David Chase, the creator of the landmark HBO series The Sopranos, has cut a deal to return to the cab;e network with a series about the history of the American film industry. The show, Ribbon of Dreams--the title comes from a line of Orson Welles's, who once used it as a definition of what a movie is--will begin in 1913 and, borrowing a gimmick from the HBO series Rome, chart history as seen through the eyes of a pair of fictitious characters, "one a cowboy with some violence in his past, the other a mechanical engineer", and their own offspring. The characters will be introduced as working for pioneering director D. W. Griffith; as the series progresses through the course of the twentieth century and up to the present day, there are plans to work in such figures as John Wayne, John Ford, Bette Davis, and Raoul Walsh. Brad Grey, who served as executive producer of The Sopranos and is now CEO of Paramount Pictures, will executive produce Ribbon of Dreams as well.

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If you think this economy is causing problems for you, shed a tear for Steven Spielberg. As Kim Masters reports, DreamWorks, the film company that Spielberg co-founded in the '90s with Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen, "sold itself to Paramount in 2006 for about $1.6 billion, but the relationship with Paramount chief Brad Grey quickly soured. When contracts allowed it, DreamWorks partner David Geffen stepped out and stepped down. Spielberg and CEO Stacey Snider also left, planning to raise their own money and distribute their films through Universal. That's the studio that Spielberg has always considered his home. (He kept his offices there even after his company sold itself to Paramount.)" At the time, nobody thought that Spielberg would either be begging for pennies or sweating to close a movie deal anytime soon. But then the bottom fell out of the economy, and DreamWorks started ceding to Paramount its right to participate in the production of some hotly anticipated projects that it had developed, treating them as so many sandbags that needed to be tossed over the side. Of course, Spielberg has never lacked for a full plate, but at the moment he's been focused on Lincoln, the planned biopic starring Liam Neeson and written by Tony Kushner. Part of the idea behind the movie was to have it ready for release this year, as part of the celebration of Abe's 200th birthday, and Spielberg was hoping to begin shooting in a few weeks. But he was also hoping that he'd be able to raise the money. When he and DreamWorks found that tough sledding, they asked Universal, which was expected to ultimately distribute Lincoln, to chip in with financing. When Universal proved cool to that, DreamWorks entered into tentative, secret talks with Disney, talks that became a lot less tentative when it turned out that they weren't all that secret. When Universal, which thought it had an exclusive offer from DreamWorks, found out about the Disney negotiations, the studio pitched a fit and, in what Masters calls "an embarrassment that stunned Hollywood", told the aging golden boy and his company to go screw, "pushing DreamWorks into a hasty distribution deal with Disney—a deal less favorable, in certain respects, than the one that had been contemplated at Universal."

Lincoln is now in limbo, along with a few other DreamWorks projects (including Peter Jackson's The Lovely Bones) that the studio doesn't want to relinquish its rights to but can't afford to fund or buy outright. Spielberg is hoping that Paramount will foot the bill on Lincoln--Masters notes that the decision will be made by "Brad Grey—the man the DreamWorks team treated for a long time as a mortal enemy."

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Hollywood private investigator Anthony Pellicano has been found guilty of 77 out of 78 charges including racketeering, racketeering conspiracy, wire fraud, and identity theft. (He was acquitted of a single count of unauthorized computer access. He still has a racketeering-related charge yet to be decided.) The case attracted much in show business circle because of the high-profile nature of some of Pellicano's clients, and also some of his victims. Among those who hired him included Brad Grey of Paramount Pictures and Michael Ovitz. Pellicano's downfall began with Ovitz hired him to "handle" a reporter named Anita Busch, who contacted the FBI after she "walked out to her Audi outside her home to find a dead fish under a pan, a hole in the windshield, and a note saying 'STOP.'"

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Over the years, whenever one of the long lulls between seasons of The Sopranos would finally draw to a close, creator David Chase would emerge from the back room of the Bada Bing and entertain a few questions about the upcoming episodes. After jotting down a few of his substance-free replies, one enterprising reporter or another would ask whether or not this was the end of The Sopranos, for real this time. At which point Chase would make it perfectly clear that what he really wanted to do was direct. Direct movies.

This comment was usually accompanied by some remarks about the base nature of the television medium, how impossible it was to do good work in it, and how movies were really where it was at. Remarks which left us fans of the series dumbfounded. Had Chase no inkling that The Sopranos was head and shoulders above 99% of what was released to theaters while it was on the air? Did he truly think there were more than five people on the planet who had more creative freedom than he enjoyed in his years with HBO? Did he never hear the phrase - on his own television show, even - "Be careful what you wish for"?

Well, now Chase is getting what he wished for.

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Brad Grey is a TV guy.  (You know him, if for no other reason, because he is one of the men behind The Sopranos.)  TV guys are not supposed to know anything about movies. 

And yet, Brad Grey is running one of the oldest and most respected movie studios in America -- Paramount Pictures, an outfit which, according to one of Grey's collegues, is "on our way to making money", quite an accomplishment in today's Hollywood -- and this weekend will see the release of Cloverfield, a huge gamble that Grey greenlighted at significant personal risk (and which is the product of J.J. Abrams, another TV guy).  

In an interesting interview with the New York Times, Grey discusses his trial by fire as the head of Paramount, the management shuffles that accompanied his rise to the top, and his conception of Abrams as the Spielberg to his Lew Wasserman.  It's fascinating not only because of what Grey has to say -- a typical producer's mix of cautiousness and braggadocio, but without the guarded defensiveness that usually comes with habitiual ass-covering -- but because of the insight it has into the business of running a studio at a time when business is shakier than ever and very little gets produced at the top end without a guarantee of making money.  It's in light of situations like this that whether or not Cloverfield succeeds will mean a lot more than the failure of a single movie.

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