♦ Michael Wolff's biography of Rupert Murdoch goes on sale tomorrow, as you probably know thanks to the torrent of coverage over the past couple of days. Among the juiciest bits: Murdoch despises Bill O'Reilly, his wife Wendi Deng occasionally reads his email, and he's fond of sleeping pills. [NYT, Gawker, Politico, NYO, Portfolio]
♦ The third quarter of 2008 was a punishing one for newspapers. Ad revenue plunged 18.11 percent, the steepest decline in four decades. [E&P]
♦ Tina Brown's pick for host of Meet the Press: Rachel Maddow. [TDB]
♦ Four Christmases was No. 1 at the box office over the weekend, racking up an estimated $31.7 million in ticket sales. [THR]

Whenever he's had a glaring problem in his business, Harvey Weinstein — legendary manipulator of the press — has always been a master at deflecting attention away: No Oscars recently? Just look at how much money the lowbrow genre films his brother Bob have been raking in! No big genre successes? Well, look at our home video business! The home video business is struggling? Well, we've got an Oscar film coming up! The cycle can be repeated over and over, but financial facts always trump spin. And today, the Weinstein Co. laid off 24 of its employees, 11% of its total staff, according to the New York Post, in what will only provide more chum in the water for those not-so-quietly rooting for the final downfall of the Weinsteins.The reason cited today was, of course, "the economy." But all of the bright spots the Weinsteins once pointed to at their company are dimming. The biggest potential break-out movie on this year's slate was Zack and Miri Make a Porno starring Seth Rogen and Elizabeth Banks. As a Kevin Smith film, it's done fine since opening over Halloween weekend, with just over $27 million at the box office. But that's nowhere near the kind of return they'll need to convince tight-fisted investors to pump more money into TWC. Their cash-generating Project Runway is tied up in a nasty law suit that will keep it from returning to the air any time soon. And the boring side of the business, the 70% stake in straight-to-video distribution arm Genius Products, is now literally a penny stock, closing on Friday at 4 cents per share, valuing the whole operation, which they once touted as a potential billion-dollar enterprise, at less than $3 million. The Weinsteins are running out of lifelines. But they still provide colorful stories. On Wednesday, some people at the Weinstein Co. were told to clean out their offices because a "special guest" would be coming through on Friday. Those same people learned this afternoon that it was just a ruse to speed their exit when they were told they were getting the ax.

The Post reports that Bob and Harvey Weinstein's film company announced plans to lay off 11 percent of its staff, or 24 people, at a company meeting moments ago. The news was apparently delivered shortly after 2 p.m. But the studio would like to make it clear that this does not mean that the Weinsteins are having any financial trouble, even if they have failed to come up with a hit in ages, longtime execs are fleeing, and the company embroiled in a messy lawsuit over Project Runway. "If this was a real financial emergency for the studio, I imagine the layoffs would be greater than 24 people," a source tells the paper. [NYP]

The trailer for the movie version of the hugely popular graphic novel by Alan Moore, The Watchmen, is out. Since 1986, various attempts have been made to turn it into a film— it'll be out for real next March. Of course, Moore won't be watching—he didn't want to be attached to a film adaptation and has told Entertainment Weekly that he wouldn't watch the movie should it happen—but it looks awesome. Click for pretty stills from the trailer.

When those photos of Isla Fisher dressed up in ridiculous outfits as shopaholic Becky Bloomwood started floating around early last summer, it didn't seem as if Jerry Bruckheimer, the producer of the Confessions of a Shopaholic movie, was taking much of a risk with his frothy, comic chick flick. How was he to know that just six months later, reckless spending and drowning in debt would be a horribly sore subject?

Our friends at Go Ape Shirts have a new Star Trek themed t-shirt by Ralph Webb. “Bar Trekkin’ is available in sizes Small to XXL for $18. It’s probably the only piece of Star Trek fashion which won’t have everyone making fun of you behind your back (because non-geeks can be cruel sometimes…)

If golddiggers of all persuasions are having a tougher time right now, that includes fictional ones like Janey Wilcox, the Victoria's Secret model whose pursuit of a very rich husband forms the story of Candace Bushnell's novel Trading Up. The book was in the process of being adapted into a Lifetime movie but suddenly, rues a network exec to the Times, "it was like the script had been written two years ago." Talking animals, however, are doing great: Beverly Hills Chihuahua has been killing it at the box office, which Hollywood studios will likely take as proof that audiences want anything but reality right now—as tempting as it might be to rush out films featuring villainous businessmen.

♦ Judy Miller is joining Fox News as a contributor. [WaPo]
♦ David Carr chats with lousy market prognosticator Jim Cramer, who concedes that it's "a completely humbling market," but won't apologize for suggesting everyone take their money out of the market. [NYT]
♦ Jeff Zucker says NBC will cut $500 million from its 2009 budget. [Reuters]
♦ Jeff Probst has a new show in the works: Live Like You're Dying will feature Probst taking a terminally-ill person on "the last adventure of their life." [EW]
♦ A report on the mood at the Frankfurt Book Fair. [NYO]
♦ Rick Yorn has left the the Hollywood management powerhouse the Firm. [Variety]
♦ Max Payne was the No. 1 movie at the box office this weekend, racking up $18 million in ticket sales. [LAT]

All those rumors that the Weinstein Company is in trouble? Not true, says Bob Weinstein, who took the stage yesterday at the "Media and Money" conference hosted by Dow Jones and Nielsen and reassured the crowd that the start-up studio was doing just fine. "We're not going anywhere—not willingly, at least," he joked, later adding that the company shouldn't have any problems remaining solvent: "We're fortified with enough cash to keep this business going." If this was just spin, props to Harvey for leaving it to his younger brother to mislead the crowd. Harvey was the one originally scheduled to give the talk, but bowed out at the last minute for "personal reasons."

