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In Other News: Lionsgate/Icahn, Spidey’s Fall Guy, Judith Miller, James Franco And Ailing Borders

By THE DEADLINE TEAM | Tuesday January 4, 2011 @ 6:48am PSTTags: Carl Icahn, Carl Icahn Lionsgate MGM Merger, Carl Icahn MGM, James Franco, Judith Miller, Julian Assange, Lionsgate, Lionsgate Carl Icahn, Lionsgate MGM, Mark Cuban, Michael Burns Carl Icahn, Movies, Spider-Man Musical Safety, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark

The sharp elbowing between Lionsgate and Carl Icahn takes another turn in the courtroom. The Wall Street Journal reports that Lionsgate filed in court to force Icahn to disclose any confidential merger agreements he made with MGM. This continues Lionsgate’s assertion that Icahn was pushing for a merge between Lionsgate and MGM while lambasting Lionsgate management for exploring the same scenario. Lionsgate’s desire for transparency extended to an ask that Icahn fess up about a side deal he might have made with Mark Cuban to sell his stake. That info–which reportedly came from Girls Gone Wild kingpin Joe Francis–was refuted by Cuban, who told WSJ that if there was any questionable offer involved in the equation, it came when Lionsgate co-chairman Michael Burns made a third-party offer to buy his shares for more than whatever Icahn was willing to pay…

Christopher Tierney, the 31-year old actor/dancer who fell 30 feet and was badly hurt in a preview performance of Broadway’s Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark, gave his first interview last night to Gotham’s WCBS-TV local news. Watch below as he describes an ordeal that included the following inventory of broken bones: 4 ribs, 3 vertebra, scapula, elbow, and the back of his head. It’s good to see Tierney moving around and even enthused about possibly returning to the show. But how’s that dancer’s body, full of screws and rods, going to feel when he’s pushing 50?  I am also hearing that the Twitter statements issued by Actors Equity head Nick Wyman are being viewed by members as too little, too late. The next few weeks will tell the tale for Spidey. The $1.8 million holiday week gross was impressive, but every show’s grosses spiked. The $65 million show definitely has an uphill battle ahead, one that will be made easier if the new safety measures incorporated after the shutdown keep the actors safe…

In her new gig at Fox News, former New York Times reporter Judith Miller got some shots in at WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange that might have some wondering if it’s the pot calling the kettle black, based on her influential coverage of suspected weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Watch as she lays into Assange for not “verifying the information he was putting out or whether it was going to hurt anybody…”

Free-spirit James Franco, who aside from establishing himself in the Best Actor race with 127 Hours has done everything from acting in soap operas to directing shorts and indies to attending college classes, announced his plans to really focus on directing. He wants to helm two big pictures back to back, starting with an adaptation of William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. Deadline revealed that CAA just signed Franco when it brought over his longtime WME agent Kami Putnam-Heist. Did the agency see a budding director, or a possible Best Actor Oscar winner who could be a superstar by next summer, after he stars in this summer’s Planet of the Apes prequel Rise of the Apes? Agencies usually hate to see rising stars gamble momentum with time-consuming directing projects…

The signs continue to look ominous for the bookseller chain Borders. The company, which just declared it couldn’t pay certain publishers, disclosed to the SEC the exit of two key execs: exec veep Thomas Carney and chief information officer D. Scott Laverty.

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In Other New Year’s Eve News…

By THE DEADLINE TEAM | Friday December 31, 2010 @ 6:45am PSTTags: Borders, Borders Vendor Financing, Fair Game, Judith Miller, Julie Taymor Spider-Man, Movies, Natalie Mendoza, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark

In a tough blow for the brick and mortar bookstores coming out of the holidays and heading into the new year, Borders has acknowledged that it delayed payments to vendors. In a statement released yesterday to PublishersMarketplace.com, Borders claimed restructuring its vendor financing was part of an ongoing potential refinancing of its existing credit facilities. Without such a move, the company faces a liquidity shortfall. The Wall Street Journal reports that the retailer doesn’t know it new funding will materialize and it is unclear whether publishers will be understanding enough to send fresh product. Borders and rival Barnes & Noble have been weathering a worsening storm of customers opting for online shopping and e-books, trading the charm of browsing bookshelves for discounted wares…

Former New York Times reporter Judith Miller’s landing at conservative site Newsmax is causing a bit of a stir. Miller, who also contributes to  the conservative-leaning Fox News, will always be known for controversy over  whether her pre-Iraq invasion reports about possible weapons of mass destruction was used by the Bush Administration build momentum toward the subsequent invasion. She also spent 85 days in jail after refusing to disclose that Scooter Libby, the former aide to vice president Dick Cheney, had disclosed to her that Valerie Plame was in the CIA. Miller recently used her experience on that topic to debunk the Plame pic Fair Game in an op-ed piece for the Wall Street Journal, calling the film well acted, but a “gross distortion of a complicated political saga.” Firing back in an essay for Columbia Journalism Review, Liman wrote: “Judith Miller demonstrated in her recent WSJ story about my film, Fair Game, the same cavalier attitude towards the facts that led to her departure from The New York Times in disgrace. And we should never forget that Scooter Libby outed Valerie Plame to Miller in June 2003—more than two weeks before Richard Armitage outed Plame to Novak. Somehow Miller neglected to mention that in her op-ed piece. But she also forgot about that before—in her early grand jury testimony—until she was forced to come clean about it in a subsequent grand jury appearance and under oath at Libby’s trial. Miller’s belated testimony helped convict her “source” Libby, but not until she did everything she could, as a forceful proponent of the war in Iraq, to avoid telling the truth to the American public. And so here we go again.” Moviegoers didn’t seem to care much about the controversy, based on ticket sales. The $22 million budget Fair Game grossed less then $10 million domestic, and less than $19 million worldwide…

The producers of Spider-Man Turn Off The Dark have officially acknowledged that Natalie Mendoza is leaving her role of Arachne, Read More »

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