Conflicting reports emerged late Monday from SAG's emergency national board meeting, where at least one member says Doug Allen is out as the union's chief negotiator.

SAG's protracted pursuit of a strike authorization vote may end as early as tomorrow, with the bitter aftertaste of a secret awards blacklist lingering in an emergency meeting underway at union HQ.

As pro-strike SAG members gathered around their mediation menorahs to light a tiny Eric Bogosian head on fire, thereby commemorating the second night of Yea-nukkah, they were met with a shocking development:

We thought a fun way to keep track of where celebrities stand on the impending SAG strike would be with some printable holiday greeting cards!

The Screen Actors Guild took its finger off the nuke button long enough to select 2008 awards nominations, while the Academy narrowed its Best Song candidates to a modest 49.

A rumor that Twentieth Century Fox Television—producers of some of your most beloved stories, including 24, My Name is Earl, and Family Guy—would be switching over to an all-AFTRA format got this official response:

Hollywood awoke Tuesday to more graphic evidence of sectarian violence in the SAG ranks, with namecalling, dogma and even allegations of brainwashing feeding the union's race to strike-fueled self-destruction.

A sturdy cross-section of topline Hollywood talent from Tom Hanks to George Clooney to René Auberjonois today urged SAG leadership to back down from its '09 strike threat. Maybe even more noteworthy: Who's missing?

"Happy 2009 — let's take the year off," will come the refrain from SAG HQ next month, as they today announced Jan. 2 as the date strike authorization ballots go out to its 120,000 members.

So SAG's fucked. Wait—did we say "fucked?" There we go again—needless doomsday prophesying where Obaman cool-headedness is clearly required. What we meant to say is: "SAG's probably fucked." Yesterday brought a confluence of Pop Culture Doomsday events that not even a walrus blowing like Bird could have foretold:

Just days after we learned the kinda-sorta true details of a secret summit called by SAG president Alan Rosenberg and attended by the A-list dons of Hollywood's acting Cosa Nostra, tensions between the union and producers have reached a rolling boil. With 120,000 strike-authorization ballots being readied for…

It took a rumored meeting of superstars like Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep to get us to care again about a potential actors strike, and a hasty bit of rumor-debunking this morning to dash all the intrigue. But after a retraction, a non-retraction, and a few sharp personal jabs between dueling industry…

Just when we thought nothing much had changed in the narcoleptic parallel universe of SAG contract negotiations, we're hearing now that the union's saber-rattlers are finally bringing the heavy weaponry to bear on their studio nemeses: A recent dinner hosting Jack Nicholson, Meryl Streep, Warren Beatty and other…

Frankly, we like your odds of being one of the 66,000 people to whom the Screen Actors Guild owes some $25 million in unpaid residuals — members, heirs of members, and even non-members whose fluke payments have trickled into SAG over the last 20 years. As noted here last month, the union has kept money belonging to…

· 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…

A Slow Burn. Time now to check in on how those pesky, protracted SAG talks are going. Hey, News Corp. president Peter Chernin—what's the latest? He told a conference in New York today that talks are going "horribly," and a strike would be "devastating to the creative community...I think it's genuinely foolhardy to…

So it looks like we're back on the Depression's doorstep, with credit axed and markets capsizing here and abroad. But one growth industry continues to thrive reliably: Movies, where despite the ongoing threat of a SAG work stoppage, studios are sinking more than a half-billion dollars into productions for their…

· Pundits are saying the second presidential debate turned a corner for the Obama campaign, as he was much more successful in interacting with the cadavers propped up in chairs at the Town Hall Meeting of the Dead. [Variety] · Billy Kemp has been named the new VP of casting and talent at FremantleMedia North America,…

· Jack Black will soon reunite with the writers of Kung Fu Panda, teaming up on an untitled comedy about a man who wakes up sans memory on Cuban shores only to deduce he's a superspy. Yuks, partial nudity and Bourne-franchise comparisons ensue. [THR] · If you are the least bit sleepy, we recommend skipping to the…