There are going to be a lot of people claiming victory in the decision Sunday to release “The Reader” this year after all. Did Harvey Weinstein win because he got the ‘08 date he wanted over the objections of Scott Rudin? Or did Rudin’s extracting post-production resources from TWC at least partly make up for it?

But the politics, colorful though they may be, actually pale compared to what’s now the more germane subject. How much will the movie, with the big Weinstein push, matter in the ‘08 awards race? Last year The Weinstein Company had “The Great Debaters” but it got in late (though did manage a Golden Globe best drama nom). Does “The Reader” finally mark the Weinstein’s true return to Oscarville?

If Winslet is as good as some have it, how will voters view her now that she has two contenders, and how will said movies affect her publicity campaign(s)?

And what will it be like for a field already rife with high-buzz, little-seen titles (”The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” and “Milk,” et al) to digest another one? The uncertainty about the release may be clearer, but little else is.

Paul Newman was a great actor and perhaps as great a man in his private and philanthropic life, which gives obit writers plenty of juicy material but tends to make reading too many of them sound repetitive.

Several of the obits did distinguish themselves, however. Writing in THR, Gregg Kilday and Duane Byrge tell not just of his career and philanthropy but self-deprecating humor on same, noting his quip that his salad dressing often outearns his movies.

The National Post of Canada had a brilliant recollection of how he was mystified by the moviemaking process — and why he liked car racing for the straightforwardness of the result. “As Newman confessed, he was still baffled by ‘what films end up decent’ and which don’t.

And a appreciation in Sports illustrated, of all places, <a href="http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2008/writers/richard_hoffer/09/27/newman.obit/
“>noted the futility of the effort of, well, trying to appreciate him. “Paul Newman lived long enough, and lived well enough, to confuse anybody who’d try for a final summation,” Richard Hoffer wrote.

We watched parts of two of his movies over the weekend, “The Hustler” and “Nobody’s Fool” just to remind ourselves of the scope and longevity of his career. We were reminded not just of the obvious virtues in his role but of the often contradictory ones: the brooding cool but likable accesibility, the beaten-down victim and the capable alpha male, the quicksilver charm and the uneasy crotchetiness.

He wasn’t playing for and against type; there was no type, just the putty-like shaping of talent to fit script and drama. Scorsese issued a <a href="http://www.abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/Movies/story?id=5904788&page=1
“>statement that noted “the emotional complexity Newman could conjure up and transmit through his acting in so many movies…his consummate sense of craft, so consummate that you didn’t see any sense of effort up there on the screen.” In that sense, at least, Newman can be summed up.

It’s been a Harvey Weinstein kind of week. First comes word that the indie mogul is in <a href="/2008/09/on-the-reader-a.html
“>a battle with Scott Rudin over whether to release “The Reader” in 2008 or 2009. And Thursday the long-percolating rumors that TWC was severing its ties with MGM bubbled up and over, with Harvey Inc. cutting short its service deal with the Century City studio about three months before the deal was to expire (a pair of TWC movies with November dates will be handled by MGM).

The timing couldn’t be better — for both parties. MGM is in a state of both growth and uncertainly, growth with its development slate under Mary Parent and uncertainty with a large production facility still waiting in the wings in these embattled Wall Street times. Distributing titles that came about when both it and the studio behind those titles were in very different places is hardly a priority now, nor should it be.

Meanwhile, TWC in a month is set to release what could be its biggest moneymaker in its 3+ years in business, “Zack and Miri Make a Porno,” and just in the nick of time, with the company in need of a hit and new buzz. Handling “Zack” — as well as most of the half dozen or so other titles that remain to be released this year — is the right move at so critical a moment.

Speaking of Weinstein movies that remain to be released this year — well, according to some, anyway — some new details are emerging in the Weinstein-Rudin showdown over “The Reader.”

One interesting bit — there are indications that the battle began not just a month or two ago but all the way back in January, when Rudin said emphatically he didn’t want the movie out this year and Harvey said let’s wait and see what we have (and then eventually decided to announce this fall they were aiming for December). That
the battle continues into October with no resolution in sight is a sign of the mens’ tenacity — and the low probability it will be resolved anytime soon.

The scrum isn’t the the only thing that’s been going on for a while. Kate Winslet, too, has apparently been saying for months she won’t do media for “The Reader” if it comes out in 2008. The actress, of course, not only has another awards contender in “Revolutionary Road,” she has an another awards contender directed by her husband in “Revolutionary Road.”

