HBO has made a name for itself for not only delivering strong original content like “The Sopranos” but deeply biased documentaries like “Reagan.”

Now, HBO’s main competitor Showtime is backing a new documentary on Vice President Dick Cheney. The channel hired R.J. Cutler, the producer behind the pro-Clinton documentary “The War Room,” to give us a new look at President George W. Bush’s vice president and confidante.

Tentatively titled, “The World According to Dick Cheney,” the film will take a look at one of the most powerful vice presidents in history. Here’s director R.J. Cutler’s take on the upcoming film from a Showtime press release:

Like it or not, we live in a world defined by the domestic and international vision of Dick Cheney — perhaps the single-most influential non-Presidential figure in American political history,” said Cutler. “But for all the debate that his re-emergence in the public eye has caused, the fact is that Cheney the man remains an enigma, and the  manner in which he utilized his power and experience to become such a dominating political figure, have been left largely unexplored. This documentary will shine a balanced and multi-dimensional light on this truly polarizing figure.

Will “The World According to Dick Cheney” be a fair representation of the veteran political figure?  We’ll have to wait and see, but consider this snippet from a piece Cutler wrote about how “The War Room” got such unfettered access to Clinton’s campaign.

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Watch George Lucas pitch “Red Tails” directly to conservatives and American patriots.

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Lucas describes “Red Tails” as “very patriotic,” “very jingoistic,” “old-fashioned” and “corny.”

NewsBusters:

“I showed it to all [the studios] and they said, ‘No. We don’t know how to market a movie like this.”

When Stewart asked why, Lucas first responded, “Because it’s not green enough. They only release green movies.”

The filmmaker clarified, “It’s because it’s an all black movie. There’s no major white roles in it at all. It’s one of the first all black action pictures ever made.” ….

Sadder still was how Hollywood balked given the message Lucas was trying to convey.

“I wanted to make it inspirational for teenaged boys. I wanted to show that they have heroes, they’re real American heroes, they’re patriots that helped to make the country what it is today. And it’s not glory where you have a lot of white officers running these guys into cannon fodder. It’s like a real, they were real heroes.”

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Can six people actually be considered a protest?

TheWrap.com generously applied the protest label to a tiny group of Occupy Wall Street protesters railing against the right to cuss on the small screen.

The Supreme Court began hearing arguments today about censorship issues pertaining to television, highlighted by cases like Cher’s use of the “F” word on a 2002 Billboard music telecast. And those uniquely fragrant Occupy Wall Street types were there to lend some moral clarity to the debate.

About half a dozen protestors were in front of the court yelled slogans like: “You can kill people half a world away, but you can’t say ‘fuck….’”

Meanwhile, inside the building, the justices wrestled with whether the FCC has the constitutional right to enforce rules prohibiting obscene language and nudity on broadcast television and radio.

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Some industry folks attempt to put the best spin possible on this bad news, but an overall 2% drop in home video sales from an already catastrophic collapse is terrible news. The economy isn’t getting worse; it’s sputtering but has been getting better for a couple of years now, and the home video sales curve is moving in the opposite direction. Furthermore, Blu-ray is what saved this number from being a four-alarm fire and in order to make that happen, prices of Blu-rays discs and players had to dramatically drop. That means less profit.

My guess is that a large percentage of the Blu-ray bump in sales came from cheap, catalogue titles, not new titles. That’s bad news because there are only so many catalogue titles to release, and technology-wise, home video has hit a wall. People aren’t interested in 3D at home and picture and sound quality can’t improve past Blu-ray. So what’s the next format to entice people to purchase titles yet again?

This fantasy that Ultraviolet is the next step in this evolution is just that. UV might be a nice additional feature, but it’s hard to imagine customers purchasing a title AGAIN for portability reasons alone.

USA Today:

Sales of movies on Blu-ray discs and films delivered digitally and on demand rose in 2011, but not enough to make up the gap in falling DVD sales.

Consumers spent $18 billion buying and renting discs and on digital movies in 2011, a 2% decrease from 2010, the Digital Entertainment Group (DEG) will report Tuesday.

Sales of Blu-ray discs topped $2 billion for the first time, up 19% from 2010. But DVD sales dropped 20% to $6.8 billion.

Still, home video executives were satisfied with the results considering the economic challenges of the past year and an underwhelming box office slate of films hitting retail.

