In my mind's eye, I see Peter Bart standing outside Campanile, holding one of those cardboard signs you see in the hands of homeless men on street corners, except the Variety editor, being a good editor, has slightly reworked the message: "Will Work for Food Oscar Ads." That was the essential point of Bart's column in today's Variety--why hasn't everyone jumped into the pool, frolicking in the annual rites of Oscar overkill? As Bart put it: "Oscar '08 may go down as the year of the Great Non-Race."

By this time last year, according to Bart, the studios had sent him 24 movie screeners. This year: Three. I only read Variety online, so I asked a studio marketing chief to leaf through today's edition and count up the number of ads. It was sobering. The only studio in the pool was Warners, who took out a double-truck ad for "The Dark Knight," the studio presumably having made so much money on the film that it wants to give some of it away to a needy trade publication (or more likely, to impress director Chris Nolan so he'll consider making a lucrative sequel). The rest of the issue had a half-page ad for a Polish film, a quarter-page ad for a film from Taiwan and a third-page ad for "Last Chance Harvey."

That was it. The studio marketer told me that at this point in time three years ago, Variety would've had at least 10 or 12 pages of studio ads. Why the drop-off? Anyone paying attention to the outside world knows we're in the midst of a hideous global economic recession, with corporate profits plunging, the biggest U.S. carmakers teetering on the brink of bankruptcy and tens of thousands of everyday Joes being laid off from their jobs. But Bart, like most Hollywood insiders, lives a life of privilege, putting those nice Campanile lunches on his expense account. So when he hears that GE's hurting or Sony's having a tough time, his reaction? "Hankies, please."

Desperate to drum up some business, Bart asks the rhetorical question: "Are the studios hanging the talent out to dry? Films like 'Milk," 'Doubt' or 'Frost/Nixon' need award nominations to find a mainstream audience." He even recruits Harvey Weinstein, the great Oscar showman of years past, to give Bart a money quote, with Harvey saying "If you don't pay for that big upfront Oscar campaign, you end up paying at the box office."

I managed to track Harvey down to ask him point-blank: Isn't is actually entirely appropriate for media conglomerates to cut back on Oscar ads in the middle of a horrific recession? Won't the best movies get plenty of nominations anyway? His response: "No one has shown me yet that you'll get the nominations unless you spend the money in the trades," he says. "It certainly hasn't worked for me so far. We had years where we spent less on Oscar ads and left it to serendipity and it didn't work. Oscar advertising makes a real difference in these kind of movies' commercial success. I mean, where do we stop? Should we be getting rid of all of the Oscar PR people too? Oscar ads just make economic sense." (Harvey, I'll be counting up all your full-page "Reader" ads from now on to see if you put your money where your mouth is.)

Bart calls Weinstein's support for big Oscar campaigns sage advice. I call it outdated and ill-advised. When people are losing their jobs left and right, it's frivolous, not to mention nauseatingly narcissistic, for studios to be tossing away millions of dollars on Oscar campaigns when that money could be better spent in a thousand different ways. Imagine how you'd feel if you were one of the hundreds of employees that's been laid off at a media conglomerate, only to see that your company's film division still has plenty of dough left to run Oscar ads in Variety or the New York Times or my newspaper.

What really worries Bart is the prospect of someone getting an Oscar nomination without spending a dime on an Oscar campaign. It would be a big blow to his bottom line, but it would be a giant step forward in studio accounting--the kind of accounting that puts a priority on good judgment, not on the costly and trivial pursuit of silly prizes. 

Photo of Harvey Weinstein from the Associated Press

Up until now, Summit Entertainment hasn't exactly set the movie world on fire. Run by veteran sales agent Patrick Wachsberger and former Paramount vice chairman Rob Friedman, the new indie distributor and finance company has struggled to prove that it can compete with the studio behemoths in the marketplace. Of its five releases, only one, the mixed martial arts film "Never Back Down," was a modest success, grossing about $25 million in the U.S. The company's most recent release, the teen comedy "Sex Drive," was a bomb, making barely $8 million after opening on nearly 2,500 screens.

