• Joe Roth, the Hollywood producer and former head of Twentieth Century Fox and Walt Disney Studios, has put his four-bedroom apartment at One Beacon Court on the market. The 3,779-square-foot spread, which Roth purchased for $13 million in 2006, is currently listed for $21.7 million with Corcoran's Deborah Grubman and Carol Cohen. [Cityfile, Corcoran]
• In related news, Johnny Damon's former apartment at One Beacon Court is up for sale, too. The baseball player and his wife sold the 39th-floor pad three years ago for $8 million. Now the 2,100-square-foot apartment is back on the market, this time with a listing price of $8.9 million. [Cityfile, Sotheby's]

Drunk on power after slaying the HD-DVD dragon, Sony rolled into CES `08 with more confidence than Colin Farrell after a couple of key bumps. Eager to gloat but unwilling to pay huge appearance fees, they trotted out Leonard Maltin (the poor man's Roger Ebert) and Dean Devlin (the homeless man's Jerry Bruckheimer) to shill discuss the impact that Blu-Ray will have on the filmmaking process. The two spent a few minutes lamenting the demise of the in-theater viewing experience before launching into orgiastic praise of all things Blu-Ray. After explaining that "home video is no longer an ancillary market, now it's a PRIMARY market", Dean Devlin dropped a radioactive bomb on us.

Today's NY Times looks at the behind-the-scenes battle for control of the creative soul of psychedelic Beatles musical Across the Universe unfolding between Revolution Studios head Joe Roth and director Julie Taymor, in which Roth's helpful trimming of about a half hour from her cut and a subsequent test screening of his shorter version has a "helpless" Taymor threatening to take her name off the picture before it becomes a full-blown Rothian abomination. While Team Taymor carefully chose its words in responding to the Times' inquiry into the flap ("Sometimes at this stage of the Hollywood process differences of opinion arise, but in order to protect the film, I am not getting into details at this time."), Roth reminded everyone not to pay too much attention to the hysterical stage lady who can't take constructive criticism like a Mann:

If you've got a couple of minutes to spare before the end of your lunch hour, we recommend that you head over to the Revolution Studios online studio store and pick up some memorabilia, because it seems that anything bearing their logo is about to become a collector's item. The rumor on the street (and in the inboxes of just about every assistant in town) is that the Revolution is over (or, if you prefer a less martial wording, Revolution has stopped spinning), with chairman Joe Roth finishing off a few projects in development and/or throwing some in a cardboard box and carrying them over to Sony in the obligatory producing deal. As is the custom when a studio goes down, we must list a smattering of its most notable failures, so join us in fondly reminiscing about Tomcats, Christmas with the Kranks, Rent, Little Black Book, and the one that rivaled even the immortal Ishtar as a punchline while simultaneously crippling two acting careers, Gigli.

Revolution Studios head Joe Roth should know better than to bore people by describing his dreams, especially if the person he's boring is a columnist from the LAT and running a tape recorder: