Bob Yari, the development baron-turned-indie mogul who co-produced Crash before losing a lawsuit to share the film's 2005 Best Picture Oscar, announced late Friday that he'd seek bankruptcy protection for his distribution company.

Clearly bored with the twins, absentee star Jennifer Lopez is set for a busy run of on-camera distractions in the months ahead. And perhaps needless to say after her '07 run of dodgy, self-produced dramas, the output to come promises a veritable bounty of romcoms playing to the constituency that will finally get J-Lo over that $100 million hump. Or maybe the $25 million hump — any hump, really, would likely satisfy producer Bob Yari, who's bankrolling The Governess this fall:

In what sadly may become a regular feature of our industry coverage here at Defamer, we feel compelled today to recap one of the ugliest weeks in recent memory among those toiling in the independent-film trenches. if you haven't been able to keep it all straight before now, please read on (and keep the liquor handy):

Still smarting from his inglorious Oscar Night '06 jilting at the hands of fork-tongued Crash co-producers Paul Haggis and Cathy Schulman, real estate magnante-cum-film industry dilettante Bob Yari has a whole new territory to divide and not quite conquer. It's called "Canada," reports Adam Dawtry, where the would-be mogul this week locked up distribution for his slate of around 10 middlebrow indies per year through 2010.

Today's NY Times updates us on the progress of the ongoing legal feud between producer Bob Yari, the Crash producer suing the Academy for denying him the opportunity to take the stage after the film's Best Picture win last year and bask in his share of the heavy-handed racism fable's Oscar glory by emotionally declaring, "Tonight, I won't need to drive my SUV into the side of a van full of illegal Chinese immigrants just to feel something," and the whole fucking system trying to keep renegade, studio-eschewing producers like him down, sharing with the world excerpts from an e-mail exchange between Yari's camp and a defiant Bruce Davis, executive director of AMPAS, who says that Yari can pry his next Governors Ball invite from his cold, dead hands:

He's the Crash producer still steaming over a credit dispute that cost him his moment of Oscar glory. She's the Crash producer who places her Best Picture statuette on the mantel, pretends its shiny, bald head is his clean-shaven pate, then loses hours screaming at it for her long overdue payday. Together, they're the entertainment industry's credit-and-payment disputin'est couple, Bob Yari and Cathy Schulman. The latest scene of Bob & Cathy: A Hollywood Love Story, in which the spatting former partners engage in a heated round of mutual invitation-withholding related to the premiere of The Illusionist, a film they worked on together at the time in their backstory before the lawsuits began, unfolds in today's Page Six