· Fox, CBS, and DirecTV hold on to the NFL for the insignificant sum of about $8 billion. In related news: Still no team in L.A., though the homeless guy down the street is fond of wearing an old Rams helmet. [THR]
· Carole Black will resign her post as president and CEO of Lifetime Entertainment in March. We can only imagine the personal toll wrought by nearly six years of anorexia, breast cancer, and Valerie Bertinelli movies. [THR]
· Clubhouse strikes outs, is sent to the showers, is indicted in the BALCO case, or any other baseball-related metaphor that indicates it's not on television anymore. [Variety, sub. req'd.]
· Reese Witherspoon's Type A Productions is developing Janet Evanovich's bounty hunter mystery novel One for the Money for Columbia. We hope the book's about an adorably feisty bounty hunter, because Witherspoon's really got the adorably feisty thing down. [Variety, sub. req'd.]
· Were you hoping that the Golden Globes would end in a showdown of True Believers? The Hollywood Foreign Press has already stymied any hopes for a Fahrenheit 9/11 vs. The Passion of the Christ throw-down. Documentaries aren't eligible for any awards, while movies about Jesus getting his ass kicked for two hours are eligible—but only if they're in English. Maybe Moore and Gibson will get drunk and wrestle instead. [THR]

With its heat sapped by an utter lack of starpower on the witness stand, The Hollywood Trial of the Century plods onward through a fog of procedural drudgery. Hasn't anyone told the court in Delaware that a good story needs compelling characters in conflict? Sample action from Monday's proceedings;

A reader at the LA.comfidential blog reports from Miramax's American Film Market party at Akwa. The Max might be lean and mean these days after laying off just about everyone whose name doesn't begin in "Wein" and end in "ein," but they know their core business is still sucking up to talent at parties and convincing them to work cheaply.

· Howard Keel, movie musical song-and-dance man and Dallas star, dies at age 85. If Jamie Foxx really wants an Oscar, maybe he should option the rights. [THR]
· George Clooney will star in and direct the Edward R. Murrow/Joe McCarthy showdown pic Goodnight. And Good Luck for his and Steven Soderbergh's Section 8 production company. Clooney also co-wrote the script and plans to be very hands-on at the craft service table when production begins. [Variety, sub. req'd.]
· Desperate Housewives keeps on bringing in larger ratings numbers; we suspect this streak is fueled by a weekly human sacrifice at Disney headquarters. Fox's beloved Arrested Development does just O.K., preventing everyone involved from getting too comfortable in their offices. [THR]
· Author Gabriel Garcia Marquez finally caves in after years of resisting movie offers, as New Line purchases rights to Love in the Time of Cholera. At least they didn't wait for him to die and buy off his relatives. [Variety, sub. req'd.]
· HBO and Alan Ball confirm that the upcoming 12-episode fifth season of Six Feet Under will be the last. Unless HBO throws a shitload of money at everyone to squeeze out one more season. Or spins off Nate. [THR]

Erstwhile superagent Mike Ovitz's testimony in The Hollywood Trial of the Century has provoked copy-friendly outrage within the highly-principled world of the talent representation community. Naturally, there's a delicate balance between "honesty" and an "extreme fear of defenestration."

· Proving the industry maxim that no number one film can go unsequelized, The Grudge 2 will become a reality. They've sign up the first pic's writer, Stephen Susco, to revisit the remake. [THR]
· Leonardo DiCaprio will produce/star in a thriller about mercenaries hired by governements to fight their wars. We imagine his preparation for the role will fall short of a quickie tour-of-duty "in the shit" of Falluja. Some people have no dedication to craft. [Variety, sub. req'd.]
· CBS does the utterly expected and picks up CSI: NY for 10 more episodes; Les Moonves seriously considers drafting Jerry Bruckheimer as his right-hand man in his plot to conquer the world. [Variety, sub. req'd.]
· Director Steven Soderbergh leads the charge against the excessive, ear-splitting decibels of movie theaters' "pre-show entertainment." They'd probably make more headway against in-theater noise pollution if they merely forced Michael Bay to retire. [THR]
· CBS dominates the Nielsens in the first night of November sweeps; The OC manages a decent opening despite Mischa Barton's ridiculous attempts to convey her character's inner struggle by shrieking like a wounded turkey. [THR]

Right on cue, here's the press release announcing the MPAA's legal offensive on people who would dare to view Maid in Manhattan without ponying up the Blockbuster rental fee. We'll spare you the pain of slogging through the entire document by noting that when such a statement begins with the title Studios to Begin Suing Illegal Film File Swappers: Governor, Legislators, Studio Executives, Union Leaders, Filmmakers and Others Back Movie Industry in Actions Against Traffickers, you're not going to anticipate a page-turner. However, we're grateful Dan Glickman cut off the list of supposed supporters for the litigation with "and Others," rather than running the full litany, which continued with "Our Newly-Elected President, the Troops in Iraq, Fans of Freedom, Mothers of Children Suffering from Pediatric AIDS, the ghost of Frank Sinatra, Anyone with a Conscience, the Cute Little Puppies That Asphyxiate Every Time You Initiate a Download, a Nondenominational Vision of God, and Anyone Who Doesn't Wish to Spend Eternity Licked by Hellflame." See, the new MPAA is really learning restraint!