The buzz is also strong on that movie, and Winslet apparently is sticking to her position that, for her, she wants it to be about that period movie all the time. “Revolutionary Road” may be set in the 1950’s and “The Reader” in the 1940’s, but this is Weinstein Oscar drama like it’s 1999.

Those waiting for Bob Berney to clarify his plans — will he go distributor, producer, or some hybrid combining the two? — may soon have their answer. That’s because next week, on October 3, Picturehouse is officially and legally dissolved (the company had remained formally in business through the release of “The Women,” which has earned a respectable $20 million in two weeks of release). And that means next week is when all staffers who remained on, Berney included, can officially move on to other plans. Expect an announcement in the coming weeks.

Terrence Howard was one of the quiet pleasures of “Iron Man” last year as Tony Stark confidante James Rhodes, also known as the once-and-future War Machine.

The Iron Man sequel has most of its deals nearly wrapped, including Howard’s, who by all accounts will emerge from the shadows in the new pic as War Machine, the armored superhero more powerful than Iron Man.

But Howard, with a fledgling career as a musician (he released his first album, “Shine Through It,” this month) said he’s struggling to keep a more contemplative side of him going even as Hollywood continues to push him in another direction.

“There’s that other side of me that I always want to develop, but it’s hard with some of (these roles)” he told us at a table at a fundraiser for Frank Sinatra’s School of the Arts earlier in the week, adding that, “It’s happening again with ‘War Machine.’ That’s why I need music as a complement.”

(Minutes before he had basically said as much from the stage — he performed the title track from the new album — lyrics: “It’s been a long haul, the duty of us all, do what you’re supposed to do…all I want to be is a little bit more like me.”)

Howard, one of the more esoteric actors you’ll meet, prone to getting animated with little provocation about infinite space and the Fibonacci Sequence and the Golden Section (a line segmented in two according to the Golden Ratio, in case you were wondering), also said he jammed with Jeff Bridges almost every night on the set of Iron Man, the two of them trading licks in their trailers until deep into the night.

And indeed, Howard came off as having an intense, wide-eyed, almost Willy Wonka-ish fascination with music, first bidding on a meet-and-greet with Tony Bennett (he stopped only when, after an auctioneer prodded him to keep going, he quipped, “I don’t have my next movie”) and then, after a bluesy number performed by John Mayer, Howard hurried backstage, presumably to get some tips from the strummer on slide techniques, or maybe the Fibonacci Sequence.

The foreign-language Oscar can sometimes seem like an awards anomaly: it draws interest in inverse proportion to the number of people who see the the films.

While foreign-language films at the box office are — a small renaissance thanks to pics like “Tell No One,” “The Counterfeiters” and “La Misma Luna” notwithstanding — still at a low ebb, the cinephiles who follow the films are so intense and the field so diverse that the race has become one of the more suspenseful ones around. And ever since a mysterious panel of thirty was added a few years ago to whittle the submissions down to a shortlist, even the rules come with drama.

Two years ago the race offered the subplot of a critical darling, “The Lives of Others,” taking on, and beating, a $40 million-grosser and fanboy favorite, “Pan’s Labyrinth.” Last year the howls could be heard from Bucharest when “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days” was left off the shortlist.

This year’s shaping up to be no less rich. (For a growing list of the films that countries around the world are putting forth, see THR’s snazzy foreign-language Oscar page.)

For starters, there are two early favorites with some solid Oscar storylines.

One is “Waltz With Bashir,” the Israeli animated doc automatically submitted by the country after it took home six of the country’s Oscar awards, the Ophirs, Tuesday. (It’s perhaps the only film in history to potentially be eligible for foreign, animated, doc and picture). Ari Folman’s dreamlike meditation on war is topical and dripping with buzz after its strong showing in Cannes. And SPC, a distrib with a strong foreign-Oscar track record and a two-time defending winner in the category, is releasing. 

On the other hand, the prize has gone to a country outside Europe or North America exactly twice in the last twenty-two years.

Also a strong contender because of the Cannes talk — and with an SPC pedigree — is Laurent Cantet’s, “The Class,” a movie of social realism and moral complexity that’s captivated us pretty much since the moment we saw it. But the film won the Palme d’Or, which in the upside-down logic of the foreign race actually seems to work against a pic, as it did “4 Months” last year.

