' Brolin recalled. Then, early one morning during a family ski trip, Brolin read Weiser's original screenplay, which covers Bush from 1967 to 2004. 'It was very different than what I thought it would be," Brolin said, 'which was a far-left hammering of the president.' [...]

"'I love Michael Moore, but I didn't want to make that kind of movie,' Stone said of 'Fahrenheit 9/11.' 'W.,' he said, 'isn't an overly serious movie, but it is a serious subject. It's a Shakespearean story. . . . I see it as the strange unfolding of American democracy as I have lived it.' [...]

"While noting Bush's low approval ratings (23% in a Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll released this week), Brolin, like Stone, said 'W.' isn't intended to kick the man while he's down. 'Republicans can look at it and say, "This is why I like this guy," Brolin said. 'It's not a political movie. It's a biography. People will remember that this guy is human, when we are always [outside of the movie] dehumanizing him, calling him an idiot, a puppet, a failed president. We want to know in the movie: How does a guy grow up and become the person that he did?'" [LAT]

The documentary by Mr. Gibney, who also made “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room” and “Taxi to the Dark Side,” does not attempt to work around Thompson’s endless self-consciousness but uses it as leverage instead. Produced by Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, and narrated by the actor Johnny Depp, “Gonzo” mirrors the subjectivity and immersion of the journalism Thompson and his trusty arsenal of psychoactive agents perpetrated in Rolling Stone and elsewhere. Mr. Gibney eschews narrative conventions and switches point of view on a dime, creating a prism of interviews and episodes that gradually assembles into a compelling portrait [...]

“I would argue that Hunter and Tom Wolfe are the two most original voices to come out of journalism in the last century, and it’s no coincidence that they both worked for Jann Wenner at Rolling Stone,” Mr. Carter said. “No one else was willing to push it that way, to take those risks.” Mr. Gibney’s documentary plays appropriate tribute by restricting its gaze to the nascent Thompson of the ’60s and early ’70s. By the time most of America knew who Thompson was, he was pretty much washed up, having gradually been overtaken by his own legend, with steady assists from the bottle, the drugs and his coven of enablers.

August men line up to pay their respects in the documentary — Patrick J. Buchanan, George McGovern, Jimmy Buffett, Gary Hart and Timothy Crouse, the author of the campaign memoir “The Boys on the Bus” — as do the women he loved. Both his first wife, Sandy, and second wife, Anita, testify to his courage and courtliness, in between pointing out that he could be mean as a snake and far less predictable. He broke through by covering a biker gang from the inside — he “rode with the Angels,” as Mr. Wolfe puts it in the film — and took a serious beat-down on the way out. Journalism, as practiced by Thompson, was not something for sissies. [NYT]