But Summit has an amazing ace up its sleeve--"Twilight." If you know a teenager, I need not say more. If you don't, the sound you hear in the distance is the approaching pop culture tsunami. Written by Stephenie Meyer, "Twilight" is the first in a series of enormously popular vampire love stories that are now poised to spawn one of the hottest Hollywood literary franchises since "Harry Potter." Directed by Catherine Hardwicke ("13" and "Lords of Dogtown"), "Twilight" arrives on 5,500 screens this Friday, with the industry already abuzz with reports about spectacular advance ticket sales. During the past few weeks I've been hearing from studio marketing chiefs, who all seem in awe of the word-of-mouth groundswell for the film.

When the film's young stars, Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson, showed up at Comic-Con last July, they were greeted by Beatlemania-style screams. Last week 10,000 kids showed up at a mall in Dallas to mob them. They've been on the cover of Entertainment Weekly and a variety of teen tabloids as well as all over MTV. (Here's our dispatch earlier this year from the film set.) But what's amazing is that one of Hollywood's biggest studios had the project for years and simply let it go. "Twilight" was originally at Paramount's MTV Films, which spent nearly two years trying to develop the picture before the studio put the project in turnaround. A second studio, Fox Atomic, also passed on the project before it came Summit's way.

It wasn't as if "Twilight's" teen appeal was exactly a secret. The second novel in Meyer's series, "New Moon," debuted at No. 5 on the New York Times bestseller list for children's books when it was released in 2006. It hit No. 1 the following week and remained in the top position for 11 straight weeks. The fourth installment, "Breaking Dawn," sold 1.3 million copies in its first day of release. The entire series has now sold 8.5 million copies in the U.S., more than 17 million copies worldwide.

So how did this budding literary phenomenon practically drop in Summit's lap? Keep reading:

It's always high-comedy time when Variety delivers one of its patented "state of the industry" thumbsuckers. The trade paper did not disappoint today, offering up an unintentionally hilarious piece claiming that Hollywood was undergoing an industrywide cutback of its premieres and holiday bashes. As always, Variety's team of reporters wrote an entire story without managing to quote a single industry executive by name, since apparently no one in Hollywood would be willing to acknowledge that--the horror!--they are cutting back on party expenses, for fear of ticking off the talent involved with the movie whose premiere was the one to suffer.

Still, what made the story especially strange was that most of the people quoted--anonymously, of course--didn't even support its premise. All Variety could deliver in the way of evidence of cutbacks was the vague news that "Disney and Viacom won't be getting festive this year" while Universal was letting "individual divisions decide how merry to get" during the holidays. The only actual quote in the whole piece supporting the industry-cutback premise was from an unnamed caterer who said one way to save money was to put the "shrimp in hors d'oeuvres instead of a buffet," adding "you cut back on things that take an inordinate amount of labor."

Yikes! The next thing you know they'll be buying the champagne from Costco. That's not exactly stop-the-presses material. In fact, the farther you read into the piece, the more questionable the whole assumption becomes, since according to Variety's own reporting, there are still plenty of big parties on tap and still plenty of films getting fancy premieres ("We still need to make a splash," as one studio event planner put it). Another unnamed executive was quoted as saying the parties would continue, since "we still have a business to run."

I called two big-shot PR executives to ask if it was true that studios were cutting back on premieres and parties and lavish Oscar spending. "Are you kidding?" was the answer. The sad truth is that if studios really want to save money, they'd much prefer to fire a bunch of low-level employees. The premieres, parties, limo rentals, Oscar ads and private jets are the last to go, since they are expenditures that can be written off against the film, buried far from view. The rest of America may be suffering, but the recession hasn't gotten bad enough for anyone in Hollywood to crack down on anything that involves coddling the talent. It's show business, where the party must always go on.   

