By Steven Zeitchik

Maybe it’s because it takes us back to when a certain male-centric HBO Hollywood comedy shot at the offices of an entertainment trade we once worked for, but we’re always amused when a newsroom is invaded — um, graced — by a film crew.

There’s a certain irony, if not an outright culture clash, in seeing news reporters and film crews try to inhabit the same working space; both our camps, after all, have the irksome propensity to act like the fate of the universe depends on our getting our work done in exactly the right environment at exactly the right moment. And we can get uppity when our delicate habitat is disturbed.

Reactions from staff members in these situations tend to run the gamut. Some sit quietly doing their work. Others jostle for air time. But the most telling responses are from those who are annoyed by the presence of all the actors, grips and directors.

Apparently that annoyance is growing visible at the journalistic confines of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, where Fox 2000 and David Frankel are shooting the bad-dog tale “Marley and Me.” (Frankel, who directed “The Devil Wears Prada,” is practically an honorary reporter for all the time he spends in editorial offices; guess when you grow up as the son of a New York Times legend you don’t escape so easily).

Frankel chose to shoot at the newspaper’s actual offices, instead of recreating a newsroom on-set, because he wanted more authenticity, and his choice has apparently engendered some authentic grumbling from staff, who say, essentially, that a daily newsroom is a place where stories are broken, sources are forged, truths are revealed (and columnists write about their dogs). It’s not a place where actors prance and directors give orders.

Of course you can’t really fault the production. Fox/Frankel admirably realized that when you try to make a newsroom seem real on a Hollywood lot you end up with a really bad simulation –that is, you end up with “Superman Returns.” When you shoot in an actual newsroom, on the other hand, you get the rhythms of the place, the colors of the walls, the smell of the newsprint, the temperaments of the staff.

And with Owen Wilson playing the lead, you capture exactly the look of most newspaper columnists.

By Randee Dawn

Though it’s been heavily rumored that New Line’s “Sex and the City” movie will pop up at Cannes, there’s at least one person who’s not so sure it’s a great idea: Sarah Jessica Parker.

The star and producer of the New Line film is concerned that if the movie premiered there, about 1-2 weeks before it opened both around the world and in the U.S, the hush-hush ending could slip out. “That’s a big deal for those women and men who really stuck with us, who don’t want to know the ending. It’s not life altering. It won’t help humankind. But it for those fans who don’t want to know things early.”

There’s been much speculation around the shoot, which has drawn crowds and tabloid reporters scouring for clues on what happens to the fearsome foursome. The production has tried to keep a lid on plot details, even moving shoots indoors and shifting schedules to keep away prying eyes; in fact, the publication of a tie-in book is already being held back until the movie’s relese so that it doesn’t give away the ending.

The actress went on to say that as much as she really would love to be at the fest, she was “really conflicted” about what an early screening would mean.

Parker does allow that if the film doesn’t go to Cannes, there will be multiple premieres in various European cities. And back home, naturally New York will get its own glittering gala. “That,” she promises, “would happen either way.”

By Steven Zeitchik

Film buffs and bizzers like to complain about the endless retreads and remakes in Hollywood, and rightly so. The arguments that have been made against them for years — Why can’t you show more imagination? Why give consumers more reason to think the bigscreen is a medium of the past? Why give “The Mod Squad” any more fame than it’s already gotten? — finally seem to be coming to pass with the biggest question, a Niemoeller-esque ‘What will studios do when there are no TV shows and old movies to remake? (The answer, apparently, is remake 80’s toy franchises).

When it comes to sci-fi, though, this ransacking urge isn’t necessarily a bad thing. From Asimov to “The Twilight Zone” to Philip K. Dick, many of the great concepts were actually born a half-century ago, and when you try to force new ones you can end up with B-movie confusion or, worse, Doug Liman”s “Jumper.” Better to stick to the oldies but just do them better.

So we were glad to hear screenwriter Michael Brandt — the talented scribe behind Relativity’s recent “3:10 to Yuma” remake and the upcoming Jolie-on-a-hot-Viper-roof tentpole “Wanted”–say basically the same thing when we talked to him Monday.