And then there are the other contenders– Jordan’s Sundance winner “Captain Abu Raed,” a battered-wife drama in an exotic setting (see under: the adjacent compelling image) that’s the country’s first-ever feature, and Iceland’s “White Night Wedding,” Baltasar Kormakur’s return to both his homeland and to dark relationship comedy (really dark, actually) after his genre turns in the U.S., not to mention pretty much whatever Italy winds up submitting.

Do voters reward an emerging country like Jordan? Rectify the Palme d’Or oversight of last year with a “Class” win? Where does a headline-grabbing pic like controversial Germany submission “Der Baader Meinhof Komplex” fit in? Does “Bashir” get a sympathy vote after Israel’s “The Band’s Visit” was jobbed — we mean disqualified — last year on language grounds? Or does it lose support because of its eligibility in other categories?

It’s September, and we’re excited about the foreign Oscar. Please don’t hold it against us.

A past king of the Oscars and last year’s king of the Oscars are in a heated skirmish over — what else — a potential Oscar movie.

Harvey Weinstein and Scott Rudin are jockeying over when to release the Rudin-produced “The Reader,” the postwar romantic drama that’s earned buzz both for itself and star Kate Winslet.

The movie rides into the fall on the wind of strong test screenings, which is propelling Weinstein’s desire to release the pic in December. The mogul also thinks it’s the proper moment for a movie that has the late Anthony Minghella and the late Sydney Pollack on as producers (Minghella actually helped develop the script).

But Rudin, already with two Oscar contenders this year (”Revolutionary Road” and “Doubt”) is said to be favoring an ‘09 release. “Road” also stars Winslet, which would mean if “The Reader” came out this year Rudin would not only compete against two of his other movies but Winslet would compete against herself too.

The battle is turning pitched, with lawyers apparently being called in to determine respective rights/wiggle room.

It’s not the first time that the two New York film lions have tussled — and on a Daldry movie, no less. On “The Hours” about six years ago, their disagreement spilled over to a number of areas, including but not limited to Nicole Kidman’s prosthetic nose. That pretty much worked out well in the end for everyone. — Kidman won an Oscar for best actress and Daldry was nominated for best director. (Poor Stephen Daldry — he’s worked often with Rudin but is also a friend of Weinstein’s — and is trying to prep a Broadway adaptation of the “Billy Elliot” film as all this is going on.)

Still, that doesn’t mean anyone is backing down. So who wins? A distributor tends to have the edge in these instances, some legal experts we talked to said. But the movie isn’t delivered yet, with Daldry still working on it in post. So chalk one up to an ‘09 release.

It should be noted that it’s not clear that vote-splitting is an issue with these movies — both “No Country” and “There Will Be Blood” garnered their share of Oscars last year, after all. What is clear is that one of the best dramas this Oscar season may unfold off the screen.

Watching the primetime Emmys Sunday night (in-between the Yankee Stadium farewell tearjerking; talk about some award-winning schmaltz), we had this thought: the Emmys have become the Oscars, at least in one very key respect — they focus on highly specialized programming that’s pretty beside-the-point for many American viewers.

Five or six years ago the winners in top categories like outstanding drama and comedy were mainstream hits such as “Everybody Loves Raymond,” “Friends” and “The West Wing.” This last few years has seen a significantly different story.

Like the best picture nominees at the Oscars this year — which earned the second-lowest box-office total in the modern era, this year saw the niche get ever narrower at the Emmys as well.

First off, there’s the fact that only one out of the five shows that won in the major show categories (outstanding comedy, outstanding miniseries, etc.) is even on network television. And best drama — for decades indistinguishable from the highest-rated series’ (in fact, besides wins for the network-popular “The Sopranos,” the award had never gone to a cable series) — saw fully half of its six nominations go to shows that rarely even draw two million viewers…and to a winner, “Mad Men,” that epitomizes the word niche.

That’s akin to the Oscar trend this year in which only one of the five best picture nominees earned more than $75 million.

Yes, all this is cyclical, and we’re sure in a year or two there will be some network blockbuster that walks off with a gang of Emmys. But it seems to us there’s a specific business reason why this is happening on the television side, and it’s not dissimilar to the comparable film phenomenon, namely — the growth of a side of the business devoted to creative excellence relatively free of corporate interference. Just as the film business had (at least until recently) the specialty-division boom, the basic-cable original-programming boom has pretty much followed the same path.

And that means that, for all the differences in the business models, it may also follow the same struggles. The emergence of this prestige-industrial complex has been great for creative output. But, as with the specialty-film business, we shouldn’t get carried away. The Emmys give the lie to a notion that’s gained currency since the  original programming explosion began about five years ago — that television has made quality programing democratic.

The argument goes that in an era when the price of a movie ticket has gotten too expensive and the films themselves have become too inward-looking, television offers accessible but artful programming to anyone with a basic-cable subscription. But the goings-on at the Nokia Theater Sunday highlight that it’s not that simple. These are still niche shows with niche audiences.

Sure, some of these programs have increased the the reach of pretty high-quality fare (it’s hard to imagine 15 million people watching a show like “the Sopranos” before, well, “The Sopranos”). But while the overall quality  gone up, the overall viewership hasn’t kept pace. All the people who love “Mad Men” of “The Wire” can’t explain away the fact that shows like this rarely break the one- or two-million viewer mark. And everyone who cites the guest roles and inside jokes of “30 Rock” still have no easy answer for the fact that it’s a minor hit even by NBC’s current modest standards.

Don’t get us wrong — we love that these shows exist. And the fact that they’re getting this kind of awards attention means that enough people are noticing that they could develop into blockbuster hits. It’s just that any argument about the mainstreaming of these shows is about as credible as saying that “There Will Be Blood” defines the pop-culture zeitgeist.

We’ve suffered though incessant mocking recently for our desire to see “Beverly Hills Chihuahua.” But the truth is that the movie works on several levels, including one that may even entertain adults. (And no, mind-altering drugs won’t be required.)

“Chihuahua” is mostly a talking-dogs movie, though adults, a rat and an iguana also make their voices heard. It hits the more obvious family-movie themes of honoring your heritage but, more interestingly, also treads a fine line between dark and light.

The storyline involves a pampered female named Chloe who ends up kidnapped while on a vacation in Mexico, then escapes with the help of an ex-cop searching for redemption. The two are then chased by the bad guy who in fact got the cop kicked off the force. It’s a solid cop drama — except that Chloe is a Chihuahua, the ex-cop is a German Shepherd (he used to be on the K-9 division), and the goon is a Doberman. Amazingly, it all works.  By the end, when the dog is asked back on the force, many members of the audience we spotted at the premiere, including Alyssa Milano and Placido Domingo, had tears in their eyes.

Disney faced some tough choices in making it. A few months ago, it tested a more adult version of the movie and a more kid friendly version of the movie. Both tested well, and the company tried to find a middle ground. Among the more adult scenes: Chloe, voiced by Drew Barrymore, is put into a dogfighting ring where she is to be shredded by the Doberman, as onlooking humans call for blood.

“‘How did we get that one through,’ you’re asking,” laughed director Raja Gosnell at the premiere. “We had to be very careful in the tone of it. Drew’s character is never afraid, she’s plucky the whole time; the music was never too scary;  we had bits of comedy whenever we could; and we never made the Doberman too ferocious. All those things working together keeps the audience on an even keel.”

Disney has actually come under fire for its dog movies in the past, notably for “101 Dalmatians” and “Eight Below,” with animal-rights orgs accusing them of encouraging parents to buy pets that only end up in shelters once the novelty wears off. This movie’s no different — there were actually about 20 protesters outside the El Capitan Theatre shouting things like “Adopt, don’t shop!” And last Friday, the California Animal Control Directors Association took  ads out in protest.

But these orgs may want to know that one of the movie’s messages is to take in strays, and it also generally advocates the benefits of pet adoption and obligations of pet ownership. Gosnell even used dogs from shelters for the movie – one of the lead Chihuahuas was found in a shelter one day away from being put to sleep – and the studio says it has found homes for them all.

Looks like the DreamWorks deal is finally done. The Reliance-funded company will have more than $1 billion to play with for its planned slate of as many as ten pics per year.

Next up are of course the distribution question (odds-on money is still on Universal, though don’t be surprised if another distrib steps up with a sweetened deal) and which staffers make the jump. Paramount on Friday eliminated some of the potential unpleasantness and bureaucracy by releasing any employee under contract.

The less-discussed but equally critical question is which projects live and die in the transition. Agents and producers have been on tenterhooks for months as they wait for the company’s status to be determined, and a lot of scripts and pitches have waited in limbo with them. Those agents, writers and producers are probably the happiest people (besides all the principles) that this is finally moving toward a conclusion.

An English-language remake of a foreign film is like a certain kind of cover band — capable of adding its own spin to the original but more likely reminding us why that original should have remained untouched.

Maybe it’s the possibility of this challenge that lately has been inspiring studios to grab remake rights like John McCain grabs economic soundbites. Movies from German Oscar-winner “The Lives of Others” to Michael Haeneke’s French-language media darling “Cache” are being developed as American tales (Haeneke’s “Funny Games” already got the remake treatment), with <a href="http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/content_display/news/e3i47f5cb6394a9cc0fdf31d40102fb6ad3
“>the latest example Mandate’s and Columbia’s devotion to a Danish filmmaker named Ole Bornedal, who’s been making genre-inflected arthouse films for over a decade (he was behind a pair of ’90’s movies called “Nightwatch,” both Danish and English versions; the latter starred Ewan McGregor and came from Dimension).

Mandate has picked up redo rights to Bornedal’s two most recent movies, an alien-classroom tale called “The Substitute,” which has been set up at Columbia and which Mandate will develop as part of its Sam Raimi Ghost House label, and “Just Another Love Story,” a tale of a photographer posing as the boyfriend of a woman who has amnesia until the woman’s actual boyfriend turns up with revenge on his mind. That last one drew some nice attention at Sundance this past year; along with a Russian-language pic called “Mermaid,” it was of the few foreign titles to land on American execs’ radars.

Still, as promising as Bornedal’s work is, the companies will have their work cut out for them. Most American remakes face a choice not easily resolved: hew too closely to the original and you show why the sensibility doesn’t work in another setting (Cameron Crowe’s “Vanilla Sky,” a too-literal recapturing of Alejandro Amenabar’s excellent “Abre Los Ojos,” is Exhibit A). But try to reinvent too much and you lose what made the original work in the first place. Fans of “Cache” have been wondering how exactly Universal/Imagine will relocate that story to the U.S. and thus lose the Algerian subtexts; it’s like making “Platoon” without the Vietnam War.

There’s a reason foreign movies are more in vogue than ever with studios now (even though they’re less in vogue than ever with actual audiences): because in a world where development execs want to convince nervous bosses that their films will turn out just fine, what better reference point than a an entire movie (even if the new project will look nothing like the original). It’s a classic pitch-meeting move, and dilemma: it helps get the project greenlit faster even if it also makes the actual execution of that project more difficult.

Genre films may be the exception to all this, which is why we hold out more hope for the Bornedal pics. Murders, chases and mysteries tend to migrate more easily across national film cultures, and the combination of an arthouse or foreign sensibility with the post-lingual appeal of a pulse-stoppper is a potent one (Nimrod Antal, director of a riveting Hungarian-language genre-ish movie called “Kontroll” a few years ago, made the transition look easy when he directed the Screen Gems mote-thriller “Vacancy”).

You might even say that American takes on foreign-language genre movies is like the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups of development projects — it combines the twin goodness of auteur street cred with commercial sensibilities. Other types of remakes can be a sticky mess. But a chocolatey snack appeals no matter where you are in the world.

How loudly will the credit crunch reverberate back to the film business? Pretty loud, we think, and in ways that many of us can’t imagine yet. But then again, the closest we got to an MBA was Tivo-ing the Nightly Business Report two years ago.

Execs at the upper echelons of Goldman Sachs, on the other hand, know of what they speak. Which is why the sobering words of several of the bank’s managing directors at a roundtable event we attended Thursday about the credit markets landed so resoundingly.

Speaking of corporations’ general ability to get money, Matt DeFusco noted that we faced a much longer-term problem that some might realize. And “when the markets do reopen, it will be a very high quality bond” that banks are looking for/demanding. “It will be a different world from the one that was around just before this summer.”

Of course most studios say they don’t worry about that because the money they’ve already locked up now is ironclad. Or is it?

There’s reason to think the credit facilities that are financing studio or producer slates now may not last the current shakeout. Said GS’s Dennis Coleman. “What we can expect is that banks take a look at their total exposure,” he said. “In some cases theyre going to shrink their exposure and in the case of more distressed institutions they’re going to drop.”

Studio execs have said they think that no matter what happens to any bank, any shortfall will be made up. But experts aren’t so sure. “If you have a $100 million facility covered by five banks and one of the banks is going under, the company is out $20 million,” Coleman said. “It’s not the other banks’ responsibility to lend another $20 million.”