Jim Carrey, the first movie star ever to command a salary of $20 million per picture, has signed a deal with Warner Bros. in which he will receive no upfront cash and no percentage of the gross for the upcoming film Yes Man. Instead, he will receive a so-called cash-break deal on 36.2 percent of the back end -- that is, the amount the studio holds onto after it recovers its production, prints and advertising costs. In her Deadline Hollywood blog, writer Nikki Finke remarks that this "could just turn out to be the worst talent deal ever" for a major star. "The conventional wisdom in Hollywood is always to get as much fixed compensation as you can upfront because you're never going to see the back end thanks to the studios' creative accounting," Finke wrote. She quoted one unnamed talent manager as saying, "Let me put it this way: if his reps were a hospital, they would be shut down for malpractice. This is a new kind of Hollywood stupid."

The Iranian animated film Persepolis, which tied for the Cannes Film Festival's Jury Award last May despite protests from the Iranian government, but was yanked from last month's Bangkok Film Festival following similar protests by Iranian officials, has been scheduled to close the New York Film Festival on October 14, organizers said Wednesday. They did not indicate whether they had heard from Iranian representatives. The film by Vincent Paronnaud and Marjane Satrapi, about a girl growing up in Iran following the overthrow of the Shah in 1979, is due to be released in the U.S. by Sony Classics at the end of the year, with the voices of the leading animated characters provided by Sean Penn, Catherine Deneuve, Gena Rowlands and Iggy Pop.

Roger Ebert, who began covering the Chicago International Film Festival in 1970, three years after it was founded, has written to the festival thanking it for dedicating this year's edition (October 4-17) to him. "It's very gratifying," wrote Ebert, who has been recovering from multiple mouth and throat surgeries and is unable to speak. Praising festival founder Michael Kutza, Ebert said, "Thinking about how much Chicago owes Michael for keeping [the festival] alive, it should be dedicated to him." The festival announcement noted that as a young critic attending the festival in its early days, "Ebert first saw films by Martin Scorsese, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Greg Nava and other future film giants."

The blood-soaked 300 movie has held on to the top spot on the video sales charts for the second week in a row. In its debut, the No. 2 film, Disturbia, earned about half as much as 300.in sales but topped it in rentals. The video debut of TMNT (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles) placed third in sales but 12th in rentals. 300, which had already set a record for sales of HDTV videos, held on to the top position among HDTV videos last week, reporting strong revenue for both the Blu-ray disc and the HD DVD version.

Movie Gallery, the nation's No. 2 video rental chain after Blockbuster, has apparently dodged a bullet. It said in a statement today (Thursday) that some lenders had agreed to allow it to delay the current month's debt payments until August 27 provided that there be no delay in future payments. Movie Gallery had said earlier this month that it did not have funds on hand to meet current debt payments.

A hacker has figured out a way to save the streamed movies that viewers rent online from Netflix. The techie online IDG News Service noted that the hack is aimed at "undermining the Microsoft Corp. technology designed to prevent people from saving the content." It reportedly involves a 14-step process that requires the use of FairUse4WM, created by another hacker.

Kathie Lee Gifford, who co-hosted Live with Regis and Kathie from 1987 to 2000, will be returning to the show for the first time to celebrate the morning program's 20th anniversary during a two-week period beginning Sept. 3. "This will be the first time Regis, Kelly [Ripa, the current co-host] and Kathie are together on the air," executive producer Michael Gelman told the New York Post. "We've been waiting for the right time to have her back and this is a big event, so we're happy to have her." In an interview with the newspaper, Gifford disclosed that she quit the program because her father was dying, "and I was not comfortable making it public... I had a very personal reason for not going through yet one more painful experience in a public way. ...I just had to have that time with him without cameras in my face and without having to explain things." (In 1997 she had to deal with controversy following reports of a tryst between her husband, sportscaster Frank Gifford, and an airline attendant.)

The conservative watchdog Accuracy in Media has demanded that NBC News apologize for airing misleading images of a Russian mini-sub, which it said had planted the Russian flag on the seabed under the North Pole. In fact, it has been revealed, the network's Nightly News program and other news programs aired footage of a sub taken during the search for the Titanic in the North Atlantic that it had received from the Reuter News Agency. "It is inexcusable that a reputable news organization like NBC would stonewall our request for a correction of the record," said AIM editor Cliff Kincaid. "Reuters corrected its error in this case, and it is high time for NBC to do the same." AIM has repeatedly accused NBC News of displaying anti-American bias in its coverage.

ABC News has confirmed that its news magazine 20/20 will air a critical feature about rival Dateline NBC's "To Catch a Predator" series. The feature will focus on Dateline's episodes filmed in Murphy, TX in which 20 alleged pedophiles were arrested after being lured online to a local home where they expected to engage in sex with an underage girl. In one instance, a former district attorney, Louis "Bill" Conradt, shot himself to death after police arrived at his home. The Murphy sting was also the subject of an article in the current Esquire. Murphy Police Chief Billy Myrick, who cooperated with the Dateline producers and praised their work, had no such praise for the 20/20 crew who, he told the Dallas Morning News, pulled up in unmarked cars and conducted an "ambush" interview with him last week. "I didn't like their tactics," Myrick said. No date for airing the 20/20 feature has been set.

Apparently, Fox is planning to turn up the entertainment content of the Super Bowl next February 3. The network announced today (Thursday) that Ryan Seacrest, host of American Idol, will emcee the halftime show and conduct interviews with celebrities arriving at the Glendale, AZ site of the game. Neither the network nor Fox has announced other talent for the halftime show. Today's (Thursday) Daily Variety observed that naming a red-carpet host is a first for a Super Bowl. The trade paper suggested that it was aimed at "trying to increase entertainment quotient to bring in non-football fans and increase already massive viewership."

The BBC has been taken to task for unleashing its iPlayer, which allows viewers to watch BBC programs on demand, using technology that is compatible only with Microsoft Windows systems. "They have been corrupted by Microsoft," the website DefectiveByDesign said in a statement. "You will need to own a Microsoft operating system to view BBC programming on the web. This is akin to saying you must own a Sony TV set to watch BBC TV." A petition campaign has been launched online urging the British government to enact legislation that would bar the BBC from using Microsoft-only technology and demanding that the Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) program within the iPlayer software be dropped.

Cable news pioneer Chet Collier, who was instrumental in the founding of CNBC, America's Talking (which became MSNBC), and later the Fox News Channel, died Wednesday at age 80. He had previously produced The Mike Douglas Show for Westinghouse Broadcasting. In a memo to staff, Fox News chief Roger Ailes, whom Collier hired as a production assistant on the Douglas show when Ailes was 22, said that he had visited the gravely ill Collier last month. "He was still watching the Fox News Channel every hour of the day. He was also still giving me good advice. He loved Fox News and was very proud of the accomplishments here. He never took any credit for himself, but we couldn't have accomplished everything we did without him."