It wasn't exactly a honey of a weekend at the box office over the Veterans' Day holiday, despite the flight of Jerry Seinfeld's Bee Movie to the top of the list in its second week from No. 2 a week ago. The animated film from DreamWorks Animation recorded a three-day take of $26 million, just ahead of last week's winner, Universal's American Gangster, with $24 million. But Warner Bros.' Fred Claus, which many box-office forecasters had predicted would land ahead of the two holdovers, earned only $19 million, to place third. And MGM's Lions for Lambs opened with a tame $7 million. Overall, the box office was down 11.6 percent from the same week a year ago.

The top ten films over the weekend, according to final figures compiled by Media by Numbers (figures in parentheses represent total gross to date): 1. Bee Movie, Paramount, $25,565,462, 2 Wks. ($71,779,597); 2. American Gangster, Universal, $24,028,445, 2 Wks. ($80,388,420); 3. Fred Claus, Warner Bros., $18,515,473, (New); 4. Lions For Lambs, MGM, $6,702,434, (New); 5. Dan in Real Life, Disney, $6,002,717, 3 Wks. ($30,809,056); 6. Saw IV, Lions Gate, $4,949,812, 3 Wks. ($58,026,020); 7 . The Game Plan, Disney, $2,462,122, 7 Wks. ($85,466,069); 8. 30 Days of Night, Sony, $2,172,031, 4 Wks. ($37,430,374); 9. P2, Summit, $2,083,398, (New); 10 . Martian Child, New Line, $1,843,767, 2 Wks. ($6,106,881).

Director Delbert Mann, who often collaborated with producer Fred Coe on some of the most memorable dramas of television's "golden age," died Sunday in Los Angeles at age 87, his son Fred Mann told the Associated Press Monday. In 1953, the pair brought Paddy Chayefsky's teleplay Marty to the small screen, then to the big screen two years later. Mann won the Oscar for best director and the film won for best picture. His other movie credits include The Bachelor Party, Desire Under the Elms, Separate Tables, The Dark at the Top of the Stairs, That Touch of Mink, and the 1971 version of Kidnapped.. He also directed numerous TV specials based on literary classics including Heidi, David Copperfield, Jane Eyre, The Man Without a Country, and All Quiet on the Western Front.

The box-office success of American Gangster is not being celebrated by most African-American newspaper columnists. The online Journal-isms column by Richard Prince has compiled comments from a variety of black writers who have lashed out at the movie for exalting former drug lord Frank Lucas. Elmer Smith in the Philadelphia Daily News commented that it lifted "lowlife to new heights for a generation that doesn't remember or even care who they really were." Betty Bayé wrote in the Louisville Courier-Journal that she had talked to a friend, a former New York school teacher, who told her "Frank Lucas is the devil ... and some knuckleheads are going to go out and see that movie and think that they want to be just like him." Prince's column also quoted at length from a column in the New York Daily News by Stanley Crouch, who compared the movie with a documentary shown on BET. In the film, Crouch noted, "Frank Lucas has been given qualities that he simply did not have. We see him played as a soft-spoken and sophisticated man who closely studies the written word and only explodes into violence every now and then. In actuality, as the BET documentary reveals, Lucas was illiterate. ... He not only killed people to impress his ruthlessness on the underworld, but even put out a murder contract on one of his own brothers, whom he had brought from North Carolina to work in the drug trade with him. Lucas squashed the contract only because another brother had been killed and the drug lord did not want his mother to have to mourn for two dead sons at the same time. Always a family man. That such icy qualities are not in the movie makes it a highly crafted piece of poisonous eye candy."

SPOILER ALERT: The sci-fi website IESB.net has published what it claims are script details of the forthcoming Star Trek sequel that explain how the old Spock, played by Leonard Nimoy and the new Spock, played by Zachary Quinto meet. The lengthy article, attributed to two unnamed sources and plastered with spoiler notices, also indicates that the movie is based on an original Star Trek episode that originally aired on April 6, 1967 in which the crew of the Enterprise discovers a portal through space and time. Paramount declined to confirm the information.