· An NBC reality show/televised deathmatch will pit comedians against one another for a spot on SNL, with Lorne Michaels as the Trumpian arbiter. We're sure that the always-friendly, sharing SNL players will welcome their new, no-dues-paying colleague with open arms. [THR]
· ABC pairs up with Elton John for a single-camera, aging rock star sitcom. It looks like Sir Elton's legendary shopping habits have finally drained his bank account down to the very bottom. And hasn't anyone told ABC that divorcees are the new sitcom gays? Someone call Bette Midler, this one sounds like it could be a disaster all around. OK, we're done now with our disjointed, disbelieving critiques. [Variety, , sub. req'd.]
· The Sopranos' Jamie Lynn Discala prepares for her post-Meadow career by signing up with UPN for a series based on the website Vivianlives.com. With another Sopranos season left, it might be a little early to panic by trolling the internet for job possibilities. [THR]
· NBC and Fox News won the election night ratings wars (broadcast and cable, respectively, obvs), probably because they both called Ohio early and let half the country go to bed before 3 a.m. [THR]

· Kim Delaney is brought on to The O.C. for a five episode arc as an eyebrow-fetishist ex-flame of Peter Gallagher's Sandy Cohen character. [THR]
· The Agent Dance Mini: Bart Walker, head of ICM NY's Film division, is going to CAA and taking every indie director with any credibility with him. And, naturally, some that will sell out when the opportunity arises. [Variety, sub. req'd.]
· Writer Thomas Harris and producer Dino De Laurentiis decide to once again cannibalize the Hannibal Lecter story, picking director Peter Webber to direct Lecter pre-prequel Behind the Mask. Even Brett Ratner couldn't kill this franchise, hard as he tried. [Variety, sub. req'd.]
· Real life couple Rob Estes and Josie Bisset are cast in ABC Family movie Blended. The two will play single parents who get married in Las Vegas, merging their eight children. It's like Eight Is Enough or The Brady Bunch, only with washed up Melrose Place actors! [THR]
· Sherry Lansing's ditching Paramount, but not before getting sued by a disgruntled producer. [THR]
· Cuba Gooding Jr., Burt Reynolds, Angie Harmon and James Woods are set to star in End Game, an indie thriller about a presidential assassination. Wow, how did they get this together so quickly? Bush hasn't even made his acceptance speech yet... [THR]

Now that Sherry Lansing has done the trendy thing and announced her delayed resignation from Paramount, Viacom co-president Tom Freston finally has a chance to put his stamp on the underperforming studio and draw some blood in his intramural deathmatch with Les Moonves. But before Lansing's announcement, Freston was smacked down for criticizing Paramount:

· FX seems to be banking on a prolonged presence in Iraq, ordering on-the-front-lines war drama Over
There from Steven Bochco. [THR]
· Expensive NBC CGI disaster Father of the Pride is "temporarily" shelved for November sweeps, but the network promises unaired episodes "will be back" in December. Either that or Jeff Zucker will instead light two million dollars in cash on fire in front of NBC's offices in memory of each unseen show. Variety, sub. req'd.]

Michael Ovitz emerged from the final day of his Hollywood Trial of the Century testimony feeling "really good" that his five days of complaining about Disney's corporate culture, pining for his ruined relationship with Michael Eisner, and failed attempts at attorney mind-control helped to repair his damaged reputation in the entertainment industry. Really, he probably couldn't have done anything to further erode that reputation short of roaming the Delaware countryside to castrate every resident's first-born son and knock up their wives. Now that his testimonial obligations are over, the local authorities should probably escort Ovitz back to his private jet just to make sure he doesn't self-destructively try to undo any of the "progress" he made at the trial.

The LAT reports that Sherry Lansing, chairwoman of risk-averse remake factory Paramount Pictures, will step down after her contract expires at the end of next year. Like all studio lame ducks who want to watch every last contractual dollar transfer into their bank accounts, Lansing will hang around the lot long enough to help look for a successor. But it won't be so easy to fill the "pioneer" Lansing's coon-skin cap, as Columbia head Amy Pascal notes that "She's been a pioneer … making movies that nobody else would make. She always listened to her inner voice." These days that inner voice was telling the trailblazer to go around planting her flag in other people's old movies, like The Stepford Wives and The Manchurian Candidate. And maybe it's time for us to completely beat this metaphor into the ground by saying it's a good thing she's getting off the wagon train before the new corporate Injuns scalped her.