Photo by Alastair Miller / Bloomberg News

When I had lunch with John Hamburg the other day, the writer-director of the upcoming comedy "I Love You, Man" appeared full of anxiety, something of a natural condition I suspect, since judging from his work, he is the poet laureate of comic anxiety. (Best known in the business as Ben Stiller's in-house writer, Hamburg's writing credits include "Meet the Parents," "Zoolander" and "Meet the Fockers" as well as serving as the writer-director of "Along Came Polly.") The problem at hand was pretty clear. His new film, which stars Paul Rudd, Jason Segal and Jamie Pressly, had the perfect title and he desperately wanted to keep it.

After all, what else would you call a comedy about a loner engaged to a nice girl who suddenly realizes that he has no male friend to be his best man--and proceeds to go out on a series of male dates, hoping to find the right guy? I mean, doesn't "I Love You, Man" say it all? Hamburg thought so too. So did DreamWorks, which produced the film (which is being distributed by Paramount). There was just one snag. 20th Century Fox had a film coming out at roughly the same time next spring called "I Love You Beth Cooper." And if there were ever a studio that would attempt to copyright the phrase "I Love You," it would be Fox.

So even though Hamburg had done a lot of work at Fox, including some key rewrites on the studio's mega-hit "Night at the Museum," he was worried. And rightfully so. After all, it was DreamWorks who had a Farrelly brothers comedy called "The Seven Day Itch," loosely based on 1972's "The Heartbreak Kid." At least it was called that until Fox challenged the title, claiming the movie could be confused with the 1955 Billy Wilder film "The Seven Year Itch." (I only wish Wilder were still alive, since surely he'd have a great quip about the logic of how you'd confuse a 50-year-old Marilyn Monroe movie with a Farrelly brothers comedy.) Fox was so fiercely committed to protecting its title that studio Co-Chairman Tom Rothman personally went before the MPAA title arbitration board to plead the studio's case--and won on appeal, forcing DreamWorks to change its title to "The Heartbreak Kid." (The movie flopped.)

"I have to admit I don't have a real fall-back position," Hamburg told me over lunch. "I have a list of other titles in my office and they're all terrible. 'I Love You, Man' is so good because it's a phrase that's in the culture. It symbolizes the way men talk to each other, especially the 'comma' and the 'man.' And the whole subtext of the phrase really plays out in the movie. I dunno--isn't 'I love you' a pretty common phrase? It seems like I've heard it in movie titles before."

So does this story have a happy ending? Did Fox put the screws to Hamburg or did the studio make him an offer he couldn't refuse? Keep reading:

When I was young and fancy free, I once went out with a girl whose major criteria for granting a guy a second date (and trust me when I say there was always a long line of potential grant recipients) was whether we could offer a persuasive answer to the question: What is your favorite James Bond theme song? (I could identify--in high school, I once bailed on a girl after it became apparent that I was going to be subjected to a steady stream of Cat Stevens and Three Dog Night songs from her LP collection.)

But I digress. Outside of arguing over who's the best baseball player or the worst president of all time, what could be more emotionally satisfying than debating the merits of the amazing array of James Bond theme songs? So kudos to Drew Kerr at TotalMusicGeek, who came up with the great idea of doing a Top 20 ranking of the themes--along with a YouTube link allowing us to watch all of the film's title sequences while listening to the themes.

I'm not sure I agree with all of Drew's rankings--he puts Nancy Sinatra's steamy rendition of "You Only Live Twice" (covered not so long ago by Coldplay) at No. 1, which strikes me as a bit high. But puzzling over the entire Bond aesthetic is half of the fun of playing the game. I agree with Drew that the new Jack White-Alicia Keys theme, "Another Way to Die," is, well, dreadful, almost as bad as Madonna's dreary "Die Another Day" and Garbage's dismal "The World Is Not Enough." On the plus side, I'd forgotten how good Tina Turner sounds on "GoldenEye" (co-written by Bono and the Edge) or how classic Carly Simon's "Nobody Does It Better" feels today, perhaps because it was co-written by the one and only Marvin Hamlisch, who's still enough of a brand name to get name-checked in "Role Models."

