Pity the Memoirs of a Geisha team. They expected to be celebrated for their decision to go with an all-Asian cast, a potentially risky move for a major Hollywood production, but instead find themselves the victims of the tricky cultural tensions between the Japanese and Chinese:

Actor Rob Schneider, who earlier this year established himself as Hollywood's foremost practitioner of the epistolary form with his infamous open letter to LAT columnist Patrick Goldstein, takes the occasion of a reference to his role in 50 First Dates in a NY Times editorial on recently deceased Pat Morita's career ("Watch Rob Schneider play Ula, a leering Hawaiian in the Adam Sandler movie ''50 First Dates,'' with a pidgin accent by way of Cheech and Chong, and you get the sense that Hollywood still believes that there is no ethnic caricature a white actor can't improve upon.") to break out his finest stationery and ply his craft in a letter to the Times. Schneider notes his half-Filipino heritage, diffusing the "condescending white actor" argument, then discusses the genesis of his character:

Around the Gawker water cooler a month or two ago — about the time Judy Miller was getting out of jail and barely, grudgingly talking to her Times colleagues about what got her there — we were discussing how David Carr, who we'd previously believed to be a media writer for the Times, an impression we gathered from little things like his weekly column called "Media," now seemed to write about anything he wanted for the paper. Michael Flatley's return? OK. Chris Noth's feelings about his Law & Order return? Sure. Indie rock in Atlanta? Go for it. And so, around that cooler, a nickname was bestowed: Mr. Run Amok, the equally uncontainable yin to Miller's sadly unfortunate yang. We had a brief chuckle, and then we forgot about it.

A number of readers e-mailed us yesterday to note Saw producer Gregg Hoffman's sudden death Sunday, and today the LAT (who profiled Hoffman and his partners a few weeks ago) has an obituary carrying the sad news:

You don't say? Because we thought the legendary director of such video game adaptation masterworks as House of the Dead, Alone in the Dark (featuring Tara Reid as a genius anthropologist), and BloodRayne was about to blow us all away by trying his hand at a lighthearted romantic comedy.

Most of the time we agree that celebrities are self-involved assholes, , that they typically treat reporter-types like shit, that they want the media's attention when it helps them but then, hypocritically, bitch about that attention when it's no longer useful. But every now and then we read an account from the red carpet, and we — at least for a moment — feel the celebs' pain. Blogger The Reeler tells a tale from last night's premiere for the latest incarnation of The Producers:

Sony is hoping that the reported troubles (rewrites, reshoots, money) surrounding the Fun with Dick and Jane production won't show up on the screen, and that Jim Carrey's big holiday movie can help salvage a bomb-riddled year. Today's LAT feature on Dick and Jane answers its own question about how (besides Jim Carrey's usual GNP of Bolivia salary) a movie without CGI dinosaurs or simulated global cataclysms might balloon to a nine-figure budget:

The New York Times provides an excellent screenwriting lesson in its profile of Emilio Estevez's new Bobby Kennedy assassination movie Bobby, set entirely in the soon-to-be demolished Ambassador Hotel:

Once again (and this one really stings), our fancy Hollywood premiere invitation appears to have been pilfered by the mailman, as we spent a night on the couch ignoring some Barbara Walters special instead of enjoying the open-bar-and-finger-food largesse of the Brokeback Mountain premiere in Westwood. (Yes, the untold thousands of dollars in secret studio kickbacks we've been getting for chronicling every gay cowboy-related sound-bite of the past six or so months are great, but sometimes it's nice not to feel like a discarded whore, you know?) Luckily, a Defamer operative took copious mental notes on the festivities, sharing this quite detailed report with us and somehow reducing the pain of not greedily devouring free crab cakes in the general vicinity of Lupe Ontiveros:

We are on record as being, to our occasional embarrassment, tremendous Woody Allen fans, and, as such, we found it impossible to turn down a proffered invitation to schlep to Lincoln Center last night for not only a screening of his forthcoming project, Match Point, but also a pre-screening Q&A with the Woodman himself. This was particularly exciting for us because, while our parents once bumped into Woody and his child bride in a hotel in Venice, where our mother is convinced she delivered a charming witticism to him in the hotel's lobby, we've never actually seen the man except on film. We were curious to see the movie, and we were equally curious to see him in person.