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President Barack Obama had a Halloween to remember back in 2009, the same time the fledgling Tea Party movement was alerting the nation to Beltway waste and fraud.

The new book “The Obamas” by New York Times correspondent Jodi Kantor spills fresh dirt on a Oct. 2009 costume ball which included “Alice in Wonderland” star Johnny Depp and the film’s director, Tim Burton.

The event was kept from the public by the transparency-loving First Family for political reasons, Kantor says.

The book reveals how any official announcement of the glittering affair — coming at a time when Tea Party activists and voters furious over the lagging economy, 10-percent unemployment rate, bank bailouts and Obama’s health-care plan were staging protests — quickly vanished down the rabbit hole.

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This is all about collapsing DVD sales, but what the studios refuse to come to terms with is that if their movies didn’t stink, we would purchase more of them. Right now, “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” is selling plenty of DVD copies. That’s because it’s a terrific film. See how that works? Furthermore, through the Blockbuster Pass, I will  still only pay what I would watch through Netflix. So this move makes even less sense.

And now you know why Hollywood hates capitalism.

Anyway, more desperate and counter-productive behavior from an industry increasingly unable to create a product the customers would like to own:

Warner Bros., which was the first to impose a 28-day embargo on the release of DVDs to Netflix, RedBox, and other cheap rental companies, is likely to double that delay this year, according to published reports on Thursday. The studio, which is believed to have taken a big hit on DVD sales in the third quarter, is expected to announce the new delay at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas next week. Universal and 20th Century Fox, which also impose 28-day embargoes on Netflix and Redbox, are also expected to double that time period.

This will fix nothing. Oh, there might be a small bump for pay-per-view and brick-and-mortar Blockbuster, but the real money is in sales, and not only are we losing our passion and the all-important “impulse” to buy new films, we are also getting used to waiting for a longer period of time to see them. And that’s a huge mistake on Hollywood’s part. Sixty days after the release-hype dies down, the movie is released to two of the biggest outlets on the planet. Moreover, this genius move will only hurt sales. That’s how short-sighted  and desperate it is.

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Congressman Peter King told Fox News it’s clear there is “probable cause” for investigating whether the Obama administration leaked classified military information to the makers of an upcoming Sony film about the raid that took out Osama bin Laden.

King’s interview with Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly earlier today revealed new details about the investigation and why the congressman thought the leak may have happened in the first place.

The New York Republican told Kelly the proof for his initial suspicions about the leak revolved around how much information about the raid hit the press shortly after it occurred.

“That compromised our assets on the ground,” he says.

His concern grew after reading a Maureen Dowd column in the New York Times “almost bragging that the administration would give Sony and [Director] Kathryn Bigelow unprecedented access to the most classified operation in history.”

That was enough to ignite a preliminary investigation by the Defense Department into the matter, King reveals. And, apparently, investigators found something worth pursuing.

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Two conservative directors are gunning for recognition online today, and they need your help.

Filmmakers Mark Judge and Paul Moon, with their documentary film project “The Story of Whittaker Chambers,” are currently competing for “Project of the Week” recognition at indiewire.com. Each day indiewire picks a “Project of the Day” to feature, and every week readers vote for one project to consult with an independent film website like SnagFilms or IndieGoGo.

These “Project of the Week” winners compete for the “Project of the Month” prize: a consultation with the Sundance Institute, which runs the Sundance Film Festival. IndieWIRE featured “The Story of Whittaker Chambers” on Tuesday.

“Chambers’s story is one that hits on every cylinder,” wrote Judge, an author, journalist and filmmaker. “There is espionage, war, the soul of man, communism, courtroom drama, narrow escapes and God. The story is incredibly exciting, and we want to provide a great ride.”

Communist-turned-conservative Chambers is known for exposing government official Alger Hiss as a Soviet spy. Hiss was convicted of perjury in 1950 and sentenced to five years in prison. Chambers is remembered for his anti-communism, but also for his classic tome, “Witness,” which has influenced conservatism for decades, and continues to do so.

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Over and over and over we keep reading about how Hollywood’s holiday box office was some sort of silver lining in an otherwise dark cloud. But once again, the context-challenged entertainment media only tells us half the story. Here’s a sampling:

Box Office Mojo:

Based on studio estimates, the four-day weekend will end up at over $201 million, or up around 10 percent from the same four-day period last year.

DHD:

Let’s party hearty with the end-of-holiday box office for end-of-year 2011. Or let’s not (and say we did.)… [S]ources tell me this final weekend will definitely be up over last year.

Los Angeles Times:

Most films sold more tickets over the New Year’s holiday than the Christmas holiday, with family films benefiting from the biggest bumps. Overall, the weekend was up 10% compared with the same period in 2010.

Cinema Blend:

Sales were up considerably from last weekend’s Christmas holiday and the new year is off to a solid start.

Except…

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Good article from the “L.A. Times,” touching on how the Internet has forever altered television viewing habits and what this means for the business end of it:

Television production studio executives long have been wary of Hulu and other forms of Internet distribution, fearing they would lead to increased piracy and destroy lucrative secondary markets, including syndication and DVD sales. But video streaming services offered by Netflix, Hulu and Amazon.com are becoming an unexpected boon to the TV syndication market. By writing checks to license library content from networks, the Internet services are injecting new revenue into the TV business and breathing new life into middling shows.

“The introduction of the subscription video-on-demand platform has broadened the opportunities for exploitation of product in a very positive way for consumers and studios,” said Ken Werner, president of Warner Bros. domestic television distribution. “You do not need to accumulate 100 episodes of a series because 40 hours of programming is a lot, so many of these shows work perfectly well on these new services.”

Something the article does miss, though, is how television marathons and DVD have also altered our viewing habits. We like to gorge now, watch more than just a single episode at a time and lose ourselves in that world for hours. This is one reason serialized dramas such as “Mad Men,” “24,” “Breaking Bad,” and the like are such favorites. These shows are addictive — in the best way.

Yesterday, the wife and I watched 5 episodes in a row of “Sons of Anarchy,” and when a new DVD arrives via Blockbuster of “The Closer,” we usually knock out all four episodes in just a sitting or two.

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Hollywood is like a child, a spoiled child you can’t help loving but desperately want to see do and be better. Hollywood can be cruel and petulant, small and bigoted, hateful and depraved. But every once in a while you see what it COULD be — the talent, the charm, and the ability to inspire and create joy. So we keep coming back to them in the hope that if and when Hollywood ever grows up, they will be what they could be — what they once were, so many years ago.

Today, our spoiled child is in trouble and with only the best of intentions I’m going to see if I can’t take the sting out of the boo-boo with the best advice I can offer.

1. Hollywood Needs Movie Stars, Not Brands

You can trace most of Hollywood’s problems back to the death of the movie star. At first, the industry was thrilled with this development. No movie star meant no big payday, no ego, and none of the baggage too many stahs carry with them. The industry also found that, at least for a while, they could get away with this. Audiences were still packing theatres to see pre-packaged brands developed from high concepts, comic books, novels, and television shows. Sequels, remakes, and prequels were still sure-fire. Who needs to pay Tom Cruise $30 million to run around with CGI’d dinosaurs when just as many people will pay to see Jeff Goldblum do the same?

This was all well and good until the “brands” ran out. Now Hollywood is down to “The Green Lantern” and board games like “Battleship.”

Movie stars, on the other hand, are the most reliable brands out there. People come to see them and if you have enough of them and if you keep developing them, the inventory is limitless. From the 1920s straight through to right around 1990, if you built it with movie stars, audiences would come. Hollywood didn’t need to rely on “brands” because they built pictures around their stars.

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“Tree of Life” grossed a pretty pathetic $13 million, “Happy Feet Two” grossed an abysmal $60 million, and “Moneyball” grossed only an okay $75 million. But in this market, where the concept of the movie star is all but dead, Brad Pitt was named the “top money-making star of the year.”

Number two was George Clooney who released two films this year that probably won’t gross $90 million combined.

Bosses at Quigley Publishing Company have asked theatre owners and film buyers to vote for their top 10 box office generators and this year exhibitors credited Pitt with bringing in more traffic than any other celebrity due to his acting and/or vocal appearances in Moneyball, The Tree of Life, and Happy Feet Two.

Coming in at number two was Pitt’s pal George Clooney for both The Ides of March and The Descendants, and last year’s winner, Johnny Depp, fell to third with The Rum Diary, Rango and Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides.

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AP:

A solid summer lineup helped studios catch up to 2010, but ticket sales flattened again in the fall and have remained sluggish right into what was expected to be a terrific holiday season.

The result: projected domestic revenues for the year of $10.15 billion, down 4 percent from 2010’s, according to box-office tracker Hollywood.com. Taking higher ticket prices into account, movie attendance is off even more, with an estimated 1.275 billion tickets sold, a 4.8 percent decline and the smallest movie audience since 1995, when admissions totaled 1.26 billion.

“There were a lot of high-profile movies that just ended up being a little less than were hoped for,” said Chris Aronson, head of distribution for 20th Century Fox, whose sequel “ Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked” has been part of an under-achieving lineup of family films for the holidays. “The fall was pretty dismal. There just weren’t any real breakaway, wide-appeal films.” …

Hollywood is left right where it was 12 months ago, finishing the year quietly and looking ahead to a promising lineup to turn its fortunes around next year.

Even more so than 2011’s schedule once looked, the 2012 film list looks colossal. Among the highlights: the superhero tales “The Dark Knight Rises,” ”The Amazing Spider-Man” and “The Avengers“; the latest in the animated franchises “Ice Age” and “Madagascar,” along with “Brave,” the new adventure from animation master Pixar; Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones’ “Men in Black 3“; Daniel Craig’s new James Bond thriller “Skyfall”; Johnny Depp’s vampire story “Dark Shadows”; Ridley Scott’s “Prometheus,” a cousin to his sci-fi classic “Alien“; and Peter Jackson’s “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey,” the first in a two-part prequel to his “Lord of the Rings” films.

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1. Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol: $26.5M — The only real bright spot, the only unqualified hit of the season. Cruise’s 4th outing with impossible missions should exceed the take of the last one. You can’t ask for more than that.

2. Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows: $17.8M — There’s been some spin claiming Robert Downey Jr’s. sequel rebounded a bit this weekend, but that’s grading on a curve. After ten days in release, the first film was sitting at $138m. Compare that to part two, which has brought in about half that ($76m).

3. Alvin and the Chipminks: Chipwrecked: $13.3M — After ten days “Alvin 2″ was cleaning up with $133m, compared to “Chipwrecked,” which sits at $50m.

4. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo: $13.3M — Two observations: First off, who in their right mind would want to see such a downer during the holidays? Second, it appears as though fans of the book were perfectly satisfied with the perfectly satisfying 2009 version.

5. Adventures of Tintin: $9.1M — The number that matters with this one is the $250m already made overseas. American audiences aren’t  familiar with Tintin. However, you would  think a better job would’ve been done to market to the U.S. But after decades of only marketing known brands, I’m not sure the studios have the brainpower to introduce new concepts and characters. Those are muscles no one’s bothered to flex in a long time. For that reason alone, a lot of money was left on the table. We’re talking Steven Spielberg for crying out loud.

6. We Bought a Zoo: $7.8M — Matt Damon is not a star AND he works overtime to alienate 60% of his potential customers.

7.  New Year’s Eve: $3M – Guess we won’t be seeing “Arbor Day.”

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According to the New York Times, even with upwards of 40 blockbusters released in 3D (meaning much higher ticket prices), box office revenues in North America dropped 4.5% this year. In worse news, overall attendance dropped 5.3%, which means that over the last two years attendance has dropped a whopping 11%. When you lose over 10% of your customers in just two years, something is horribly wrong. When you combine that with plummeting DVD sales, you have an existential problem.

Director Roland Emmerich at his London home

The Times blames much of the problem on the economy, but as anemic as it’s been, the economy has improved some since 2008 and 2009, while attendance and revenues have not. In other words, that’s a stupid excuse. But at least it’s a new excuse. After years of blaming Redbox and piracy, you have to give Hollywood’s media friends credit for coming up with a new way to avoid admitting the obvious: People don’t like Hollywood or their product very much.

Movies are a cyclical business and analysts say that 2010 benefited mightily from holdover sales for “Avatar,” which was released late in 2009 and became one of the most popular movies of all time. A decline of hundreds of millions of dollars is not catastrophic when weighed against the size of the industry. Over all, North American ticket revenue for 2011 is projected to be about $10.1 billion, according to Hollywood.com, which compiles box-office data.

That is only a 4.5 percent falloff from 2010. But studio executives are alarmed by the downturn nonetheless, in part because the real picture is worse than the raw revenue numbers suggest.

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NSFW:

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Brought to you by the same folks who eviscerated “Avatar,” the “Star Wars” prequels and more.

The second video expertly deconstructs the film’s overbearing politics and moral equivalencies, and hammers Lucas for his political hypocrisies.

“When the filmmakers can’t choose a clear side, it affects the overall film.”

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Did you know, Kim Jong-Il, the now-dead slave master of North Korea, loved Hollywood films?

“The cinema occupies an important place in the overall development of art and literature. As such it is a powerful ideological weapon for the revolution and construction.”

So wrote Kim Jong-il in his 1987 essay The Cinema and Directing

How right he was.

And what isn’t there for a brutal, murderous dictator responsible for the oppression of millions to love about modern-day Hollywood; an institution that opposes liberty, worships the state, and can’t wait to  suck up to a couple of other King Jong-Ils in the form of the Castro brothers and Hugo Chavez?

But Kim was less than enamoured by Hollywood’s portrayal of his own regime.

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Keep in mind, MTV does all of this all under the phony shield of being non-partisan. Obviously they’re worried about recent polls showing Obama in trouble with the young and dumb, so they have decided to ride to the rescue:

The cable network has replaced its campaign slogan of almost 20 years for a new one — “Power of 12″ –  which it hopes will energize today’s disillusioned youth to vote in the upcoming presidential election, the New York Times reports. The “12″ signifies the election year, and the “Power” suggests that young people within the 18-to-29-year-old demo have much influence over the 2012 race — if they take action, that is.

According to the Times, MTV’s research revealed that even though youth showed up in droves to champion President Barack Obama last election, they remained cynical about the electoral process.

“They were so passionate,” said MTV president Stephen K. Friedman. “And then they hit this wall of the economy.” He added of the name-switch: “Voting is one step in the process — just one step. The question for this generation is, they’ve got this power, will they exert it?”

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By this time next week, six new tentpoles will have opened wide: “Tintin,” “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” “We Bought a Zoo,” “The Darkest Hour,” “War Horse,” and “Mission Impossible 4.”

It seems as though, despite good weather and plenty of titles to choose from, people just don’t feel like going to the movies. That means there will be some casualties next week — more than one, I suspect.

But then again, people did come out in droves for “MI:4.” Why that one and not the others?

1. Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows: $40M – The original opened with $62M and went on to gross $209M domestically. No one found it a classic, but the energetic direction combined with the chemistry between stars Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law certainly made for a good time. What kept people away from a highly anticipated sequel? When I think of the marketing campaign, all I remember is Holmes running in slo-mo through a forest while being shot at. Maybe the focus should’ve been on the arrival of Holmes’ arch-nemesis Professor Moriarty.

2. Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked: $23.5M — Fox was lucky to get two blockbusters out of what never seemed to be a very appealing franchise.

3. Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol: $13M — The “Dark Knight Rises” prologue was screened on only around 10% of the 425 screens that hauled in a remarkable $30k per. So don’t let Tom Cruise haters spin this into something’s it’s not. Cruise is still a star, and better still, the star of a franchise that has yet to disappoint. We’ll learn a lot more next weekend when the fourquel goes into wide release, but the only excitement I’m hearing around any upcoming new release stops here.

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This weekend was supposed to turn all that bad box office news around for Hollywood,  but both saviors that went into wide release yesterday are not only trailing their predecessors (as you’ll see below), they are falling well below expectations. “Entertainment Weekly” predicted “Sherlock 2″ and “Chipwrecked” would open to $54 million and $30 million respectively, which is low compared to some others.  If these numbers hold, the silver bullet Hollywood assumed would solve all their problems suddenly won’t look all that silver.

If these two franchises, these two titles, these two pieces of product can’t put butts in seats — what can?

And how do you blame Redbox and piracy on this one?

DHD:

Sources are starting to send me more numbers for today. Both Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (Warner Bros) as well as Alvin And The Chipmunks: Chipwrecked (Fox) are badly trailing their previous installments. (Sherlock 1/$62.3M vs Sherlock 2/$42.4M and Alvin 2/$48.8M vs Alvin 3/$25.8M.) The Robert Downey Jr-starring and Guy Ritchie-directed Sherlock 2 includes $1.25M from 1,650 midnight shows. It’s early yet but audiences seem to be rejecting sequels and threequels. Of course, the movie studios point out that both the last Sherlock and Alvin opened either on Christmas or after kids were already out of school. Execs are hoping to make up the difference before year’s end. But more pics will open, too, creating clutter. So if this weekend’s low grosses continue, then the domestic box office slump may very well ruin Christmas for Hollywood.

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