Hey folks, Harry here in Madrid... about 7 hours away from waking up to go to Toledo to find a sword... and I happened to read Moriarty's Rumblings... and decided... hey, ya know what... this needs my mindless banter atop it to put that creaking beef jerky of an evil genius in place.... First off, Moriarty and the rest of you wankers need to back the fuck off of Raimi... the people I've been talking to about SPIDER-MAN and this is very very close to the project, and NO MORIARTY DOESN'T KNOW WHO I'M TALKING ABOUT, tell me that what Sam Raimi and John Dykstra have planned for this baby is unbelievably cool... As for getting in a huff about the Koepp script that Mysterio and Stax have reviewed online... well... don't you think there is a reason they've gone to a completely different screenwriter? As for the WEBSHOOTERS and the Organic/Mechanical stuff... Look, as Mysterio explained it, the direction that Raimi is taking it is to have it be a problem that Parker has to deal with, then create a mechanical device to harness the problem and turn it into the webslingers we all know and love... The organic will provide the goo... the mechanical (which Parker invents) harnesses and makes use of the goo.... I CAN LIVE WITH THIS CHANGE... it shows Parker is a big brain... I mean... come on, how many of you if something strange pussed our of your wrists could make a mechanical thing that would... turn it into groovy webshooters that could shoot out a strand or a net or weave a backpack or whatever? I couldn't... Moriarty could (ahem... riiiiight, bloke couldn't even fix his own computer or catch mine for that matter heheheheh) Nick Cage is not Raimi's choice.... it's a studio choice... Raimi is thinking more independent... but the studio is... well a fucking studio that didn't pay attention to X-MEN and didn't notice that the movie opened with no stars to $53 million dollars!!!!! And had Fox fully financed and given Bryan the extra 6 months he originally was scheduled to have... the film would have had much longer legs.... So SONY and everyone else.... get the hell out of Raimi's hair.... Oh... and Sam, give Alex Ross a call! And next... as for Moriarty's editorial that he ends his piece with.... Riiiight on bro!

Hey, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some rumblings from the Lab.

It's four in the morning on a Sunday. My work week is so oddly defined that I can justify being home and awake right now. There's a ton of little odds and ends that have been stacking up here at the Labs that I wanted to share with you, so let's kick it old-school and just run down a bunch of fun stuff, with a bit of my typical bloated editorializing thrown in for good measure.

WHY DO YOU THINK HIS LAST NAME IS CAGE?!

I'm hearing it from more and more directions now, including a talent agency source who swears it: Nicolas Cage is going to be the Green Goblin. Makes sense, I guess. Sooner or later, the guy is going to have to do a major comic book movie and get it out of his system. I mean, this is the guy who changed his last name and chose his new one because he loved LUKE CAGE. He's a comic book geek. He's actually taking a major pay cut to do the role, I hear, something he can definitely afford to do if Warner makes good on that pay-or-play deal for SUPERMAN that never happened. I guess I'm curious how he's supposed to have a son the same age as Peter Parker, but maybe they're planning to drop that part of the Goblin storyline. If they do, they've already killed many of the potential story arcs in their franchise. I keep trying to maintain a smiley face when talking about the development of SPIDER-MAN, but truth be told, this and FANTASTIC FOUR both scare the hell out of me in different ways. I like Sam Raimi, but many of the announced decisions about the character and the series seem off-base to me, changed for no good reason. Tobey Maguire seems perfect for Parker, but Cage seems like a moviestar being shoehorned in just so there's another name to sell tickets with. I want to believe... I want to believe...

KING PLANTS SEEDS OF REVOLUTION

Oh, man... if you haven't done so yet, I advise you to Click Here and download chapter one of Stephen King's new book THE PLANT. This is the only way you can read the book. It'll cost you $1, and you can either pay before you download or you can pay later on the honor system. It's a bold experiment that King is trying here, an end run around the conventional methods of distribution for his work. It's got to make his publisher Scribner a little crazy to see that the experiment seems to be working so far. As always, King is a master of voice, and the gimmick of this first installment in the story is that everything is communicated through letters and memos. I'll let you discover the story's contents for yourself... seems a shame to spoil something as brief as a chapter. I applaud King for trying this again, this extension of what he did with THE GREEN MILE when it was originally published. If this works, and people actually pay the money they owe to King, and he finishes the whole book, and sales are good, then you can expect to see other authors trying things like this, and you can expect to see artists in other media trying it as well. The entire idea of distribution is changing. That's why Napster scares record companies. That's why Scour is being sued by the major studios. Conventional ideas about delivering content to people are literally crumbling as we speak. It's an exciting time, and any of these early flurries of revolution are, in my opinion, well worth supporting, especially in the hands of a storyteller like King. Can't wait to see where this one's headed...