· Just in time for the election, DreamWorks buys the pitch Motorcade, about an assault on a president's um, motorcade on a visit to L.A. [Variety, sub. req'd.]
· It's official: divorcees are the new, bickering sitcom gays: CBS backs another divorce sitcom, this one from Will & Grace writer Kari Lizer. [THR]
· ABC orders a full season of Wife Swap, which they call "the unsung hero" their fall schedule. Destroying the remnants of the nuclear family and damaging children on national television has rarely been so heroic! [Variety,
sub. req'd.]
· Not even Halloween can stop the Desperate Housewives Nielsen juggernaut, as the show pulls its best ratings to date. Who knows how many children were lost because their parents let them trick-or-treat unchaperoned while they watched ABC mock their suburban existence? [THR]
· Paramount continues its noble resistance to original ideas, signing Gerard Depardieu to join Queen Latifah and LL Cool J (say what?) in the recycled British comedy The Last Holiday. [THR]

· The DreamWorks Animation IPO uses the success of Shark's Tale to fuel a Wall Street feeding frenzy (please excuse the self-conscious shark pun—at least we didn't repeat THR's use of "swimmingly"). CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg is now considering wallpapering the DreamWorks Ani offices with twenty dollar bills, while saving the Ben Franklins for the toilet paper rolls in the executive washroom. [THR]
· Highly respected, Pulitzer-winning novelist Michael Chabon continues to attract Hollywood's filthy lucre, signing on to write Snow and the Seven, a martial-arts reimagining of Snow White, for Disney. [THR]
· Fox puts all of its promotional eggs into The O.C.'s basket, hoping that they can move in and crush some of Jeff Zucker's weakened Thursday night You May Want To See This, If You Aren't Busy TV lineup. Failure is not an option, lest Fox fall back on its trademark thrown-together, brain damage inducing reality shows.[Variety, sub. req'd.]
· Hollywood Out of Ideas XIX: Paramount, Hollywood's home of lazy remake ideas, has Scott Rudin producing a new version of 50's schlock-horror pic The Blob, about a rampaging ball of jelly eats everything in its path. We're really dying to make a Harvey Weinstein (who is a fat guy!) joke here, but will take the high road and pass on the opportunity. (Harvey's fat! Like a blob!) [THR]

As the Hollywood Trial of the Century marches on with arguments about CAA's payments to Michael Ovitz while he flailed through his ill-conceived presidency at Disney, the LAT pauses to sketch a picture of the Hollywood Bizarro World that is the sleepy town of Georgetown, Delaware:

· NBC and ABC race to be the first to exploit 9/11 for shoddy, ratings-boosting miniseries. The early lead goes to NBC for invoking 80s nuclear holocaust series The Day After in its concept description. Sounds classy and sensitive to national suffering already! [THR]
· Revolution Studios, fearless promoter of mind-rotting cinema, will produce the romantic comedy Made in Italy, in which an American has to win over the crazy, ethnic-stereotyped family of her boyfriend. Not since My Big Fat Greek Wedding has a Mediterranean people had such an exciting opportunity to be portrayed as backwards and annoying by Hollywood. [THR]
· King of the Hill/Simpsons writer Rich Appel mines his own unhappy marital history for laughs, getting a pilot commitment from CBS for a divorce sitcom. Appel also gets in the quote of the day: "I would love to do a show that does for divorced America what Will & Grace did for gay America." We wish him good luck in his quest to make everyone think divorcees are incredibly tiresome and petty eunuchs. [Variety, sub. req'd.]
· Hey, kids, more Revolution Studios news! At least this time they're only expending their crap capital on a remake of the John Carpenter horror flick The Fog. They wouldn't want to throw away too much money on original crap. [THR]
· Fox's Nielsen master plan is falling into place, as they ride big World Series clinching game numbers into the rollout of their fall season. Also, LAX continues to bomb, but now in a fresh timeslot. They should really bring in Heather Locklear to save that show. [Variety, sub. req'd.]

In a bizarre, yet poignantly romantic, turn of events in the Hollywood Trial of the Century yesterday, Michael Ovitz lamented the disintegration of his very, very close friendship with Disney CEO Michael Eisner.

The L.A. Weekly's Nikki Finke runs Michael Ovitz's Hollywood Trial of the Century testimony through her own factchecking meatgrinder, illustrating that the former Ur-agent has some utterly unsurprising (but hilarious in scope) deficiencies in the truth-telling department:

Michael Ovitz took the stand in the Hollywood Trial of the Century yesterday, injecting some star power into proceedings that had been dominated by business academics bickering over the whether Ovitz had been overpaid or lawyers questioning the experts' qualifications. Would they finally get to hard-hitting cross-examinations about Ovitz's secret hooker discretionary fund, or tales of how CEO Michael Eisner and Ovitz clashed over whether to serve Chinese or Bolivian babies at the Disney executive dining room's monthly Eat an Orphan night? Well, not so much, as Ovitz griped about the company's unsatisfying atmosphere: