The Reader may still require a month's worth of round-the-clock editing under armed guard, but the Kate Winslet drama has at last yielded a trailer to remind us that there is an Oscar-hopeful under all those layers of Harvey Weinstein-Scott Rudin ego-crisis. And like last week's not-embarrassing Valkyrie teaser, the preview assures us that its prestige creds are in place, thus setting the table for the next phase of its awards campaign, "Getting Winslet to Say Anything Positive About It At All." Though the Rudin loyalist spends most of her time in a new interview with Vanity Fair promoting her and Leonardo DiCaprio's Revolutionary Road, there is the modest admission that "you bet your fucking ass" she wants an Oscar this year:

The Daily News combed through Lehman Brothers' bankruptcy filing to see who was left holding the bag. Among the parties owed cash: the Ritz Carlton on Central Park South ($239,671), Equinox gyms ($354,653), Charge & Ride car service ($41,374), and a fire extinguisher repairman in Brooklyn. [NYDN]

A year ago, Viacom sued YouTube for one billion dollars, claiming YouTube was not blocking uploads of copyrighted Viacom material from Comedy Central, Nickelodeon, MTV, VH1 and others. Today, MySpace will join YouTube in running ads targeted to Viacom-owned clips, instead of deleting them. Auditude, a Palo Alto startup, provides the software that identifies Viacom-owned content. Remember when musicians believed all advertising was evil? Now, I'm looking forward to seeing a Big & Rich ad targeted against another Big & Rich ad, overlaid by another Big & Rich ad for a Big & Rich ad I haven't seen yet. Collect them all!

Now that modelheiress Lydia Hearst has quit her Pulitzer-worthy Page Six magazine column in an "I didn't write that" snafu concerning alleged criticism of her family's publishing empire, they've been on the hunt for a new—and hopefully equally vapid—kid kolumnist. Who's been chosen to top Lydia's "I just bought banana-scented scratch-and-sniff wallpaper for my kitchen" musings? Liam McMullan, boy-about-town and 20-year-old son society photog Patrick. He's apparently the godson of Village Voice gossip Michael Musto, who broke the news.Kid's supposed to be a nice guy, relatively, and he's already had an Observer profile—as he told them, “I’ve always wanted to do lots of things, like direct movies, and write things, and make art, all different types." (He then took a hit of weed.) Suggestion: Liam, just continue these stream-of-consciousness observations for Page Six and you'll do just fine:

Matt Drudge has lost it. Utterly, totally lost it. This is his headline, right now, the day before the elections. It links to a YouTube clip of Barack Obama scratching his face with his index and, yes, middle fingers. Just like he did to Hillary Clinton, once! Don't you remember? Now we know who the real Barack Obama is: he is a secret asshole. This is really the best anyone can do, because it turns out all those other secret things he is aren't true. Like, for example, Bill Ayers, radical domestic terrorist and respected professor, did not write Barack Obama's book. This was revealed when California businessman Robert Fox and his Republican Congressman brother-in-law paid an Oxford don to investigate similarities between Dreams From My Father and Ayers' Fugitive Days. The charges were "laughably unsubstantiated." But of course Obama is still a secret Muslim foreigner, right? He was totally born in Indonesia, right? Ha, the Director of Hawaii's Department of Health has actually bothered to respond to the lunatics. You may be shocked to learn that Barack Obama's birth certificate is real. So really all that's left is to basically accuse Obama of everything in the world, all at once, like in this 100% real robocall now being made in Pennsylvania.

High on Pot: Roger Ebert's been on such a unhinged roll as of late (slamming Ben Lyons, posting creationism parodies, and handing out eight-minute reviews) that one may wonder, what's been eating him? Now, Ebert has taken to his blog with the answer: it's not what's eating him, it's what he's eating, and what's he's eating comes from "The Pot," a rice cooker that is the recipient of Ebert's new, 2590-word essay. "We try. We learn. We experiment. When we have absorbed the principle of the Pot, we will find ourselves day-dreaming new combinations." [Roger Ebert]

Is Facebook making money? Losing money? One would think that investing $240 million in a company entitles one to answers to such questions. But one would be wrong. Microsoft executives are so in the dark about the social network's finances that they have taken to quizzing reporters for information, we hear. (Photoillustration by Richard Blakeley)

Looks like Sarah "Pit Bull" Palin is just like your supernice Midwestern neighbor who remains polite and doodly-dorable on the phone, even when annoying telemarketers or French president Nicolas Sarkozy calls. The Canadian radio show duo that prank-called her told ABC how they did it. It was duh-easy, just like they taught you in Reporting 101: they "simply began at the bottom of her staff and worked [their] way up."Where to start? Alaska, of course: "'We started by calling the governor's office in Alaska, and after that, we were transferred from one person to another. It took us about four days. We spoke to about a dozen people,' Audette told ABCNews." Once they got her on the phone, they figured that the jig would be up soon enough:

All those hours you put in at the gym so that people would want to have sex with you? They were wasted! Well, if you're a woman, anyway. Of the 7,000 American women who participated in a university study, the fat ones were more likely to have had sex than those with a BMI of less than 25, who were maybe too busy with pilates and calorie counting to pick up men. [Telegraph]

Pity the poor Microsoft employees in charge of protecting Windows from third-party apps with security holes. The only code they can fix is Microsoft's. But as John Markoff reports this morning, Microsoft's boldest move to protect Windows Vista users totally backfired:

Strauss Zelnick is the former CEO of BMG Entertainment and now an investor in media companies such as Take-Two, which produces the Grand Theft Auto videogame series. Now he's a magazine cover model, too! Following up on his recent appearance in an ad campaign for Portfolio, Zelnick is featured on the cover of the November issue of Men's Fitness. There's even a video on the magazine's site in which he talks about how important fitness is to him and about how fond he is of low-fat, low-carb protein drinks. But maybe he should be focusing more attention on his work rather than, say, whey shakes? As the Times puts it, "With Take-Two's stock down nearly 34 percent in the last year, investors may be hoping he'll find a way to bulk up the share price as well as his biceps." [Dealbook]

The only words you'll hear more than "It's your fault" today at Weinstein Company HQ: "It could have been worse," the unofficial new TWC battle cry after Zack and Miri Make a Porno opened over the weekend to a disappointing $10.7 million. Indeed, it probably will be worse — Universal and Lionsgate accused the Weinsteins of inflating their gross by as much as a million dollars, and just for fun, another potential lawsuit threatens the brothers' follow-up this week. So who is to blame, anyway, and what's next?As director Kevin Smith told the LA Times today, "If [Zack and Miri] dies at the box office, I don't think we'll see another porn-related comedy for a long time." We have a better idea: Make all the porn comedies you want, just don't release them on Halloween behind a campaign featuring sanitized TV spots and stick figures of Seth Rogen and Elizabeth Banks. While the latter star still remains a relatively unknown box-office quanity, Rogen has done nothing but open one R-rated comedy after another since last year. Zack and Miri, not so much: It's Rogen's worst opening by far, collecting less than a third of Knocked Up's $30.7 million draw in May '07 and contorting his agent into insisting Rogen doesn't need fellow UTA-er Judd Apatow behind him — as with Knocked Up, Superbad and Pineapple Express — to deliver a hit. Smith, meanwhile, probably won't even beat his opening for Clerks 2, triggering critics to ask how much demand — if any — remains for his digressive brand of raunch. But don't take our word for it: He anticipated it himself, pushing the script for his terrorism drama Red State during the press rounds for Zack and Miri. The Weinsteins didn't want it then and definitely won't take it now; their parting ways with the filmmaker (for now) has less to do with taste than insolvency, particularly with the backlog of films piling up next to the mop in their utility closet. It was fun while it lasted. Except the Jersey Girl part, of course, but they're over it.