A HIGH-DEF DIVORCE

Speaking of things changing, I saw a movie on Friday that was shot entirely in high-def, and it looked to my eye to be exactly like film. I was stunned. And was this some giant budget feature like a new STAR WARS or a MATRIX sequel? Nope. It was a micro-budget independent feature called DIVORCE! THE MUSICAL.

I saw the film at the invite of Steve Dworman, who wrote and directed the movie in addition to starring in it. He first contacted me a few weeks back when Harry was going to come to town, but things just didn't work out for us to see his film then. Heck, we missed a lot of coolness when Harry was here, just because other coolness came up. I hate trying to stack the days when he's in town. Anyway, Steve kept calling, and he really wanted a chance to show me the film. I finally made a time to drop by Consolidated Film Labs, where it was just me and the movie on Friday afternoon. Before we started, Steve told me about shooting the film entirely on high-def video, then transferring to film. He described some of the technical difficulties involved with the transfer, and I have to hand it to him... he's made something that's indistinguishable from film. There are places where it looks more like Super 16 than it does like 35mm, but that's a minor quibble. I'm impressed by what I saw. The film itself is like a nicer, much more amiable Woody Allen picture, very sincere and likeably goofy. When the film starts, there's a sort of bitter wicked quality to many of the jokes, including a running gag involving the face of the main character's ex-wife, but that peters out fairly quickly and Dworman reveals what he's really aiming for... a family film about getting over divorce and mending broken family bonds. There's a very sweet heart to the film, even if much of the comedy plays tame, even muted. Dworman in person is exactly the same as Dworman in the film... a nice guy, friendly to a fault. He never quite gels as the center of his film, but if this is sold to a family audience, kids will relate with the teenage actress playing his daughter. This simple, goodhearted little film will no doubt find a home with a distributor soon, and when it does, it's worth checking out to see how well Dworman utilized the cutting edge of technology to tell such a basic human story.

THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE

Hey, kids!! Remember how there was only supposed to be one Immortal left at the end of the original HIGHLANDER? Remember how Chris Lambert won the game in that film? Well, if you're like me, you just don't give a shit about franchise continuity, and you're willing to accept swordplay no matter how wafer-thin the excuse!! Still with me? Then CLICK HERE!!

HEY! LOOK AT THIS SNATCH!!

It's just as funny the 3,000th time I say the title of Guy Ritchie's new film, which appears to have been changed back from the spineless SNATCH'D. Now that I've seen the teaser trailer for the film, I'm ready to see the movie itself. I loved the energy of LOCK, STOCK & 2 SMOKING BARRELS, and this film looks like more of the same. That's fine by me. I hope Ritchie does a better job of following his muse than Danny Boyle has so far. Boyle's first two films were like a promise of a brilliant, burgeoning, hip new British cinema, and his two films since have just been limp, plodding, and confused. That's not counting the still unreleased segment of ALIEN LOVE TRIANGLE he shot with Heather Graham and Kenneth Branaugh. Later this weekend, I hope to bring you some photos from SNATCH that someone forwarded us from a French film magazine. Great stuff, and it looks like Ritchie is working hard to bring us something fresh and brash and funny, exactly what we'd expect from him. I hope so anyway. See if you agree with me by CLICKING HERE!!

WGA SETS HISTORY RIGHT!!

Best news story I read all week? Right here. Seems the Writers Guild of America, West has corrected the credits on 14 movies released between 1951 and 1964, including THE BRAVE ONE, for which Dalton Trumbo won an Oscar he wasn't allowed to accept. This is one of those monumental moral victories that never comes too late, and I'm truly pleased to see the writers properly acknowledged for their work. The blacklist was a terrible time, and these men deserve to be recognized for the work they did, and they also deserve to be recognized for surviving a horrible chapter in this industry's history. Read the full story. I plan to find a few of the films on video this week and check them out, just to pay my respects. I hope this brings satisfaction and peace to the families of all involved.

TRUTH & RUMORS -- SOME THOUGHTS AND CLARIFICATIONS

Been to FILM THREAT lately? You should head on over and read their main story this weekend, a review of the "Anakin Audition" tapes that recently fell into the hands of editor Chris Gore. Go ahead. Go take a look. I'll just be here. We'll continue when you get back.

Dirty trick, wasn't it? He got you, didn't he? I don't blame him a bit, either. He actually tried it on me when I ran into him at a party last weekend. We were talking and he asked if I'd seen the tape yet. He didn't mention that it was a fictional tape or explain the gag, either. Just offered to send a copy over. It reminds me of the first time I saw THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT on tape, way back before I'd heard anything. Harry showed it to me and cut the film off before any credits were shown at the end. He loved showing it to the group of friends he'd assembled that way. There was something about it that reminded me of William B. Castle, that desire to extend the experience to be more than just passive, more than just something you watch. Harry loved fooling people into believing the mythology of BLAIR WITCH, just like Chris loved tricking people into clicking on that second page of his article. It's universal, really. Everyone loves playing practical jokes. Everyone loves being in on the gag.

Here on the Internet, here on sites like this one and Corona Coming Atractions and Dark Horizons and others, though, lines get really fuzzy when it comes to the way information can be fed to all of us. There's a small community of people out there now who seem to be more and more devoted to the idea of pushing false rumors into circulation, who love to see how well they can sell a lie to the various sites. Considering how rarely these people seem to be "joking" in any conventional sense, I'm left scratching my head as to what any of them get out of it.

I can't claim total innocence on either side of things, either. In the days before I really started contributing to this site on a regular basis, my friends and I tried our own Internet prank, spreading various pieces of a story to all the sites out there. I'm not going to say who fell for it and who didn't because, in the end, I felt bad about doing it. I stopped a lot earlier than I intended to because I realized that there's a trust issue implicit in the relationship between the source and the site. As a columnist here on the site, I find myself in a vulnerable position. What do I do if I hang my ass out there on a rumor and it turns out I've been lied to? Hey... I'll be the first to admit that things aren't looking good for Chris Walken in STAR WARS EPISODE II at this point. It may turn out that I was sold a bill of goods. If so, then it was an orchestrated effort, and there are people that I trust implicitly who have been lied to just as much as I have. And in the end, what was accomplished? I have egg on my face, and things roll on. A lot of speculation and conversation turns out to have been wasted energy. And someone, somewhere, laughs very, very hard.

Just the other night, someone sent Harry and I a mysterious e-mail saying that he had some great news about the upcoming View Askew 5 film. I noticed he had an AOL address, so I opened Instant Messenger and found him online still. I contacted him and said I'd be interested in discussing whatever scoop he had, and I thanked him for contacting us. At all points, I treated the guy with the same respect you give anyone in a conversation, even when he laid out his story for me, some convoluted premise in which only CLERKS and CHASING AMY actually happened, and it turns out that MALLRATS and DOGMA were both just comic books drawn by Banky and Holden. This fifth film is the one in which reality and fiction collide, the source went on. He laid out all sorts of details about where Jay and Silent Bob have been, and I dutifully listened to everything he had to say, then told him I'd work to check it out and post it soon. End of conversation.

Within thirty minutes, this guy had sent Harry some gleeful, celebratory rant about how he had "fooled" us and how we were "fucking stupid" and how he had outsmarted everyone and proven our site to be a sham and a phony. Keep in mind... we haven't posted anything. I have Kevin Smith's phone number, so I planned to just call him the next day and run the rumor by him to get an official comment, see if he could outright dismiss it as false or not. This is just raw info the guy has given me at this point, and he can't keep his mouth shut long enough for it to even count as a hoax. He just had to write in and laugh about how he had made the whole thing up.

And despite trolls like this, I still look forward to that e-mail from a new source, hoping each time that this is going to be someone with some great story to tell, some tidbit that I can share. In the end, I think that's all any of us are looking for when we put our e-mail addresses and our phone numbers out there. We're looking for someone who wants to share, and the winner in that scenario, ultimately, is you... the audience. I marvel some days at how much information about this industry is available for the determined reader these days. I remember when I was a kid... I would have done anything to have a resource like this. I would have loved to have been given a peek behind the curtain at an early age. I devoured every behind the scenes special that Lucasfilm put together, and I started buying any magazine about film, any book I could find. All of the material I read put together doesn't equal 1/10th of what's been published on the 'net since I first logged on in '94. And I guess the price of having all of this available is that there are going to be those folks who are determined to piss on it from time to time. And when it happens, it happens. I know I'm perfectly willing to say, "Hey, that rumor didn't pan out." I'm also willing to admit when I've gone to bat for something and it doesn't work out. I know there's still people who nurse bruised feelings over my references to THE SEVENTH TOWER as the title of EPISODE II. Sorry, gang. I never meant that as a formal piece of info. It was used at Lucasfilm in some internal stuff, obviously as a joke since it's actually another project, a juvenile fiction series they're publishing. My use of it was supposed to just be a gentle jab at Lucasfilm and their typical BLUE HARVEST/RED TAILS habit of calling films by code names. Still, enough people took it as fact because I printed it that addressing it seems to be required.

In the end, all we have as writer and reader that keeps us connected is trust. You trust me to tell you the truth about what I know, and to tell you if what I know changes. In turn, I trust you to not contact me with deliberate lies and hoaxes. And each time one of us gets burned, it makes it even more difficult to relinquish that trust. All I can do is give you my word as Moriarty... as Drew McWeeny... that I'll keep doing the best job I'm able to do, and I'll keep pushing myself to do it better.

Unless the hoax is really, really good. Then all bets are off.

"Moriarty" out.