The Reader may still require a month's worth of round-the-clock editing under armed guard, but the Kate Winslet drama has at last yielded a trailer to remind us that there is an Oscar-hopeful under all those layers of Harvey Weinstein-Scott Rudin ego-crisis. And like last week's not-embarrassing Valkyrie teaser, the…
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…
If the plot isn't exactly thickening today around Scott Rudin's exit from The Reader, it's at least sustaining a low, convoluted simmer. Still nobody knows for sure the specific reasons for Rudin's move beyond the obvious, routine desire to gut Harvey Weinstein with a letter opener, but looking forward, a few new…
♦ Sumner Redstone is being forced to sell about one-fifth of his stake in CBS and Viacom to meet the terms of various loan agreements. Also: Shares in Viacom plunged after the company announced third-quarter earnings fell short of estimates. [Bloomberg]
♦ It's official: Hearst's Cathie Black announced CosmoGirl will…
We don't always know what to believe anymore when it comes to The Reader, but after a turbulent period of fighting, making up, gossip-page ensnarement and a charity payout, no one watching the tormented relationship between Scott Rudin and Harvey Weinstein could have realistically expected it to survive another two…
No distance seems far enough, no HazMat suit thick enough to defend against the radioactivity let off by Harvey Weinstein and Scott Rudin's toxic Reader mess. This morning we're getting an idea of the clean-up cost for both parties — none more prohibitive than Harvey's, who today pledged $1 million to charity if Nikki…
This hasn't been a good week for Harvey Weinstein. Last Friday NBC successfully blocked Weinstein from moving Project Runway from NBC-owned Bravo to Lifetime. Over the past few days, he's also been engaged in an increasingly public (and increasingly messy) feud with producer Scott Rudin over the fate of The Reader,…
After a brief but concentrated period of friction over the release date for their Oscar-bait drama The Reader, Harvey Weinstein and Scott Rudin issued a joint statement late Sunday confirming the film would arrive in theaters Dec. 12, 2008. Thus anticlimactically ended Rudin/Weinstein Death Match II, their first…
The three-year distribution match made in the mildly optimistic spirit of convenience between MGM and the Weinstein Company was set to expire at the end of this year, but the Lion isn't waiting around to box up the furniture. A day after Kevin Smith's associates blogged that MGM had yanked its logo from the marketing…
While most of the filmgoing world probably wouldn't have minded seeing Kate Winslet compete against herself for a Best Actress Oscar next February (at this point we'd do anything to improve her odds), we'd sacrifice that opportunity if it means we get to witness and/or feel the seismic power struggle rocking…
The last news we'd heard about Kate Winslet's post-WWII drama The Reader was less than reassuring: While the film ultimately got its first choice of leading lady after a pregnant Nicole Kidman backed out, the successive passings of co-producers Anthony Minghella and Sydney Pollack left Scott Rudin on his own with…
With yesterday's news that Nicole Kidman is pregnant with husband Keith Urban's baby (his little Cowboy-hatted fish can swim!), the one irrefutable bit of evidence that Kidman's privacy-guarding flacks used to dispel the circulating rumors ("She can't possibly be having a baby! She's far too busy filming a movie…
