As The Slump deepens, theaters are trying desperation tactics (discounts, lame "all Smiths and Herbies get in free!" promotions, etc etc) to lure the public's indifferent heinies into their stadium seats. The WSJ reports that theater chain AMC is so exasperated with the underperformance of the once Oscar-baiting, now bonafide flop Cinderella Man that they're offering a refund to anyone who doesn't like the treacly cinematic stylings of Ron Howard:

Whenever we see a story in the trades announcing yet another studio remake of an old movie or TV show, we tend to derisively lead our link to the item with "Hollywood Out of Ideas" (a tic which is, we suppose, nothing if not an indictment of our own lack of creativity). We apologize for our wrongheaded, sky-is-falling declaration of an idea deficit in the entertainment industry, for Patrick Goldstein's column in today's LAT demonstrates that there is, if anything, a surplus of fresh ideas in Hollywood. Unfortunately, much of the innovation happening around the studios is being directed to film executives' cutting-edge rationalizations for shitty remakes:

· It's technically not another remake for The New Paramount™, but doing a prequel to The Untouchables doesn't exactly reek of original thought, either. We really hope they find a way to work in a flashback of young Capone bashing one of his third-grade classmates with a youth-sized baseball bat. [Variety]
· The Supreme Court upholds an FCC ruling that cable companies don't have to open up their high-speed internet infrastructure to competitors. Congratulations to you if you've made it all the way to this sentence, for you're now officially bored. [THR]
· Financial considerations force NBC and Imagine's to "rethink" their 9/11 miniseries, as the partners cite the difficulty of making the project less expensive, but more exploitative. [Variety]
· The Miss America pageant just wants you to know that its move to CMT is not nearly as desperate as it seems, OK? It's, um, strategic! [THR]
· Disney and Dolby apply incredible 3-D technology to the goal of making animated chickens seem more lifelike. [Variety]

· The Supreme Court bitch-slaps Grokster and file-sharing services back down to a lower court, ruling that the companies can be held liable for their users' acts of copyright infringement. Stay tuned for the press release in which MPAA pirate hunter emeritus Jack Valenti compares file-swapping to the trading of molested children on the Russian black market. [Variety]
· Hollywood Out of Ideas XXXIV: The New Paramount relapses into its remaking ways, planning a new version of 1973's Donald-Sutherland-humping-Julie-Christie classic Don't Look Now. [THR]
· Hollywood Out of Ideas XXXV: Warner Bros. and Jennifer Garner to remake the 2004 Japanese hit Be With You. You know, after she pawns the baby off on stay-at-home partner Ben Affleck. [Variety]
· Well, at least it's not a remake: Fox plans to bring video game Max Payne to your local multiplex. [THR]
· Tomorrow's snubs today: Paul Giamatti's soon-to-be acclaimed voice-work in the animated Amazing Screw-On Head to go criminally overlooked. [Variety]

· DVDs of TV shows did $2.8 million in sales in 2004; at least $2 billion of that came from viewers who don't realize that Friends and Seinfeld reruns play on free TV roughly fourteen times a day. [Variety]
· Casting directors overwhelmingly vote to join the Teamsters to give themselves extra leverage in their negotiations with movie and television producers. The funniest guy in each production office in Hollywood immediately begins telling the hilarious joke, "What did Jesus tell the newly-unionized casting director? Don't do anything until I get back." [THR]
· Vivaldi is the new poker: Indie production company Mechaniks puts a Vivaldi biopic into development, even though Columbia and Imagine have a similar project in their pipeline. [Variety]
· Hustle and Flow's writer/director Craig Brewer will reteam with H&F producing buddies John Singleton and Stephanie Allain and write/direct Black Snake Moan, the story of bluesman Blind Lemon Jefferson. Christina Ricci is already attached to the pic, with Samuel L. Jackson and—get ready for it—Justin Timberlake in talks to join. [THR]
· Carsey-Werner might be close to shuttering its television production studio, seriously imperiling our hopes for a That 70s Show/Cosby Show hybrid spin-off featuring Danny Masterson and Raven Simone. [Variety]

Nielsen Research, the fine company whose television ratings system lets you know that people are crazy for J. Peterman and Joey McIntyre stumbling through a Viennese waltz, have deployed new "local people meters," which have finally discovered something called "minority viewers":

· The MPAA recognizes longtime chief Jack Valenti by renaming its DC headquarters in his honor. Valenti celebrates the occasion in appropriate (and surprisingly touching) fashion, scrawling his name on the building's cornerstone in the blood of a freshly-slaughtered fourteen-year-old who'd illegally downloaded a bootlegged copy of Batman Begins. Valenti then hastily renamed the building the "Jack Valenti 'Take That, Pirate Motherfuckers' Centre at Respecting Copyrights Plaza," removed his shirt, and challenged all comers to a best-of-three-falls Ultimate Fighting bout. [THR]
· "Stringer fingers electronics slump"— We really want to imagine this headline's intentionally filthy, but are having a hard time imagining a body part that corresponds to "electronics slump." [Variety]
· Martha Stewart plays it coy, refuses to reveal her Apprentice dismissal catchphrase. Our vote goes to "Bite the doily," but she should feel free to invent a punctuating hand gesture. [THR]
· Fox reality incubus Mike Darnell takes American Idol to the next, logical step, planning a spin-off in which celebrities warble out-of-key karaoke songs for charity. [Variety]
· The Jeff Zucker suicide watch begins in earnest, as the tarnished NBC golden boy admits that his network took an even bigger pounding than expected following the upfronts. CBS rival Les Moonves buys his entire staff cupcakes to celebrate. [THR]

Now that Jennifer Aniston's (mostly) out of the picture and Brads Pitt and Grey have engineered the long-expected move of Pitt's Plan B production company to Grey's New Paramount™, the two pals can finally shrug off Aniston's icy stare and tell the world how they feel about each other:

· AMC and Loews agree to merge their movie theaterc chain to better compete with the larger Regal Entertainment, and hopefully gain enough influence to squeeze a bigger share of box office cash out of the studios. This, you may have guessed, is a slow news day. [Variety]
· Alyson Hannigan, Eddie Griffin, Fred Willard, and Jennifer Coolidge will star in an untitled Regency spoof of romantic comedies. Eddie Griffin (black) plays the father of Alyson Hannigan (white). This is all you need to know before you are crippled by the ensuing waves of hilarity. [THR]
· Ridley Scott will follow up the triumphant Kingdom of Heaven (you're only as good as your last bomb, right?) by directing/producing Shadow Divers, the story of a German U-boat found off the coast of New Jersey in 1991. [Variety]
· NASCAR helps Herbie: Fully Loaded feature the same kind of sponsor-driven sensory assault as a typical NASCAR race. [THR]
·Howard Stern will no longer spackle the hindquarters of Scores strippers with condiments on E!, and is now looking to take his cable show to another network. Spike TV preemptively starts training its editors in the fine art of pixilating breasts. [Variety]

· The WGA goes on the "warpath" to unionize reality TV writers, editors, and producers. The producers call the Guild's aggressive tactics "most unfortunate and unproductive, and even self-destructive." Let the rhetoric escalate, but please make sure that in the end, the people responsible for Dancing with the Stars are severely punished. [Variety]
· Movie theater giants AMC and Loews plan a merger, driving popcorn prices to $50 a bucket and prompting studios to consider bombing their multiplexes. [THR]
· Fox and Marvel sue over Sony and Revolution's Zoom, claiming that the Tim Allen comedy is "confusingly similar" to the X-Men franchise. A modest proposal to avoid the ugliness of litigation: Fox "reluctantly agrees" to send X3 director Brett Ratner to shepherd the rival production to success. [Variety]
· Adelphia founder/robber baron James Rigas is sentenced to 15 years in prison (and his son to 20) on bank fraud and conspiracy charges. We hate to make this all about us, but is our cable (or, God forbid, our internet access) going to go black? [THR]
· Producers Karen and Howard Baldwin obtain the rights to Rodney Dangerfield's life story from his widow and plan to develop a biopic. But get ready for a bummer: "...while he was making everyone forget their troubles by laughing at his, Rodney's own life was a heavy-hearted one." [Variety]

The LAT reports that the ratings-hobbled NBC has finished its advertising sales for the fall season, and after being forced to cut their rates by skeptical buyers, sold about $900 million less of their primetime inventory than last year. As if this news wasn't bad enough for NBC's Jeff Zucker, the beleaguered, fading golden boy received a swift kick in the "sweeps" from his fiercest rival's spit-shined wing-tips:

Even though Shane West's name turns up virtually every week in our PrivacyWatch feature (we'd just assumed he's a guy whose job is to eat lunch 4-7 times a day in the most conspicuous places possible), we're still sent scrambling for the IMDb every time his name hits our inbox. But now we feel like we're even worse at our jobs than we'd previously feared, as this West character is important enough to have a publicist (who shall remain unnamed) sending out "items" about his birthday bash (co-hosted with music manager Eric Podwell—and yes, we had to ask someone who he "is"), which attracted party barnacles like the Hilton sisters, Kato Kaelin, and JC Chasez [all spelling/grammar errors *sic*]:

· Unintentionally (we hope) hilarious quote of the morning: "'Anything where you have a dog in that superhero context, that's appealing on a global basis,' Barber said." Yes, this can mean only one thing: Underdog will finally become a live-action movie and attempt to slake the world's unquenchable thirst for canine superheroes. [Variety]
· Laurence Fishburne and Phillip Seymour Hoffman join the cast of Mission: Impossible 3, are contractually obligated to spend at least half an hour of their downtime each shooting day admiring Katie Holmes' huge engagement ring in front of members of the world press. [THR]
· Reflexive Self-Deprecation As Sad Truth-Telling Department: Woody Allen describes his role in his new movie: "I play a low-grade American entertainer, which is perfect for me because that's what I am." [Variety]
· ABC wins Sunday with Game 5 of the NBA Finals, more by default than by anyone's interest in the Spurs or Pistons. [THR]
· Trying to get in on some of the "there's nothing else on, so why don't we watch semi-famous people doing activities to which they're embarrassingly ill-suited" craze started by ABC's Dancing with the Stars, NBC preps I'm A Celebrity But I Want to be a Pop Star. Yes, really. [Variety]

· Batman Begins pulls in a tidy $15 million from its Wednesday debut, filling Hollywood with (probably misguided) hope that this weekend will finally break the 16 week losing streak vs, last year's box office over the same period. [Variety]
· Billy Bob Thornton will star in the film adaptation of the novel Peace Like a River for Warner Bros. Brad Pitt will produce for his Plan B, allowing for some interesting discussions about the little noise Angelina Jolie makes when your bite her ankle. [THR]
· Finding the internet gaming space as utterly befuddling as the improvised pseudo-philosophy of the movie's two sequels, Warner Bros. sells the rights to operate its online Matrix videogame to Sony. [Variety · Over 15 million people tuned in to watch Evander Holyfield get ousted from Dancing with the Stars, providing further evidence for our theory that it's the only show being broadcast this summer. [THR]
· Geoffrey Rush takes a top-secret role in Steven Spielberg's 1972 Munich Olympics project, which will probably feel like a vacation compared to the ongoing War of the Worlds publicity nightmare. [Variety]

· Tom Hanks' Playtone and Universal open wide for the rights to Deep Throat's life story—more fellatio puns TK as the development process, um, goes down? [Variety]
· Luke "Brother of the Butterscotch Stallion" Wilson is in talks to star in Ivan Reitman's Super Ex for Regency, about a man who breaks up with a superhero. Jokes about her "super PMS" will certainly be every bit as hilarious as we dare to hope. [THR]
· The new Coldplay album moves 737,000 copies in its first week, and the record industry is so happy it momentarily forgets to claim that they would've sold 4.3 billion more if not for file-sharing scofflaws. [Variety]
· Today, stuntpeople will repeatedly throw themselves down the Academy's front steps to demonstrate why they deserve an Oscar category. [THR]
· George Lucas tells network execs it's time to begin killing each other over the rights to broadcast the Star Wars franchise on television. Incredible bloodletting to immediately follow. [Variety]

A few readers have e-mailed to tell us about a bomb threat (did some lose a tough credit arbitration?) at the WGA a few minutes ago, and the building's been evacuated (see cameraphone pic at left, which just looks like two dudes hanging out). Nobody seems to have any details, but we'll update as they become available. In the meantime, avoid coffee shops along Fairfax, which will soon swell with even more unemployed writers than usual.

· Batman Begins opens today and will expand to 3,858 locations by Friday, an onslaught that Warner Bros. hopes can overcome some of the damage that Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise have done to its promotion. [Variety]
· The post-acquittal sleepover parties at the Ranch haven't even ended, and already the Jackson family is shopping a reality show. However, the famed bedroom will be closed to any camera operators over the age of 13. [THR]
· Vin Diesel is attached to star in Fox's adaptation of the videogame Hitman. Our sources reveal that Diesel's The Pacifier co-star Gary the Duck was approached about the role first, but declined because he's "too big for that Xbox shit." [Variety]
· Dancing with the Stars was the week's most-watched show, proving that ideas that seem like bad Mad TV parodies of reality television can be viable hits. [THR]
· Disney wants to cast the new, do-anything-for-a-buck version of Robert DeNiro as the husband of Meryl Streep's female president in Disney's descriptively-titled First Man. [Variety]

Skeletal Viacom executive presence Sumner Redstone (still kicking it in the boardroom, even at 117 years young!) sat down with the LAT to discuss the announced division of his unwieldy conglomerate, serve notice to any whippersnapper family members and/or aspiring galactic dictators who salivate over the thought of picking his old bones clean, and announce his plans for immortality.

The NYT reports that the braintrust behind Cinderella Man met on Tuesday to try and make some sense of the movie's failure at the box office. (Of course, Russell Crowe's ill-timed bludgeoning of a hotel clerk didn't help, but wasn't seen as the deal-breaker.) Let the wringing of the hands, the gnashing of the teeth, and the wailing to a Creator who's cruelly indifferent to period boxing movies commence!

Viacom's board has approved the long-discussed split of the behemoth conglomerate into two somewhat smaller behemoths. Former co-presidents Les Moonves and Tom Freston will each run their own fiefdom, with Moonves taking over CBS Corp. (CBS network, Paramount Television, radio holdings, etc), and Freston topping Viacom, Inc. (Paramount Pictures, MTV Networks, various cable channels, pimped rides), but we're not going to get into the boring details any more deeply than we already have. While Freston has suddenly found himself a lot less likely to be snuffed out with a Cribs-branded pillow by Moonves once his co-presidency became "inconvenient" to the generously-betoothed future galactic dictator's plans for world domination, it seems that Moonves suddenly finds his potential resources drastically reduced. Cutbacks in his army of 50-foot robots may be announced (barring a big boost from Wall Street), temporarily delaying his plans to deploy the army to kick off an invasion by kidnapping rival Jeff Zucker and submitting him to the public humiliation of a automaton-applied rusty trombone.