Karina on SpoutBlog

Steve Rhodes has pictures from the San Francisco set of Milk, Gus Van Sant’s biopic in which Sean Penn plays the openly-gay San Francisco politician Harvey Milk, who was assassinated by a fellow city supervisor who later claimed he had killed whilst in the throes of a sugar rush. Van Sant and crew have apparently dressed a stretch of SF’s Castro district to match its 70s glory. More photos here.

In what they’re trumpeting as an exclusive, Defamer reports that the Detroit Free Press has elected not to replace their recently forcibly retired film critic Terry Lawson, and will fill his coulmn space with wire reviews:

We called the Detroit Free Press this morning and learned from a (very confused) HR rep that “We are not planning on replacing [Terry Lawson] at this time.” Very interesting. By our research, all of the other Top 20 newspapers in the United States have at least one major, well-known critic (yes, even the Arizona Republic). However, The Freep’s move clearly signals that there’s a changing tide in the amount of importance (and budget dollars) local newspapers allocate to coverage of the movie business.

The real news here may be that Defamer managed to publish 267 completely snark-free words about anything, let alone the decline of print film criticism. Associate editor Molly Friedman even closes with the seemingly sincere lament that “it still saddens us that there’s not enough room in the budget of a Top 20 newspaper to send someone to the movies a few times a week.”

In all seriousness, the Detroit Free Press‘ move is the latest in an epidemic of regional newspapers dropping their film critics. This is clearly a problem in the short term, but may turn out to be a positive on a longer timeline.

(more…)

• Throwing a wrench into the WGA talks that neither side really needed, SAG has started talking shit about the recently-cemented DGA/AMPTP deal. SAG’s Alan Rosenberg wrote a letter to his guild warning them that the publicized details of the DGA pact were too vague to put much faith in, and that the pact may not actually be a victory on the digital download front. The DGA’s Michael Apted responded (and I’m paraphrasing), “If you don’t know the details, how come you’re sending letters, gettin’ all up our shit?”
• Variety has scant new details on Mark Romanek’s exit from Universal’s Wolfman remake: in this case, “creative differences” seem to translate to “money.”
• Oliver Stone’s not just talking about making a George Bush movie??????he’s now found someone to fully finance the thing, so that it can be fast tracked into production by April, and possibly in theaters in time for the November election. Chris previously did a double take on this project here.