Director Brian De Palma's latest film Redacted is scheduled to open tomorrow (Friday) in limited release as theater owners brace for possible protests. The film, inspired by the case of the rape and murder of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl by U.S. soldiers, has been condemned by Fox News commentator Bill O'Reilly, who called on his audience to bring signs to theaters reading "Support Our Troops" and predicted that the movie "will incite anti-American hatred around the world." He also called the film's executive producer, Mark Cuban, an "anti-American" and encouraged fans of the Dallas Mavericks, which Cuban owns, to protest against the film at the team's games. O'Reilly described De Palma as "a true villain in our country." In response to such verbal assaults, the director told the Canadian Press, "I have been needlessly attacked in the press and the blogs as a left-wing wacko who should be horse-whipped, and how can I say anything terrible about what's going on in relation to the troops? ... I just state what I feel very strongly, and I don't have to be loved. ... I'm not running for office." In a separate interview with Philadelphia City Paper, De Palma accused the media of soft-pedaling the Iraq war, whereas during the Vietnam War, "we saw the images. We saw our casualties, we saw their casualties. That's what got us out into the streets, and that's what got us out of the war." At the end of Redacted, he shows a montage of victims of the Iraq War as well, although their faces have been digitally obscured, reportedly on orders from Cuban. Nevertheless, De Palma observed, the original photographs appear all over the Internet "and yet none of these images has ever gotten into the mainstream media. ... How does that happen?"

DreamWorks Animation chief Jeffrey Katzenberg is predicting that new 3-D projects will drive up the box office as moviegoers seek out entertainment that they can not duplicate at home. As Katzenberg put it in an interview with the New York Post following announcement of a deal with IMAX to release his forthcoming films in 3-D IMAX, "I think this becomes something that so differentiates what you get in your home versus what you get in a movie theater, it becomes a real driver to keep people excited about the movie going experience." Box office analysts will be keeping an eye on receipts for 3-D screenings of Beowulf, which opens tomorrow, to see whether audiences will in fact be willing to pay premium prices to see the 3-D version. The film, from director Robert Zemeckis, uses the same 3-D performance-capture animation technology that Zemeckis introduced in The Polar Express. Meanwhile, a daughter-in-law of John Wayne says she is hoping to restore the actor's 1953 Western Hondo, which was filmed in 3-D, and re-release it. The Hollywood Reporter reported today (Thursday) that a digital print of the movie was screened Tuesday by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Gretchen Wayne, widow of Wayne's son Michael, told the trade publication, "I would love to get this film [restoration] as good as possible and take it out for a theatrical release. ... The digital world is constantly evolving, and as it does we are able to do more and more with this very old 3-D version of Hondo."

With each of the other major studios committed either to the Blu-ray or HD DVD high-definition video-disc format, Warner Bros. has abandoned plans to release films on a "hybrid" disc with Bluray on one side and HD DVD on the other, the website High-Def Disc News reported Wednesday. Warner Home Entertainment Group spokesman Jim Noonan told the website that the hybrid disk, called Total HD, is "on hold," explaining: "We're the only studio producing content in both formats. If we were to put out Total HD with just our titles, it wouldn't really provide the solution to our retail partners that it was intended to provide. If anything, at this point, it would further complicate their life, because there would be another product looking for shelf space. Our job is not to further complicate the lives of our retailers."

The head of the entertainment industry's largest union has issued a blistering attack against the leaders of the Writers Guild of America, accusing them of embarking on a course last year that made a strike inevitable. Thomas Short, president of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE), accused WGA West President Patric Verrone of deliberately delaying talks with the Association of Motion Picture and TV Producers (AMPTP) until the last moment. "When I phoned you on Nov. 28, 2006, to ask you to reconsider the timing of negotiations, you refused," Short said in a letter to Verrone. "It now seems that you were intending that there be a strike no matter what you were offered, or what conditions the industry faced when your contract expired at the end of October." The result, he said, has been the loss of jobs for thousands of members of IATSE and other unions. "The IATSE alone has over 50,000 members working in motion picture, television and broadcasting and tens of thousands more are losing jobs in related fields." Short concluded that it was "time to put egos aside" and return to the negotiating table and predicted "irreversible damage" to the industry if negotiations do not resume. Verrone issued a brief letter in response cryptically noting that IATSE members receive five times more in contributions to their health fund from the studios than do writers, and then added, "To put it simply, our fight should be your fight." He then insisted that the WGA is "willing to negotiate" and that it was the AMPTP that walked out of the negotiations. "So please help us by doing everything you can to get the AMPTP to come back to the table and settle this strike." However, in a statement in Washington later in the day, Verrone placed a condition on returning to the negotiating table, insisting that he would do so "as soon as the companies make it clear that they are willing to respond to the issues that are important to the association, leading with new media." The AMPTP has maintained that it had presented a package dealing with new media for the WGA negotiators to consider when the WGA abruptly went on strike. In reporting on the exchange, Daily Variety observed today (Thursday) that it represented "the latest outburst in a long line of hostilities between the [two] unions."

While 84 percent of Americans are aware of the current writers' strike against the movie studios and TV networks, 75 percent say that they are "not very concerned" or "not concerned at all" about how it will affect their TV viewing, according to a study conducted by Pepperdine University in Malibu, CA and reported today (Thursday) in the Washington Post.The study said that if the networks begin running reruns after new episodes run out, they'll watch reruns; 42 percent said they'll read more. Younger people said they would spend more time renting movies or playing video games. Nevertheless, only 4 percent of those surveyed said that they side with the producers in the current strike. In a statement, WGA West President Patric Verrone said that such polls "prove that the public understands what is at stake here. Our fight represents the fight of all American workers for a fair deal."

If Nickelodeon channel's SpongeBob SquarePants movie had aired on a broadcast network Monday night, it would have come in in second place in the ratings only to ABC's blockbuster Dancing With the Stars. The special, titled SpongeBob Atlantis SquarePantis, attracted nine million viewers according to the kids channel. Over at the broadcast networks, ABC's Dancing With the Stars drew a whopping 21.80 million viewers, but second-place CBS drew 8.58 million with How I Met Your Mother, slightly below SpongeBob's audience of nine million. It was the Viacom-owned channel's biggest audience of the year, the channel said.

National Cable and Telecommunications Association chief Kyle McSlarrow accused FCC Chairman Kevin Martin Wednesday of "manipulating" statistics in an effort to bring the cable industry under greater regulatory control. "The FCC is broken," McSlarrow charged at a news conference in Washington. While particularly attacking Martin's effort to impose "a la carte" pricing on cable operators, McSlarrow added, "When you look at the kind of proposals, from a la carte, to the imposition of additional must-carry obligations, to technology mandates, to decisions that literally cost consumers more and raise their rates, to decisions that favor one industry over another ... it's very clear that what this is all about is pursuing one particular agenda item -- a la carte -- and using the rest of these proposals to pressure our industry to do voluntarily what the FCC does not have authority to mandate." He vowed to fight, saying, "We're not going to fundamentally wreck a business model and hurt our customers to appease one chairman of the FCC." Martin responded, "Our focus is not on the welfare of a particular industry but the welfare of consumers and ensuring they receive the benefits of competition in the form of lower prices, more choice and better services."