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In today's The NY Times, Sharon Waxman looks at why Fox and Sony "pulled the plug" on Used Guys, the long-gestating comedy starring Jim Carrey, Ben Stiller, and directed by Meet the Parents/Austin Powers'Jay Roach, a seemingly sure-thing project featuring all the rubber-faced and/or hyperbolically neurotic comedy antics the moviegoing public craves, and which was ready to roll into production about a month from now. The short answer, "How can our poor little studios hope to make any money when the budget is $112 million and the greedy, extortionist talent is sucking up all the back-end profit?" seems deeply unsatisfying to Roach, whose entire worldview was thrown into turmoil and meaninglessness by the abrupt plug-pulling. Reports the Times:

"How could this happen? I keep asking myself that every second," said Mr. Roach, from the Cannes Film Festival, where he was showing another film for Fox, "Borat." "I'm trying to learn from this, and figure: how did we get this far out of sync?" [...]

When various issues — including delays in the shooting of "A Night at the Museum" which required Mr. Stiller's presence — pushed the budget higher, to $112 million, Fox pressed for cuts, asking the principals to suspend their take of gross revenues until the studio would recoup its costs. Mr. Roach said he gave up two percentage points of his deal, but he could not reasonably ask the stars for further cuts.

"They'd made tremendous discounts on a big-budget movie. This is not some labor-of-love thing," he said. "This film is dead in our center strike zone."

At a meeting on May 8 with Tom Rothman and Jim Gianopulos, the Fox studio's co-chairmen, Mr. Roach recalled, he pleaded for the movie. "I said, Please give me a chance. Let me do this, I'm in the business of making money for studios.'"

It's easy to see why Roach is so frustrated: He gives and gives (and, refreshingly, even makes no pretense about doing it for the love of watching Carrey and Stiller advance the form through being hit in the genitals by objects that should generally not come into contact with the genitals at a high rate of speed), and still the bottom-line-obsessed, risk-averse studios won't let him ply his trade of accepting a big pile of money to churn out a product that will make a division of a multimedia conglomerate even bigger piles of money. Who can't sympathize when a man is being denied his inalienable Hollywood right to sell out?