The Screengrab

Hey, did you know that Kirk was a rebellious kid? This and other shocking revelations contained therein.

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So the long-awaited Star Trek trailer dropped, by all available evidence, sometime on Saturday and was exhaustively analyzed on the Internet by everyone capable of typing with an interest. As a franchise now over the forty-year mark, there's legions of the (overly-)invested just waiting to see what J.J. Abrams was going to do to Gene Roddenberry's long-straggling franchise. (Never mind that the Mission: Impossible had been kicking around for just as long when he got around to doing the third installment; presumably no one was that invested in the series' '88 iteration, whereas there's some desperate souls out there who still want to talk about how awesome Deep Space 9 was.)

And, of course, no one can agree on anything. But we can all agree on one thing: men who spend too much time on their hair aren't manly.

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The new Entertainment Weekly cover story has the scoop on J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek reboot, and while the cover photo doesn’t exactly set my phasers to stun (Kirk looks like he should be leading panty raids at Starfleet Academy), at least fans can be reassured that Abrams never much cared for Trek anyway. “‘All my smart friends liked Star Trek,’ he says. ‘'I preferred a more visceral experience.’ Which is exactly why he accepted Paramount's offer in 2005 to develop a new Trek flick; creatively, he was engaged by the possibility of a Star Trek movie ‘that grabbed me the way Star Wars did.’” Oh boy!

What Abrams does like about Star Trek is its “unabashed idealism. ‘I think a movie that shows people of various races working together and surviving hundreds of years from now is not a bad message to put out right now,’ says Abrams, whose infectiously upbeat energy and disdain for cynicism are among his most marked attributes… In a world where a movie as incredibly produced as The Dark Knight is raking in gazillions of dollars, Star Trek stands in stark contrast…It was important to me that optimism be cool again.’”

The EW piece goes on to drop a few hints about the story.

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In my review of Fanboys earlier today, I mentioned a cameo appearance by William Shatner as himself. Based on this evidence, it would appear that the Shat Man is not philosophically opposed to the idea of cameos, but in a recent interview with AMC, new Star Trek director J.J. Abrams gave a different impression. “It was very tricky. We actually had written a scene with him in it that was a flashback kind of thing, but the truth is, it didn't quite feel right. The bigger thing was that he was very vocal that he didn't want to do a cameo. We tried desperately to put him in the movie, but he was making it very clear that he wanted the movie to focus on him significantly, which, frankly, he deserves.”

Shatner claims he was never approached for a cameo. In fact, he claims this in a YouTube clip you can view after the jump. He also supplies a simple solution to the big problem Abrams cites, namely that Captain Kirk already died onscreen. Hint: it involves the “hovering machine,” and you have to throw the switch on the right.

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The espionage thriller Edwin A. Salt is getting more than a name change – it’s about to undergo gender reassignment surgery. Yes, it only took a dash of that old Hollywood magic to transform Tom Cruise into Angelina Jolie. (Do Katie Holmes and Brad Pitt know about this? And will there be camera crews on hand when they find out?) Cruise was originally attached to the project, which Philip Noyce will direct for Columbia Pictures, but according to Variety, Edwin “will be redrafted by screenwriter Kurt Wimmer as a star vehicle for Angelina Jolie.” She’ll play the title character (Edwina Salt?) – “a CIA officer who's accused by a defector of being a Russian sleeper spy and must elude capture long enough to establish her innocence.” Rumor has it Cruise lost interest when they wouldn’t let him wear his fat suit.

Cloverfield honcho J.J. Abrams is the new Irwin Allen.

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While his wife Madonna continues to dominate the tabloid covers, Guy Ritchie is keeping busy preparing for his Sherlock showdown. As we told you last week, Ritchie’s reboot of Sherlock Holmes is getting some competition from a rival production that will star Sacha Baron Cohen as the great detective and Will Ferrell as the elementary Watson. Now Ritchie has landed his Sherlock: Robert Downey, Jr. As Variety reports, “Downey emerged as an action star with Iron Man and Sherlock Holmes also will take advantage of his physical skills as the character displays brawn as well as brains. The basis for the film is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's classic tales, but also the comicbook Sherlock Holmes.” The “comicbook” Variety refers to is an upcoming take by Lionel Wigram, not the classic DC version pictured here. Sorry, nerds.

Speaking of comics (and nerds): fans of the Elfquest series by Wendy and Richard Pini, commence sharpening your knives. Or swords. Or whatever it is elves carry.

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In re-launching the Morning Deal Report, we promised you all the latest news on comic book and videogame adaptations, but here’s one we didn’t see coming: According to the Hollywood Reporter, J.J. Abrams will soon be bringing a New York Times feature to the big screen. The article, entitled “Mystery on Fifth Avenue,” concerns “an Upper East Side luxury apartment on Fifth Avenue that the occupants had redesigned to include hidden compartments, messages, puzzles, poems, codes and games for their four preteen kids.” The $8.5 million residence houses “an elaborately clever ‘scavenger hunt’ built into the apartment that involved dozens of historical figures, a fictional book and a soundtrack.” It’s nice to have more money than you know what to do with, or so I’m told.

Variety reports that Spike Lee will take a break from feuding with Clint Eastwood long enough to direct The Time Traveler, adapted from “a memoir by Ronald Mallett, one of the nation's first African-Americans to earn a Ph.D in theoretical physics.”

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The big battle of the summer movie season is not Batman vs. Joker (spoiler: Batman wins) or Indiana Jones vs. whatever they are (spoiler: they’re aliens from another dimension. I think.), it’s the spoilerazzi vs. the spoiler Nazis. Entertainment Weekly comes at this most pressing issue of our time from a couple of different angles.

“Welcome to Spoiler Nation,” writes Jeff Jensen, “an irritating minority whose noisy, nosy engagement with Hollywood has deeply aggravated many of its most powerful players — and inspired many others to change the way they do business. How these leaks happen is no mystery. Spoilers have come from every corner of Hollywood, even from agents and studio execs themselves, motivated by the desire to promote an agenda or glean potential audience response.” Some spoiler sites self-flatteringly view themselves as industry watchdogs, making sure that studios aren’t taking undue liberties with their favorite franchise, serial arc or comic book character. Then there are filmmakers like J.J. Abrams who would prefer the hardcore spoiler geeks go get themselves lives, at least until his version of Star Trek comes out in 2009.

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