The Jim Henson Co has begun to develop a puppet film noir detective comedy titled Happytime Murders. If we knew nothing else about this project, I would still spend $10 on a movie ticket. The story follows a puppet detective who is hired to solve a string of murders around a popular children’s television show called the Happytime Gang. The film will be populated with a mixture of human and puppet characters (to clarify, not “muppets”), and will be released under an alternative label “for content created specifically and exclusively for adult audiences.” Sounds promising. But here are two reasons why the film could suck:

Collider is reporting that Warner Bros is doing a test screening of Watchmen at the Regal Lloyd Center 10 Theater in Portland Oregon this Thursday, October 16th at 7:00pm. Apparently this is a “blind screening” so they are recruiting people who don’t know anything about the comic book world. So if you run into one of the recruiters, play dumb, and pretend to like Wild Hogs and Beverly Hills Chihuahua

"Want to go see Choke this weekend and have your name in Chuck's next book?" Um, as what? A snuff film victim? A gangbang participant? This is super-graphic Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk we're talking about. He's taking the grassroots (read: hopeless) approach to finding viewers for his new movie: "all you have to do is get as many people as you possibly can to go see Choke this weekend" and get your name in a future book. Why? Because a bunch of big movies are coming out at once, and they're desperate.

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, a romantic drama directed by Stephen Daldry and starring Kate Winslet and Ralph Fiennes. Weinstein had wanted to release the film before the end of year so it could be an Oscar contender, and Rudin claims Weinstein stopped at nothing to move up the film's release date, going as far as to harass producer Sydney Pollock on his deathbed and pressure the grieving widow of Anthony Minghella (another of the film's producers) to make it happen.

If your agent at William Morris isn't returning your calls today, don't be too concerned. It's "volunteer day" at the agency, which means the next season of Entourage may very well feature of scene of Ari Gold feeding homeless people in South Central. [Deadline Hollywood]

If someone at a film screening taps you a couple times on the shoulder asking you to move over so they can see, what do you do? If you're New York Post film critic Lou Lumenick, you haul off and hit them with your binder—and then realize that you just slugged Chicago Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert, according to Rush & Molloy. Ebert can't speak, as he's been dealing with throat and thyroid cancer for years, so that explains the shoulder-tapping. But there's really no good explanation for Lumenick's hitting:

Tony Ortega is editor-in-chief of the Village Voice. He's also the man who accidentally came across a big pile of Harvey Weinstein's trash on the street in Tribeca, papers he kindly shared with readers this week. Of course, this was the same week that a recording of a private conversation between Weinstein and uber-producer Joe Roth was publicly leaked and one in which Page Six revealed that a former employee of Weinstein's is planning to publish tell-all book about the movie mogul. But there's no connection whatsoever—at least if you buy Ortega's account of how he came across the documents.

Is someone is out to get Harvey Weinstein and his brother Bob? Yesterday Gawker posted an "exclusive" conversation between Weinstein and Joe Roth; today Page Six reveals it got the same tape and that a former Miramax employee "is writing an 'explosive' book about their management of Miramax, based on files and tapes compiled over a period of 15 years." The author of the book is anonymous, but Page Six misses what may be the clearest sign that whoever is behind the spectacle isn't playing with a full deck: "Many of the files and tapes we are working from were given to us by the late Stuart Meltzer, who worked directly for Bob as his assistant before he was killed in the World Trade Center attack in 2001. Stuart was extremely paranoid and saved and recorded everything." Except Stuart wasn't employed by Miramax. He was a 32-year-old energy broker at Cantor Fitzgerald when he died on Sept. 11. So that raises a big flag.

Oliver Stone's upcoming movie about the life of President George W. Bush, W., paints the awful man as a sniveling Daddy's Boy who was so brow-beaten and dismissed by his old man that his entire adult life has been dedicated to disproving the elder Bush's low opinion of him. However, Stone thinks this faithful accuracy will actually appeal to the Bush Clan and the handful of wing-nuts who still support them. "Stone, [the film's star Josh] Brolin and the filmmaking team believe they are crafting a biography so honest that loyal Republicans and the Bushes themselves might see it. Given Stone's filmmaking history, coupled with a sneak peek at an early 'W.' screenplay draft, that prediction looks like wishful thinking."

New York Times media reporter David Carr-a former crack enthusiast-takes a look at Gonzo, the new documentary about legendary drugs-and-freedom-loving journalist Hunter S. Thompson. "Few writers have commodified narcissism so completely - his participatory style of journalism became its own genre and gives the film its title - but still we are invited to sit in the dark of the theater and have a flashback about his flashbacks. When the film opens on July 4, why will people, as Thompson would say, buy the ticket, take the ride?"

Dan Klores is the smartest man in PR. That's because he's not in PR any more. He founded his eponymous agency, which made (and still makes) him a ton of money, and then decided, "You know what? Fuck this shit. I'm gonna make movies." Now he spends all his time making (actually good!) documentaries and hosting soirees for various power brokers, without ever having to deal with the actual PR industry much. And he's about to move further up the entertainment industry food chain, because HBO has signed him to direct a movie version of his Believe-it-or-not psycho documentary Crazy Love. This, I will watch.