The slow-motion crash of Tesla Motors continues. Last week, an insider revealed the electric-car maker, once the best hope of Silicon Valley's nascent clean-transportation industry, had only $9 million in the bank. Now, Elon Musk, the investor who recently deposed the company's CEO, claims the company has commitments for another $40 million in financing from some of its current investors, a group which includes Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin and former eBay president Jeff Skoll. But that money is debt, not equity.Current Tesla shareholders have 30 days to choose, through a process known as a rights offering, whether to fund the debt, which is convertible, at a later round of financing, to shares. Tesla thereby avoids setting a new, presumably lower valuation for the company — almost a certainty if it had issued new shares, given Tesla's straitened financial condition. But the reality remains: Having raised $146 million in venture capital and tens of millions of dollars more from customers putting down deposits on the $109,000 Roadster, Tesla is now sinking into debt. In January, it may obtain a $200 million loan guarantee from the Department of Energy — meaning that it will be borrowing more cash. $9 million in the bank now, with $240 million in debt to come: Tesla will soon resemble, in miniature, the stumbling Detroit giants it hoped to overturn.

This election year has proved a boon for the chattering class of political pundits, but there are few on cable news who can break things down as well (or as loudly) as comedian Chris Rock. After making a memorable appearance on Letterman in September to rebut Bill Clinton ("Hillary lost!"), Rock showed up at a Barack Obama rally in Tampa over the weekend, and it wasn't to promote Madagascar 2. While joking that he took his children trick-or-treating Friday at John McCain's many houses, Rock critiqued the Republican candidate's own wife-swapping, $100 million bailout of yore. "You want somebody who can relate to what you have to say," Rock continued. "Like if I have problems getting laid, I wouldn't call Brad Pitt 'cause he wouldn't know what I was talking about!" Clip above.

Roll Call reports: "The juror who was dismissed from the criminal trial of Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) to attend the funeral of her father in California admitted Monday that her father had not died, and that she went to California to attend a horse race." Everything about the Ted Stevens trial was and is hilarious. [Roll Call]

Scott Moore, the head of Yahoo Media Group, is leaving the company, reports BoomTown's Kara Swisher. A bad sign for the company: Moore ran some of Yahoo's most successful operations, including its news, finance, and sports websites. Why is Moore leaving now, having survived most of Yahoo's annus horribilis with his charm unruffled? The first conclusion I'll jump to: Talks with Time Warner to sell AOL to Yahoo are advancing, and Moore does not like his position in the merged entity. Update: Swisher writes: "Dead wrong guess as usual. Talks are slower than ever. He had the top job over Bill Wilson." Well, why didn't you say so in the first place, Kara?

♦ Present at Bette Midler's Hulaween benefit gala for the New York Restoration project: Suze Orman (dressed as big pile of money, left), André Leon Talley, Gloria Estefan, Gloria Gaynor, Donna Karan, Kathy Griffin, Michael Kors, Pink, Jimmy Buffett, John McEnroe and Patty Smyth, Ray Kelly, and Cindy Adams. [PMc, Wireimage, NYO]

Let's check in with famous and successful media critic Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post. What is Mr. Kurtz writing about today? The Monday after John McCain's much-discussed appearance on Saturday Night Live, his second of the general election campaign and coming just weeks after his running mate Sarah Palin's well-publicized cameo, Kurtz's column is, of course, about how Obama is on TV all the time, and all the television talk shows are In The Tank for Barack Obama.

Sometimes it's fascinating to just sit back and watch an ad campaign get progressively farther and farther away from any intelligible sales pitch, as the ad masterminds behind it become more and more convinced that they are artists, damn it. Wrangler somehow got itself tangled up with French admen for its truly vapid "We Are Animals" campaign, currently underway. First those guys made some existentialist tripe about life and death to sell Wranglers, for chrissake. But at least that had some "concept" behind it. Now they're just showing a crawling baby. That's it. LOLwhut:

McCain is expected to lose the election tomorrow, and the NYT's penultimate campaign article makes it sounds as if he's suffering a serious case of senioritis. He passes the time on his campaign bus with his young friends Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham, telling his favorite Henny Youngman "Take my wife, please" jokes. Who but our grandpa LOLs at borscht-belt comedians? And then there's his current regimen: "During the day he gets almost no exercise, eats the candy and junk food strewn all over his bus, and naps slumped in his seat in the curtained-off front section of his plane." Sounds exactly like Gramps—but don't be fooled by appearances. McCain is only executing the last-ditch secret "Sad Grandpa" plan he was supposedly joking about on SNL this weekend. After the jump, see the sketch.