A group of 85 independent film producers on Monday released a statement saying that although the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), which is negotiation with the Writers Guild of America (WGA), has the name "Producers" in its title, it is actually a group representing the major studios, television networks and multinational conglomerates: "Creative producers are not directly involved in this dispute. ... We do not dispute the need for residuals, including those from DVDs and new media. Residuals are important and significant revenues. It is only fair that the creators of films and television share in the proceeds from all of the ways the product they create may be exploited." Another group, the Producers Guild of America, also issued a statement letting it be known that it has no beef with the writers. At the same time, the AMPTP, in ads appearing in the trade press, maintained that contrary to the WGA's claims, it already makes residual payments to writers for shows downloaded or "rented" over the Internet and had placed a proposal to pay writers for "streaming" videos when they went on strike on Nov. 4.

Despite reports of behind-the-scenes efforts to bring both sides in the writers strike back to the bargaining table, the Writers Guild of America and the Association of Motion Picture and Television Producers continued to fire at one another through the news media with no suggestion that they planned to resume negotiations. Meanwhile Daily Variety reported the first apparent defections among WGA members, all of them among the staffs of network daytime soap operas. They include an unnamed "high-ranking writer-producer" on CBS's The Young and the Restless, Variety said. The trade publication indicated that many of the soaps are in such a precarious situation already that failure to produce new episodes could shut them down permanently.

A second front by writers against CBS is expected to open by the end of the week if news writers at the network, who are represented by the Writers Guild of America East, walk out. They have been working without a contract since April 2005. A strike would affect some 500 CBS TV and radio news writers on both local and national levels in New York, Chicago, Washington, and Los Angeles. National TV programs that could be affected include the CBS Evening News With Katie Couric, 60 Minutes, 48 Hours, and The Early Show. CBS on Monday issued a terse statement saying that it was "prepared for the possibility of a writers strike. We will continue to produce quality news programming for our viewers." But WGAE President Michael Winship insisted that CBS had already "taken the crowning legacy of Edward R. Murrow and his colleagues and cheapened it. ... Part of that diminution of news quality is reflected in the network's refusal to offer our dedicated, knowledgeable, hard-working members a fair and respectful contract."

NBC has notified the staffs of The Tonight Show With Jay Leno and Late Night With Conan O'Brien that they will be laid off at the end of this week, Broadcasting and Cable reported on its website Monday. The trade publication also noted that the Tonight staff could be brought back as early as Nov. 19 if NBC goes ahead with plans to air the show with guest hosts on that day. Executive producer Debbie Vickers told the trade publication, "We want to protect the staff, who have been loyal to this show for decades, in the same way that Johnny Carson reluctantly returned without his writers in 1988." The show's head writer, Joe Medeiros, expressed anger at the decision of the network to lay off staff so precipitously and noted that it had already turned off his NBC email account.

NBC's latest attempt to deliver programming over the Internet has received universally negative reviews from tech websites, with many complaining about the requirement to download a "clunky" proprietary player and the difficulty selecting and downloading programs.NBC Direct is also currently available only via Windows operating systems running Internet Explorer. Most agreed that the network's decision to yank its programs off Apple's iTunes Store and place them on its own site was premature at best and incompetent at worst. PC Magazine reported that it tried to download two TV shows via NBC Direct, but after an hour the screen still showed a "Pending" notice.

Shares of EchoStar Communications, operators of the DISH home satellite system, plunged 15.8 percent to $40.83 percent Monday on analysts' reports that many suscribers are not renewing subscriptions or had cut premium services in the wake of the real-estate lending crunch. Analysts also expressed concern that EchoStar may have not been tough enough in assessing the credit-worthiness of new subscribers before incurring costly initial installation expenses. In a message to clients, Citi Investment Research analyst Jason Bazinet said he had downgraded his rating on EschoStar from "buy" to "hold" and predicted subscriber erosion until the end of 2008 "due to subprime mortgage defaults."