Anyway, go see for yourself--and don't miss the wonderfully kitschy title sequence from "On Her Majesty's Secret Service." As for my favorite theme? If you must know, I'm going with Tom Jones' brassy gals-toss-your-panties-on-stage version of "Thunderball." But don't take my word for it. Watch it for yourself:

Photo of Eunice Gayson and Sean Connery in "Dr. No" from UPI

Normally I resist the impulse to respond to attacks from other bloggers, having the attitude that if you dish it out, you should be able to take it. But I can't resist a teaching opportunity. So here goes. When the blogosphere was full of reports--inaccurate reports, as it turns out--that Baz Luhrmann had been pressured by top 20th Century Fox executives to change the ending to his upcoming epic, "Australia," I could have just passed along the unsubstantiated reports, as most bloggers do. But I confess--I'm an old-fashioned journalist. Instead of just repeating the same half-truths, I thought I'd go to the source--Fox Co-Chairman Tom Rothman. If anyone was pressuring Luhrmann, it would be Rothman, who is famous for being involved in nearly all production decisions--big or small--at the studio.

As luck would have it, I had a lunch scheduled with Rothman the next day. So I asked him about the reports, got some answers and put them up on the blog. The reaction in the clown-suit-clad blogosphere? Variety's Anne Thompson, who should know better, wrote that "Fox put co-chairman Tom Rothman together" with me "to staunch the tide of bad PR" coming out of Australia. Movie City News' David Poland wrote that after I had battered Fox with "attacks and attacks and attacks for no journalistic reason" that I got what I wanted--a "free lunch." Why? As Poland put it: "Because Tom Rothman wants to head off attacks on his most expensive production of the year."

Is that really true? Not at all. The lunch was set up by me, six weeks ago, not on the spur of the moment by Fox. One of my paper's best bloggers, WebScout's David Sarno, often writes hilarious posts about the bizarre fake news and conspiracy theories that bounce around the Web, propelled by the viral nature of the medium. Apparently this happens with Web film coverage too, largely because no one would ever dream of picking up the phone and doing any reporting, preferring to offer clueless conjecture. If anyone had bothered to ask me, they could've discovered the awful tedious truth: I got lucky, having scheduled the Rothman lunch way back in late September. Poland is right that I have been intensely critical of Fox in the past year--my contention being that the studio keeps top talent and producers at arm's length, preferring to work with more malleable filmmakers, the result being a string of critically drubbed films. Rothman believes I've been unfair to the studio and we agreed to have lunch to try to clear the air.

What I find depressing is that bloggers like Poland are so ignorant about how reporters get stories that they actually think there's something inherently unhealthy about us having lunch with studio executives, agents and producers. Sorry, Dave, but it's the way reporters actually break stories. I assume Anne is aware of that, since I saw her just last week having lunch with Paramount's John Lesher when I was having lunch with a writer-director at the same restaurant. I suspect we both got some interesting news out of the effort. (And just so you know, Dave, even though the writer-director makes a ton more money than me, it wasn't a free lunch. I paid.)

In fact, I've got more news coming soon from my lunch with Rothman. I'd be much happier sitting at home, looking out at the big old avocado trees in my backyard, but going out to lunch and working the phones is how you break news in Hollywood. Some bloggers know the score--for all her faults, Nikki Finke breaks story after story because she doesn't just drone on about the Oscar race; she has real sources. Most film bloggers have spent so much time knocking the old mainstream media that they've forgotten that reporting still has its virtues. It's OK to sit in front of the computer and spew out half-formed opinions, but I'd rather go to the source and get the real story.

Who knew that he had a highbrow fan club including the likes of Kingsley Amis, W.H. Auden, Raymond Chandler and Anthony Burgess? Who knew that he was once described as looking like a "young Hoagy Carmichael?" Who knew that he wasn't even English, having a Scotsman as a father and a mother who was Swiss?

We're talking about James Bond, of course, the legendarily smooth-as-silk secret operative who's been a favorite big screen escapist fantasy for more than 40 years, and is arriving in theaters again this weekend via "Quantum of Solace," with Daniel Craig in his second turn as Bond. I thought I knew plenty about the whole Bond mystique and back story, but it turns out that I'd barely scratched the surface, as is evidenced by how much I learned from reading Allen Barra's delightful Bond essay in today's Wall Street Journal.

Also a consummate baseball fan -- his new book, due out in March, is called "Yogi Berra: Eternal Yankee" -- Barra takes us along for a great ride through Bondland, tossing out arcane stats (there have been 20 previous films, not including a 1954 TV production of "Casino Royale"), nostalgia (in "Thunderball" Bond is envious of the CIA for "the excellence of their equipment") and juicy Bond quotes (from "On Her Majesty's Secret Service," on his many amorous adventures: "I'm fed up with all these untidy, casual affairs that leave me with a bad conscience").

I mean, who knew JB even had a conscience? Even though the reviews of "Solace" have been lukewarm, Barra makes a persuasive case that Craig is the actor born to play Bond. You should read his whole piece, but here's the thrust of his point:

Forget the foppish Roger Moore or the bland Pierce Brosnan. Mr. Craig's Bond is the real thing, the "blunt instrument" described by Ian Fleming in an interview and repeated by Judi Dench's M in "Casino Royale." He isn't suave like Sean Connery or sensitive like Timothy Dalton; when a bartender asks Craig whether he wants his martini shaken or stirred, he snaps, in a line that drew chuckles from Bond fans everywhere: "Do I look like I give a damn?"

Photo of Daniel Craig in "Quantum of Solace" by Karen Ballard / Associated Press

If you hang around Hollywood long enough, you learn not to believe everything you read in the trades. Still, it was pretty exciting to see the news this week that the indefatigable producer Avi Lerner had wooed Brett Ratner into directing Lerner's upcoming remake of "Conan," the iconic 1982 film that helped launch Arnold Schwarzenegger's long run as a Hollywood action hero. According to the original Hollywood Reporter headline, Ratner had committed to the project, though its latest version was a bit more circumspect, saying he was in "final negotiations" to do the film after working with the screenwriters, who were doing a quick polish to "incorporate" some of Ratner's ideas. The blogosphere wasn't quite so discerning, with some Web outlets simply saying that Ratner was "officially directing" the film.

One of Hollywood's most persuasive salesman, Lerner told me this morning that Ratner was the perfect director. "He has the passion and feeling for this project--he even wrote a story about Conan when he was 10 years old," Lerner explained. "He understands the character, he analyzed the script really well. He knows how to make this a really big movie. I like his childlike enthusiasm--he almost sees these movies as wonderful toys. What can I say, he's a nice, likable Jewish boy."

Lerner acknowledged that even though he sent out a press release announcing Ratner's involvement with the project, the deal wasn't actually done. "We still have a few obstacles," he said. "Brett is only committed if we agree on a budget, on how to do the special effects and exactly where we'd shoot the film." Lerner has a studio in Bulgaria, so he'd like to shoot most of the movie there, with some exterior work in China.

But is Ratner actually committed to doing the film? In two words: Not really. When I called him today, he sounded somewhat agitated, unhappy that news of his negotiations with Lerner had surfaced, especially since he is extremely close to getting a green light from Paramount to make "Beverly Hills Cop 4." "Let me make this very clear," he told me. "I am not doing 'Conan' now. This is totally premature. For now, 'Conan' is only a development deal. I have a deal at Paramount and I'm doing 'Beverly Hills Cop' first, no matter what. Avi shouldn't be telling you or anyone else in the press what I'm doing."

So what happened here? And how did Avi get the rights to "Conan" in the first place? Keep reading:

The blogosphere has been full of breathless tales that Baz Luhrmann has been forced to dump the unhappy ending he filmed for "Australia," his $130-million adventure epic (due out later this month) that stars Hugh Jackman and Nicole Kidman. Australia's Sunday Telegraph reports that 20th Century Fox executives forced Luhrmann to add a more upbeat ending after the film had "disastrous reviews" at early test screenings. Is it really possible that Fox would bully Luhrmann, a final-cut director, into giving his movie a happier ending?

Even though we've had some heated disagreements in recent months about my coverage of his studio, Fox Co-Chairman Tom Rothman graciously agreed to have lunch with me today at the Fox commissary, where we did see eye-to-eye on one important matter--it was very cool to be sitting two tables away from the legendary Hong Kong action movie star Chow Yun-Fat. (What he was doing at Fox was something of a mystery, since Rothman said he wasn't making a movie with the actor.) So what about "Australia"? Was there any truth to the Sunday Telegraph story?

"Everything in that story was patently nonsensical," Rothman said. "It's all too typical of the way the world works today that everybody picked up an unsourced, anonymous quote-filled story in a tabloid from Sydney and nobody ever bothered to check to see if it was accurate. The facts are--Baz is a final-cut director and we never pressured him in any way, shape or form. He wrote the movie, shot it and cut it all himself without any interference from us at all."

Rothman said that the movie "has probably had seven different endings at one time or another, none of them easily characterized as happy or sad." He said Luhrmann chose the ending the director thought worked best for the film. "But you couldn't possibly characterize the ending as happy or sad," he told me. "I'd call it deeply satisfying but that's because it's very complex. In fact, you could have a long conversation about whether it's happy or sad, which is actually part of what makes it a great movie."

I can't wait to see the film. And I couldn't agree more with Rothman about the gall of the Sunday Telegraph relying on such shoddy reporting. Maybe Tom can use his influence to improve the quality of journalism Down Under. All he has to do is pick up the phone, since the Telegraph is owned by ... his boss, Rupert Murdoch.

Photo of Hugh Jackman and Nicole Kidman in "Australia"  from Twentieth Century Fox / AFP / Getty Images

The Bush administration wasn't actually secretly trying to prevent liberal activist Tim Robbins from voting for president last Tuesday. If you missed it, Robbins got into a noisy argument with a polling worker after no one could find his name on the rolls of registered voters at his local polling place in New York, even though the actor said he'd been voting at the same location for years. But according to a report from Access Hollywood picked up by MSNBC, Robbins, ahem, went to the wrong polling place.

The New York City Board of Elections wrote the actor a letter saying he should have voted at a library on West 20th Street, not the YMCA on West 14th Street where he and Susan Sarandon turned up to vote. It's pretty evident from the sly tone of the letter that the election board was getting its revenge for being portrayed by Robbins in various news reports as a cloddish bureaucratic sinkhole. "It would appear, based on a review of your voter registration history, that your voting experience was less than positive because you simply went to the wrong poll site," an election board member wrote, coolly sticking the knife in by adding that if there was confusion over the appropriate voting location, it might be because "you have not voted in an recent election, including the presidential primary in February 2008 and the party primary in September 2008."

Ouch! Is it really possible that Robbins, who seems to speak out more on American foreign policy than, well, most U.S. senators, didn't actually vote in the pivotal New York presidential primary? OMG! Wait till Dirty Harry, my favorite right-wing, Robbins-loathing blogger, hears about this--it'll make his day!

But wait--Robbins isn't taking this lying down. He disputes the election board's claims, saying it's a PR stunt "to try to cover their butts over their ineptitude." He says he voted as his regular polling place in both 2004 and 2006--and has a copy of his voter registration clearly showing his home address. "Something doesn't [jibe] with the actions of the Board of Elections," he told Access Hollywood. "For no good reason, they chose to take this active voter off the voting rolls." Robbins says he is examining legal options, saying the board's release of his personal information is "an invasion of privacy and further insult."

Stay tuned. Somehow I think this election dispute may last longer than Gore vs. Bush 2000.

RELATED:

Robbins Argues with Polling Workers on Election Day

Photo of Tim Robbins by Los Angeles Times