Please excuse us if this is common knowledge that we're only stumbling upon now in our morning stupor, but we had absolutely no idea that notoriously, er, intense superproducer Joel Silver invented (or helped invent) Ultimate Frisbee, the sport that launched a thousand bong hits. But being the Hollywood animal that he is, Silver's baring his producing fangs to the director of a documentary about the game:

By now, we hope that most people realize that this year's box office "slump" was mostly caused by a flood of shitty movies. (We hate to keep bringin up Stealth, but hey, we didn't greenlight Short Circuit On A Plane.) Previously, the LAT has made a fun little game of making execs admit to their 2005 bombs, but today they try to pick the brains of some disaffected moviegoers, and in their effort seem to have stumbled across Hollywood's Chosen One:

With NBC Universal still circling an acquisition of DreamWorks, today's NY Times wonders (with accompanying Photoshop whimsy, at left—why have we never put Jeffrey Katzenberg in a red hoodie? Well played, NYT.) what exactly the media behemoth will be getting from The 'Works' primary asset, Steven Spielberg, who has a well-established history of spreading his movie-making love all over town. Rob Marshall, director of the Spielberg-produced Memoirs of a Geisha, chooses to celebrate the value of The Maestro's artistry rather than poke the "million-pound gorilla" with a stick:

With Cinderella Man so spectacularly shitting the box office bed in its ill-fated summer-event-movie release (remember the refund offer?), Universal now hopes that a limited rerelease (in densely Academy-vote populate LA and NY) and an early December appearance on DVD will mitigate the damage by helping the movie pick up some awards nominations. More interesting, however, is the way the studio is selling the Oscar-trolling reincarnation:

Last week Ken Tucker announced he's quitting his job as New York's movie critic to return to Entertainment Weekly and the comfortable bosom of Time Inc. This week, Adam Moss & Co. make a quick recovery by snapping up Slate critic David Edelstein to fill Tucker's still-warm aisle seat.

In the dark places in our soul that we don't like to talk about at cocktail parties, we were secretly terrified that we might never again experience the unbridled, brain-smoothing joy of Chris Tucker shouting high-pitched expletives at a seemingly uncomprehending Jackie Chan while shit blows up around them. It seems that New Line is finally ready to shovel cash onto the raging fire of another Rush Hour sequel, locking up Tucker, Chan, screenwriter Jeff Nathanson, and, most crucially, visionary fauxteur Brett Ratner. Variety has the staggering details:

With Brokeback Mountain's premiere just around the corner, its producers are delighted that co-stars Heath Ledger and Michelle Williams fell in love on the set, providing a welcome counterpoint to all the "gay cowboy movie" talk. To thank his leading man, producer James Schamus kick-starts Ledger's public re-heteroization:

Oh, Alessandra. We do so admire your ability to come up with new and creative factual inaccuracies week in and week out. Like in Friday's review of NBC's Poseidon Adventure remake, in which you wrote:

The founders of Twisted Pictures took a big chance in pouring their own money into financing the first Saw movie, a gamble they won, and won big. But unlike other Hollywood speculators who strike it rich by falling ass-backwards into a leprechaun's pot and then claim that their asses are equipped with finely calibrated gold-detectors, they're staying humble about their success:

The countdown has begun to Brokeback Mountain, the movie that will test the outer man-on-man tolerance limits of even the most admiring of Ang Lee's straight, male cineaste fanbase. Much is made in the current Newsweek of the, for lack of a better term, balls-out content of the Jake Gyllenhaal-Heath Ledger gay cowboy love story, and how that will play in Gay Pride Parade-free Peoria. But nothing would divert the filmmakers from the message this story set out to tell, not even in its marketing: