Just in case you missed the NYT's coverage of the New Gay Mafia (the comedy cartel that currently has the studios' collective testes in a vise and who playfully gives them a tickle whenever they've got a new movie idea), Vince Vaughn is finally a bonafide, eight-figure stah:

It's your dime-a-dozen Hollywood story, really: The hotshot screenwriter whose scripts sell for absurd, record-setting money in the piles-of-blow-as-big-as-Richard-Donner 80s pens a couple of bombs, disappears for the better part of a decade to battle the demons of success and its attendant guilt (Why, Lord, must I be so gifted and successful and throw hooker-laden parties at my bitchin' mansion while others toil in obscurity and poverty? Why why why? Hey, Ernesto, there's a fucking leaf in the hottub that's not going to strain itself, OK?), and then reemerges for a big I'm-just-so-misunderstood newspaper profile on the eve of the premiere of his most undiluted creative work at an international film festival. Given the above, we knew exactly where yesterday's LAT profile of Lethal Weapon action-nihilist Shane Black was going. This passage, however, stood out:

The WGA rank-and-file huddled in the Writers Guild Theater last night to receive wisdom from scribble-and-shoot, multihyphenate elders Barry Levinson, James L. Brooks, and Gary Ross, and heard what they already certainly knew—if the studios can't slap a catchy tagline on a one-sheet that features something engulfed in a ball of flames, you've got a one way ticket to Fox Searchlight country. A reader recaps last night's talk:

Freeze Dried Movies has an early review of Sony's Bewitched based on a test screening, precisely the kind of thing that gives studio execs screaming hemorrhoids as they anticipate bad buzz spreading from an unfinished movie:

The blog For No Good Reason imagines the rewrites that ultimately resulted in Sean Penn's opening scene* in The Interpreter, in which Penn's character pounds a drink in a bar and meaningfully drops his wedding ring in the empty glass, letting us all know that this is a Troubled Man with Emotional Baggage that will Come Into Play as the movie progresses. Also, he may Have A Buzz On:

Unfortunately, dreamy-eyed brother Jake was unavailable to offer his thoughts on America's role in Israeli-Palestinian relations, as he was busy walking his dog in Runyon Canyon.

A reader offers a very, er, specific preview of the upcoming Adam Sandler remake of The Longest Yard, admirably tossing out the useless parts and getting straight to the stuff we all want to hear about:

KABC-7's website reports a tragedy on the set of Fox 2000's remake of My Friend Flicka:

Bleep! Censoring Hollywood, a news special focused on companies that offer "sanitized" versions of Hollywood films to the red-state crowd, has Hollywood players doomsaying about the technology's sinister downside. From the LAT:

They're tough, they run studios, and, as far as anyone knows, they have vaginas: Meet Sony's Amy Pascal, Universal's Stacey Snider, Buena Vista's Nina Jacobson, and a host of Hollywood's other power girls, whom the NYT has dubbed "Hollywood's New Old Girls' Network" (the original working title,"Those Dingy Broads What Run The Studios," was later discarded for being too quaint). Strangely included in the Times' colorful, if wildly confounding, flowchart is producer Peter Guber(above, encircled and indicated by our subtle arrows), whom the Times is apparently depicting as the Tinseltown Zeus from whose head sprung forth this pantheon of filmmaking Athenas; somehow, this was deemed more palatable than illustrating the New Old Girls' Network's breech birth from Paramount trailblazer Sherry Lansing's womb.

LA Observed notices this curious correction buried deep in the bowels of today's LAT:

Breaking news from the Australian set of the new Superman movie: Virtually unknown Man of Steel Brandon Routh really fills out those blue tights!

It seems that it took months of gleeful flatulence and prominently-displayed boners on the Meet the Fockers set to get there, but the hard-working Dustin Hoffman finally may have gotten stone-faced party-pooper Robert De Niro to lighten up at a tribute to Hoffman's career:

Defamer apologizes for agreeing with yesterday's NYT headline for their profile of acclaimed actor Dustin Hoffman. Clearly, Hoffman is displaying an acceptable amount of effort late in his career, as evidenced in the DVD outtakes for Meet the Fockers:

If you were a little apprehensive when you heard that Robin Williams (he of the thousand characters so desperate to burst forth from his hyperactive, improvisational-genius brain that they're willing to disguise themselves as one of the four endlessly recycled, annoying entities that finally emerge from his mouth) was going to portray a retarded janitor in House of D, fear no more. He's not going to go for the Oscar-baiting approach taken by Sean Penn in I Am Sam or Juliette Lewis in The Other Sister. He's got his own ideas about how to do things, and they involve ridiculous make-up:

The Hollywoodland blog digs out its collection of "vintage" Premiere magazines (circa its 1987 launch, featuring Dragnet on the cover), which yields such time capsule delights as full-page ads for Ishtar (the go-to talk show monologue punchline of the late 80's) and Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II, as well as a development report on Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, which was finally dragged onto movie screens by George Clooney three years ago. More fun than five minutes in the closet with the Virgin Connie Swail!

[Ed.note—Welcome to the Monday Morning Q & A, in which we refuse to tax your brain, still cobwebby from the weekend's decadence, with tough questions.]

After the Fauxteur Fashion Minute reports of the last couple of days, it's so refreshing to see a director (one with actual talent and ideas!) taking an active interest in how his appearance might affect people's perceptions of his work. Todd Solondz, the proto-nerd behind Paindromes, frets in the LAT:

Earlier today, France continued its proud tradition of celebrating some of American cinema's most underappreciated icons by making Bruce Willis an officer in the Order of Arts and Letters, one of its highest honors in cultural achievement:

Courtesy of an interview with the NY Daily News to promote her new film, Palindromes, we're proud to present the Ellen Barkin Guide to Acting: