Trade Round-Up: Kong's Girlfriend To Chair The Spirit Awards
King Kong star Naomi Watts will serve as honorary chair of this year's Independent Spirit Awards, where up-and-comer Peter Jackson's intimate tale of the love between a struggling actress and a gorilla with a severe glandular disorder was curiously shut out. [Variety]
Saffron Burrows, Jada Pinkett Smith and Liv Tyler are in final negotiations to star in Reign O'er Me, the Adam Sandler 9/11 movie we still can't quite wrap our minds around. [THR]
NBC has posted the pilot episode of the Dick Wolf series Conviction to iTunes Store, where potential viewers can download it for free, then spend the two weeks until the show's premiere telling friends how totally awesome it is, thus making the series a huge hit for the struggling, technology-crazy network. [Variety]
Agents are livid about some new language in actors' pilot contracts, fearing that the networks will use their clients' in-character images to whore for Pepsi on cell-phones. [THR]
The American Cinema Editors reward Crash's editor for saving Paul Haggis' movie from becoming a movie-of-the-week on the Heavy-Handed Race Parable Network. [Variety]