Brandt (with longtime collaborator Derek Hass) is not only producing and rewriting a script for “Countdown,” the movie take on Richard Matheson’s classic “Twilight Zone” episode “Death Ship,” for Summit; as we report in today’s paper, he’ll make his directorial debut with it. (For those not packing their Tivo with Sci-Fi Channel marathons, “Death Ship” is the one about three astronauts who land on a planet, only to discover a crashed ship that looks very much like theirs, with corpses that look very much like them, leaving them to figure out if they’re dead and hallucinating the whole thing or someone is just playing a very cruel trick.) The remake is already getting fans and genre experts buzzing about how old “TZ” episodes are ripe remake terrain.

Apparently Brandt and his fellow producers had talked to a number of big-name helmers about directing “Countdown,” but the directors wanted to do one of two things — take the picture in a narrow genre direction and turn it into, say, a Saw-like horror movie, or, the opposite, they were too faithful to the original.

So instead Brandt will direct the movie in the way he imagines it — as a story that keeps the philosophical core of the original episode but eliminates some of the more earnest sci-fi trappings that characterized the genre at its beginnings.

“The updates that are successful — not just of this but of any of the great 1950s sci-fi concepts — are those that take the idea and bring a modern sensibility to it,” Brandt told Risky Biz. “When it misses sometimes, it’s because people get caught up in the story from start to finish.” In other words, older futurism works better when it’s looking ahead.

By Steven Zeitchik

Yes, it’s still March. It can turn cold and rainy at a moment’s notice. You’re worried about your NCAA bracket. Cannes seems far away; in fact, the resolution of the Obama-Clinton faceoff seems closer.

But the producers, directors, cineastes and everyone else who has a stake or say in Cannes are putting together the lineup, and from the sound of things it’s going to continue and even double down on a trend of the past few years.

Of course there’ll be the usual mix of auteurs (Michael Winterbottom, Steven Soderbergh, Charlie Kaufman), as well as the films undoubtedly representing their countries and their countries alone. And the event-movies will be well-represented; apparently you don’t put together an international film festival anymore without an “Indiana Jones” or a “Sex and the City” or a big animated movie (last year it was “Bee Season;” this year get ready for another DreamWorks Animation moneymaker, “Kung Fu Panda.”)

But more notable is how complicatedly international many of the films will likely be, turning it into a stew, a melting pot, other dubious food metaphors. The last few years have of course brought small glimpses of this. Two years ago it was the cast, setting and locations of “Babel” scattered across several continents. Last year it was “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” offering the quelle scandal moment: a Brooklyn-born director (named Schnabs, no less) directing a French-language, French-acted, French-feeling movie that was the talk of the fest.

Those were nice forays, but not entirely the norm. This year, however, intermingling internationalism could break out so heavily Kofi Annan may as well be heading the jury (no offense, Sean Penn).

As our story in Friday’s paper notes, gone are the days when every country had a movie that was distinctly its own, replaced by a culture that deliberately and sometimes even bewilderingly cuts across backgrounds and borders (kind of like Obama himself, come to think of it).

You want American directors with foreign languages and locations? Steven Soderbergh (two Che movies) Woody Allen (one Spain movie) and Michael Winterbottom (an Italy adventure) have enough of that to go around.

You want non-Americans shooting in the U.S. with Hollywood stars? Vietnamese director Anh Hung Tran (”I Come with the Rain”), Brazillian Fernando Meirelles (”Blindness”) and “Babel” scribe Guillermo Ariaga (”The Burning Plain”) can give you what you’re looking for (though we’re hearing it’s not certain that “Plain” will be ready in time).

The uncategorizable Wim Wenders, who always likes mixing countries and cultures in his movies as though they were a good mojito, has “The Palermo Shooting” — the German helmer’s pic is set in Italy and shot with Italian money, features German characters and stars U.S. actors. And that’s not even getting into the cross-border productions — an Israeli film like “Waltz with Bashir” (France, Germany and Israel) or the Danish thriller “Flame and Citron” (Denmark, Germany, Czech Republic).

We’ll see what all this polyglot commingling will bring (we imagine artistry in some cases and an unholy mess in others). Still, there’s something refreshing about the change. A specialty exec told us recently that Academy members should drop the native-country requirements for foreign movies at the Oscars because financing, talent and productions come from too many parts of the world for so narrow a set of criteria. Looks like the French are already ahead of them.

By Steven Zeitchik

EXCLUSIVE: Leonardo Dicaprio and Ridley Scott are teaming up for a dark thriller called “The Low Dwellers.” Check out our full story here.

They’ll both produce via their respective banners, with DiCaprio attached to star and Scott looking to direct. Like “No Country,” it’s an ’80s revenge story set in the heartland, and like “The History of Violence,” it’s a testosterone-fueled tale about a man haunted by his past. Relativity Media has picked up the project, winning a bidding war over Warners and Sony.

The juiciest part: the script is a spec from a twentysomething named Brad Ingelsby who’s never stepped foot in Hollywood and is still working as an insurance agent in Pennsylvania even as we type. We knew we were in the wrong line of work.

By Steven Zeitchik

Indie film on television always seems like it should work. Many festival films, after all, feel “too small” — acquisition execs’ code phrase for a movie with limited breakout potential — so wouldn’t they be better off on a screen of matching size?

Yet we’ve often found the Sundance Channel and IFC a curiously unsatisfying experience.  Hardcore fans of docus, world cinema, American indies and underground film –and we count ourselves among them — can’t find the forgotten classic they’d be happy to stumble upon, but are also equally at a loss to make a discovery. Nothing against both networks, whose intentions we’re sure are as noble as a bride on her honeymoon (and whose original series, by the way, do hit on the refreshing with some regularity). But there’s something about the way films are organized and shown on these nets that seems designed to keep even interested fans away.

Which is why it doesn’t seem as a shock, or the end of the world, that the Sundance Channel, may be for sale to a big corporate bidder, according to Wall Street analyst provocateur Rich Greenfield. Remember, 90% of the net is currently owned by those bastions of street cred, NBC and CBS, at the moment anyway. And the 10% that is owned by Robert Redford never seems able to effectively translate the quirky and edgy aspects of its namesake festival to a different medium.

Okay, so it was a little jarring to see phrases like “We do not have specific revenues and EBITDA” and “pay out building free cash flow in the form of dividends/share repurchase” associated with the institution that gave us “Sex, Lies and Videotape.” But if Time Warner or Viacom — who with nets like HBO and MTV have in the past been able to take the outre and cleverly wrap it into the mainstream, want to give it a whirl — then godspeed.

Of course this is an analyst we’re talking about; who knows how much of this is rooted in entertainment reality anyway? It’s not like he’s been making the scene at the Eccles for the last decade. I mean, we thought we should give him the benefit of the doubt. Then we read this sentence. “We believe both Time Warner and Viacom could have interest in Sundance to leverage their growing specialty film divisions (Warner Independent Pictures and Paramount Vantage, respectively.” WIP, growing? Yeah, our thoughts exactly.

By Steven Zeitchik

The Anthony Minghella passing is sad for all the reasons it’s usually sad when a talent is taken too early. It’s especially poignant given that the writer-director was in the middle of seemingly a half dozen projects –his own, as well as a number he was producing with longtime Mirage partner Sydney Pollack.

At 54, the British filmmaker known for his adaptations of literary material was, in many respects, in the prime of his career.

Minghella and the Weinstein Co. recently concluded a deal with HBO and the BBC to air the adaptation of the “The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency” franchise as a movie and TV series. The filmmaker also was attached to write and direct the adaptation of Liz Jensen’s psychological thriller “The Ninth Life of Louis Drax” for TWC, and also at TWC had served as a producer on Scott Rudin’s German-novel adaptation “The Reader.” due out in the fall.

Minghella was also developing a project called “The Resurrectionist” at Miramax, based on a well-reviewed novel with elements of the thriller and the fantasy.

The BBC will air the two-hour pilot of “Detective” next week, but HBO said it still plans to air the movie as a kickoff to the series next year. The status of the series remains up in the air; it’s not clear how many scripts have already been completed and if the project could or would go on without Minghella. (Features scribe Richard Curtis was co-writing.)

Minghella had, though, written but not yet cast or shot his segment of “New York, I Love You,” the follow-up to the set of romantic vignettes “Paris, je t’aime” that was set to shoot in NY in April, as Gregg Goldstein reports. A rep for producers said they were waiting for Minghella’s family to weigh in but hoped to forge on with a new director. Miramax, meanwhile, said it was too early to determine whether it would set up “The Resurrectionist” with someone else.

All day, stories poured in from people who had worked with Minghella on set and on tour, in the editing room and at press conferences. Nearly every story pointed to a gentle soul who didn’t see immense skill and vision as antithetical to being a mensch. As Daniel Battsek told us, Minghella was “as kind and generous as he was talented.”

Of course the talent was a pretty big part of it too. Minghella’s current projects were
just the latest in a career marked by bringing literary works to the screen in a way that balanced his own vision with fidelity to the source material. Janet Maslin wrote on “The English Patient” that the helmer “manages to be astonishingly faithful to the spirit of this exotic material while giving it more shape and explicitness, virtually reinventing it from the ground up,” and that seems to sum it up nicely.

Among Minghella’s last public appearances was a BAFTA event last week in London where he noted his experience in Hollywood. “The thing that is most notably different about working in the U.S. is that if you are embraced then you are completely accepted,” he said. “It was quite giddy (after “English Patient”) because you’d be there and Meryl Streep would come on the phone and you’d think it was your mother pretending to be Meryl Streep or maybe your sister, but it was really Meryl Streep.”

He also said, with rather acute self-awareness, “I had never thought of myself as a director and found out that I was not. I am a writer who was able to direct the films that I write.” Today we think of him as someone who shared all that with us, albeit for not nearly long enough.

By Steven Zeitchik

Debating whether regional film critics matter recalls Milton Berle’s old line abut Zsa Zsa Gabor’s sixth husband: We know what to do, we just don’t know how to make it interesting.

That said, it was hard not to take note as Defamer reported Monday that Newsday had let a number of film critics go.

That diminishes the overall number of critics by, well, some number that’s pretty shocking. Coupled with the recent full-time departures of reviewers like Terry Lawson at the Detroit Free Press, Eleanor Ringel Gillespie at the Atlanta Journal Constitution and Phoebe Flowers at the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel — not to mention old warhorses like the New York Daily News’ Jack Matthews — and the Ex-Critics Club is starting to get more crowded than the psychologist’s office outside Bear Stearns.

It has always struck us as upside-down that smaller papers were axing their critics while the big ones kept them on. We get that all film isn’t local, but why would you get rid of the very people who could distinguish your paper’s coverage at the local level, providing not only a more useful service to readers but maybe even to local theaters and businesses?

Over drinks with a few publicists last week who know about such things, they echoed our query. The obvious national critics– Scott, Dargis, Turan — can still open a movie, they said, but regional critics like Chris Vognar in Dallas still mattered when it came to boxoffice and further press, and the species’ ongoing disappearance was as baffling as it was unfortunate. That’s why studios — unlike many of the papers — haven’t given up and continue to send filmmakers like Ben Affleck to tour midsize cities instead of just throwing a press day and hoping that writers turn up.

Still, much of the carping seems misplaced, or at least overly crotchety. We know better than to argue that, say, the reviewers at Moviez4Ever have replaced the venerable print critic. But a glance at Rotten Tomatoes shows that the typical release is still getting at least fifty or sixty reviews. Some of them are lazy, but some are pointed and funny. Even the terse bottom lines that so irk traditionalists are sometimes worth 600 smudgy words (Jam! Movies on “Never Back Down”: “Mr. Miyagi would not be pleased.”)

And a number of generational upstarts — check out pretty much the whole A.V. Club at the Onion or the work of Risky Biz friend Geoff Berkshire at Metromix — may just end up filling the gap left by Matthews and his ilk. Zsa Zsa, don’t give up. Husband No. 7 is on the way. And boy can he write.