The LAT reports that NBC Universal head/golden-boy-in-decline Jeff Zucker's been bitten by the acting bug, taking a role as himself (he needs to get his feet wet before tackling something like Streetcar) on Kirstie Alley's Showtime series, Fat Actress:

We don't plan on making a habit of leaving our blogging hovel, but we just returned from a leisurely lunch at Paramount's cafeteria. (Please, before you get any crazy ideas, we were eating in the downscale section, looking forlornly through a couple of panes of glass at the fancy people in the executive dining room.)

· The latest on Miramax vs. Disney: In an SEC filing, Disney ominously states that production of Miramax projects may be "abandoned or otherwise impaired" after their deal with the Weinsteins expires. This is the closest Michael Eisner can get to threatening to kill Harvey Weinstein's children. [Variety, sub. req'd.]
· Hilary Swank gets the "femme fatale" role in the Brian DePalma adaptation of the James Ellroy novel The Black Dahlia. DePalma will now have to try and find a way to butch her up a little and put her right back in Oscar contention. [Variety]
· No matter how hard we close our eyes and wish for Brett Ratner to disappear, he stubbornly continues to show up in the trades. Robin Tunney signs up for Ratner's Fox drama Prison Break.[THR]
· NY Film Critics Circle jumps on the Sideways bandwagon. When will these critics stop blindly rewarding excellence, just like the Academy voters did years ago? [THR]
· NBC Universal Television pretends to humor Will & Grace star Eric McCormack's producing aspirations, sets up a shingle for him with offices across from the CBS Radford lot. How long will it take McCormack to figure out NBC provided him with cardboard prop computers from Ikea and Fisher Price telephones? [Variety]

· Let the end-of-year listmania begin: AFI releases its top 10 movies/television programs of 2004. [THR]
· The lovable drunks of Sideways take the LA Critics Assn. [THR], San Francisco Critics Circle [Variety, sub. req'd.], and NY Online Critics [THR] top honors. They're all just setting themselves up for disappointment when Miramax buys a win for The Aviator at the Oscars.
· The Desperate Housewives juggernaut outdoes all TV series in Golden Globe nominations, even beating The Sopranos by a count of five to four. Unfortunately, adulterous, teen-banging wife Eva Longoria is shut out. [Variety]
· Fox is so desperate to grab the Steve Levitan-Pamela Anderson pilot that it gives the still-unwritten project a six- episode, on-air commitment. Or, in terms we can better understand, three episodes per implant. [Variety]
· Kathy Bates is in negotiations to star in the Lifetime movie Ambulance Girl, about a middle-aged housewife who drives a fire truck. Kidding! She drives an ambulance. Naked. OK, not really. One nude scene per decade for Bates really is more than enough. [THR]

While the Directors Guild and the Writers Guild have already tasted the back of the studios' collective bargaining hand when they asked for a bigger cut of DVD cash, the Screen Actors Guild is still hoping their current talks will shake some more home video money out of the producers sitting across the negotiating table. But they're not going to do any better than the DGA and WGA if their negotiating position is ruined by agents bragging that their A-list clients are already making fuck-you money from DVDs, and don't need to be bothered by piddling matters like a strike over residuals:

· Switching to a strategy in which they will only try to court viewers who live within the Los Angeles city limits, Showtime fast-tracks the production of Two Blind Mikes, the story of Michael Eisner and Michael Ovitz's love affair gone sour. Do the Showtime folks know something we don't about how The Hollywood Trial of the Century is going to turn out? [Variety, sub. req'd.]
· Warner Bros. becomes the first studio to make over $2 billion internationally in one year. Apparently, Troy and Last Samurai play much better with overdubbing or subtitles. [THR]
· Nicole Kidman ditches the new The Producers movie, claiming she's way too busy to learn the songs and dance routines. [Variety]
· Snoop Dogg will star in and produce a Coach Snoop, a film about his experiences coaching his son's football team. Said Snoop, "But most importantly during the football season, if you aren't wearing a helmet, get the fuck away from me. Football first; everything else second." Well, everything else but weed. [THR]
· HBO claims their in-show product placements are all driven by story and add extra realism, instead of adding huge amounts of cash to the network. Right. Nothing's more real than stealth cash from advertisers. [THR]

With the "psychopath" epithet tossed into the fray early in testimony at The Hollywood Trial of the Century, we knew that it wouldn't be long before someone laid the "cancer" metaphor at Michael Ovitz's feet. Today's testimony, however, contained a much more interesting image courtesy of a former Disney director:

· The O.C.'s Mischa Barton is in negotiations to star in Dino de Laurentiis period drama The Decameron, based on the 14th century literary classic that no one within a 300-mile radius of Los Angeles has ever heard of. [THR]
· Adam Sandler's proves his Happy Madison Productions exists solely to keep his underemployed friends in mortgage payments, producing Bench Warmers for Rob Schneider and David Spade. Make up your own idea for a logline, you'll probably get it in fewer than three tries. [Variety, sub. req'd.]
· In a move we're sure has NOTHING to do with Pixar's Cars move, DreamWorks pushes Shrek 3 to 2007. Why not just hold it until the Apocalypse, Katzenberg? It's a great time for opening family fare. [THR]
· Wayne Brady and Frasier scribe Saldin Patterson set up a legal comedy at NBC. Suicide, cutting, and vomiting to follow this item. Not in that order. [THR]
· DreamWorks renews its deal with Ben Stiller's Red Hour production company, banking that it will get more DodgeBall than Duplex. [Variety]

· Adorably creepy child-actor-of-the-moment Dakota Fanning will star in a Paramount/Nickelodeon Pictures adaptation of Charlotte's Web. We once again applaud her handlers' savvy in keeping her busy before she boards the train to Osmentville. [THR]
· Tom Hanks's Playtone Productions sets up reality show/mockumentary We're With The Band at Comedy Central, a show so confoundingly genre-busting that it seems designed solely to circumvent the rules of every professional guild in town. Also, it stars Alanis Morrissette, probably just to piss off the INS. [Variety, sub. req'd.]
· Hollywood Out of Ideas, Vol. XXI: 20th Century Fox Television forces us to remember Maury Povich's salad days by resurrecting "seminal" news magazine show A Current Affair. [THR]
· Stunt casting alert! Zach Braff talks pal Colin Farrell into doing a turn on Scrubs, where he'll play against type as an "unruly Irishman" who "shows up drunk to the set every day" and "shows his penis to everyone in a ten-foot radius" before "vomiting on a gurney." [Variety]
· News That Ten People Care About: The WGA West will re-edit a controversial roundtable discussion about the Guild's problems with an eye on publishing it in Written By, their in-house magazine. Also, Dan Petrie, Jr. is fighting a ticket he got for double-parking on Fairfax. [THR]

Desperate for the kind of star-power that would inject new life into The Hollywood Trial of the Century and cloud the minds of the media, lawyers called Oscar-winning actor Sidney Poitier, a Disney director at the time of Michael Ovitz's hiring, to deliver a soliloquy about his life (and, time permitting, to defend the company's brief employment of the former superagent).

The Hollywood Reporter has released its annual "Women in Entertainment Power 100" list, an event that momentarily sates the industry's appetite for numerical rankings of influence while subtly reinforcing Hollywood's cherished glass ceiling. In THR's estimation, 2005's most powerful lady is Anne Sweeney, an executive who's come a long way, baby, from a Good Morning America page to co-chairman (ahem, chairwoman, THR?) of Disney Media Networks. Congratulations, Anne, etc etc. We're getting a little misty for the old days, when our girl would bring us a pipin' hot cup o' joe as we read Variety's "Top Ten Dames from the MGM Typing Pool We'd Like To Bang in 1943."

Some little animated birdies told us that Disney and Pixar are about to announce that they're pushing back Cars, the last movie in their current deal, from the 2005 holiday season to the summer of 2006. Said birdies also note the movie's production will still be wrapped in time for the original release. Are the Pixar folks simply tired of taking all of the holiday animation dollars, and are looking for a season where they can vacuum up even more box office cash before marching their DVD armies through at Christmastime? Is Disney stalling to prolong their association with the Pixar money machine? Has Michael Eisner worked a secret side deal with Steve Jobs to digitize him into a Disney mainframe so that he can control the Mickey Mouse Empire FOREVER, unless he's erased by a ragtag team of hackers, moments before he engineers a massive crash at Space Mountain? We really hope the press release addresses that last question. We've already lost interest in the Cars story.

· Scott Rudin takes a break from his extremely busy schedule of hiring, torturing, and firing assistants to produce an adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's novel No Country for Old Men for Paramount. He may even have to postpone at least three of his weekly lashing sessions until the project's casting phase. [THR]
· Studios shuffle end-of-year release dates, killing time during the holiday season under the guise of "awards positioning" and "Christmas openings." [Variety, sub. req'd.]
· Julianne Moore is in negotiations to star opposite Nicolas Cage, currently the Biggest Star in the World, in yet another Phillip K. Dick adaptation, Next. [Variety]
· "Breaking news": Kanye West nominated for shitload of Grammys. [THR]
· Snarkster comedian Michael Ian Black loses out to Craig Ferguson (say it with us now: "Who the fuck is that?") in the sweepstakes to host CBS's Late Late Show. We think they made up the name "Craig Ferguson" just so Craig Kilborn can sneak back on the air without losing face. [THR]

Bereft of high-profile, superstar witnesses (let's face it, the endless parade of current and former Disney executives lacks sizzle) the The Hollywood Trial of the Century hasn't been capturing the town's imagination the way it once was. But in yesterday's testimony, Disney director Gary Wilson recounted how CEO Michael Eisner asked him to take Michael Ovitz out on a "boat ride" and "talk some sense" into him.

Apparently taking a break from writing himself a movie in which he gets to have sex with a woman young enough to be his granddaughter, Woody Allen pens a "Shouts & Murmurs" piece imagining what it might sound like if lawyers called Mickey Mouse to the stand to testify in The Hollywood Trial of the Century:

· Fresh from getting canned by Pat "The Iron Flack" Kingsley, former PMK/HBH No.2 Leslee Dart opens her own company—with a nice stable of her former PMK clients. [Variety, sub. req'd.]
· Ashton Kutcher looks to star in the drama Random Acts of Kindness, about a suicidal young man who is rescued by a reclusive novelist. The "rescued" in the logline suggest that the novelist doesn't fail in thwarting a Kutcher suicide, so interest in the project should immediately wane. [THR]
· Peter Sarsgaard joins Jake Gyllenhaal and Jamie Foxx in the Sam Mendes Gulf War project, Jarhead. Sarsgaard probably won't get the opportunity for any on-screen Kinsey-style full-frontal antics, but then again, don't ask, don't tell, etc etc. [Variety]
· Touchstone Television rewards Desperate Housewives creator Marc Cherry with a three-year, seven-figure overall deal. What does ABC owe him for saving their network? [THR]
· Renny Harlin will develop and direct a film based the graphic novel Full Moon Fever, in which workers on the moon who are attacked by werewolves. The producers should probably double-check that Harlin is still alive before they start casting those werewolves. [Variety]

· Nicole Kidman will star in the Robert Evans-produced (apparently he's making time to produce in between hottubbing with Brett Ratner and planning his Broadway show) romantic comedy Wedding Season. [Variety, sub. req'd.]
· Chris Columbus will direct an adaptation from the dregs of Marvel Comics' hero stable, The Sub-Mariner. They're not going to waste any of the good characters on Columbus. [THR]
· The always-innovative Fox picks up "Lost, but on the moon!" pilot Darkside. Prepare yourselves for their coming "Desperate Housewives, but underwater!" project. [Variety]
· New Line Cinema acquires the rights to He's Just Not That Into You, with the book's writers Greg Behrendt amd Liz Tuccillo adapting the non-fiction blockbuster bestseller for the screen. In a related story, we are planning on killing ourselves as a Sex and the City rerun plays in the background. [THR]
· Shitergy Report: NBC Universal sells the syndication rights for Law & Order: Criminal Intent for a record $1.92 mil an episode to sister company USA and sister channel Bravo. [Variety]

In picking up Tuesday's Smoking Gun story about Viacom co-president/bleach-toothed future intercontinental despot Les Moonves' attempt to expedite his divorce proceedings, Page Six lets us know that his estranged wife is still pissed that she got dumped for Early Show/Big Brother host Julie Chen:

· Al Pacino is looking to star in MGM's remake of Witness for the Prosecution, the 1957 Billy Wilder courtroom drama. Good move—these lawyerin' flicks inevitably provide ample opportunity for overblown scene-chewing, a Pacino speciality since Scent of a Woman. [THR]
· A day after Les Moonves crowed about CBS' sweeps victory, former NBC golden-boy Jeff Zucker dejectedly appraises his network's sweeps performance as "good but not great." NBC then announced the midseason series (like the much-delayed boxing flop-to-be The Contender) it will dump into its schedule. Please, someone confiscate Zucker's shoelaces before any of the new shows premiere. [THR]
· Hell-bent on more efficiently liquefying the brains of its young audience, The WB picks up a script based on Plum Sykes's novel, Bergdorf Blondesto develop into an hour-long drama series. [Variety, sub. req'd.]
· The Broder-Webb-Chervin-Silbermann agency finally discovers "reality television" and starts a department to rep creatives in this exciting new genre. They're still researching the financial feasibility of starting a "talkies" department. [THR]

· THR chooses slow-retiring Paramount head Sherry Lansing as the winner of the first Sherry Lansing Leadership Award. They'll soon announce plans to change the name of their publication to Sherry!, with Lansing appearing on the cover each month in a new, sassy-yet-sensible outfit. [THR]
· Les Moonves declares CBS' November ratings victory a "watershed moment" And you laugh when we tell you he's going to conquer the planet in a bloody invasion? It begins... [Variety, sub. req'd.]
· SAG/AFTRA contract talks with producers will begin Monday. By Wednesday, we expect to find SAG negotiators curled up in the fetal position, murmuring about how they really didn't want a better deal anyway. [THR]
· So much for those crazy 20th/FBC swap rumors: Gary Newman and Dana Walden sign new contract to stay on as presidents of TCFTV. Well, maybe we shouldn't quite put the rumors to bed...they're all still in Murdoch's stable. [THR]
· Now that they've got Tom Hanks on board, Columbia announces that The Da Vinci Code will hit theaters on May 19th, 2006. Mark your calendars, when you buy them at the end of next year. [THR]