David M. Halbfinger reports that the uncertain state of the political thriller State of Play may offer some insight into how the game is being played this minute in a movie industry driven half-nuts by labor difficulties. Brad Pitt, who was locked in to star in the movie, pulled his Hamlet act and waltzed away from the project last week, just as it was about to go into production. Like many high-level productions, State of Play was all set to go so as to complete shooting by next June, when Hollywood may face an actors' strike. Now Universal, if it decides to proceed on schedule, will have to re-cast the lead quickly before other fully-booked-up actors in the cast start dropping out to make their other pre-June committments. On the plus side, they can consider any number of leading men, such as Tom Hanks and Johnny Depp, who are suddenly available because the projects they were about to start work on have been put on hold until after the writers' strike ends, because it's been decided that the scripts still need work.
Don't feel too bad for the studio bosses, though; in a business where sincerity is regarded as a first sign of the onset of dementia, the various strikes are in some ways a gold mine for the people in charge of spin. United Artists is currently backing out of Pinkville, Oliver Stone's planned movie on the My Lai massacre, and the official story is that it's because of, yes, script problems that can't be dealt with due to the strike. But anonymous sources claim, not implausibly, that UA was looking for a way to get out because, after the commercial failure of all the Iraq War movies this fall (including UA's own megaflop Lions for Lambs), the last thing anybody wants to do is fund another big-budget expedition back to Vietnam. — Phil Nugent