One studio in Hollywood, at least, may not think that this strike situation is really all that bad. A Defamer operative tells us there's a rumor floating around that since it struck its side-deal with the Writers Guild earlier this week, Tom Cruise's United Artists has been deluged with "2,500" scripts as idling agents frantically abandoned their Scrabulous games and retaliatory werewolf attacks to get their clients' projects in front of pretty much the only people who can get anything done at the moment. Is that figure merely the fantasy of some tracking board poster who decided to arbitrarily assign a numerical value to "a shitload"? Probably!

Harold Dieterle's restaurant Perilla opened earlier this week in the West Village, almost exactly a year after he was named Top Chef. When we checked it out last night, Ruth Reichl, the former Times dining critic and current Gourmet editor, had just vacated the premises. But there were still personages and signifiers ample enough to give a taste of what Perilla really is.