EXCLUSIVE: After weeks of checking out rumor after rumor, I’m finally able to pin down details of the long-overdue shakeup that’s ahead for NBC when this fall’s primetime schedule shapes up to be an unmitigated disaster. Someone has to shoulder the responsibility, and both Ben Silverman and the Reveille development…

  So The Dark Knight posts still another best-ever. Media By Numbers is reporting that Warner Bros’ latest Batman installment crossing the $500 million domestic gross milestone today after only 45 days in release. It’s already the second-highest grossing pic of all time behind only the $600.8 million domestic haul of T…

MONDAY: Now AFTRA has officially weighed in on the Interactive Contract and confirmed what SAG Interactive Committee chair Michael Bell told me — that AFTRA is starting informal negotiations on its own. Wheras in 2005 both AFTRA and SAG bargained the Interactive Contract jointly. See AFTRA’s statement below Bell’s… SUN…

MONDAY AM UPDATE: Here is the tentative summer total through today’s holiday — $4.12 billion, compared to Hollywood’s best-ever $4.16 billion for summer 2007 or just 1.3% behind. The summer box office may have run up near-record numbers, but it crawled to a close this Labor Day weekend with some very uneven…

UPDATE: Sentencing will take place November 17th. Maybe Terry Christensen should have hired a real criminal attorney and not his entertainment law partner Patty Glaser who clearly got out of testifying against him by becoming his counsel. Being found guilty on one count of wiretapping and one count of criminal…

  Few people in Hollywood actually like Aaron Sorkin, least of all his fellow Writer’s Guild scribes who recently learned about his attempts to undermine the guild’s solidarity behind the writers strike. But NBC political anchors really really like him. Last night, NBC’s Brian Williams and MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann had…

My photographer Jim Stevenson spotted this anti-Membership First poster visible near a film production in Los Feliz today. Is this savvy or slimey? You be the judge. UPDATE: Opposing slate leader Ned Vaughn emails me: “Unite for Strength had nothing to do with this anti-Membership First flyer and I don't know who's…

Anti-Membership First Flyer Sighted…  It was inevitable in this bitter SAG election between Membership First and Unite For Strength that both slates would find red meat in the just-as-bitter relationship between SAG Hollywood and the NY Division. At issue now are remarks made by SAG national president Alan Rosenberg…

  The Pulitzer-prize winning New Orleans local newspaper thinks it’s an outrage that Lionsgate is releasing Disaster Movie on the 3rd anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. The studio that has hawked torture porn for years has now decided to make a buck off the suffering of hundreds of thousands of people, and on the eve…

I just received the following announcement: New York and Los Angeles (August 27, 2008) – Screen Actors Guild (SAG), the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA) and the advertising industry's ANA/AAAA Joint Policy Committee on Broadcast Talent Union Relations (JPC) today jointly announced an…

I was out of the office yesterday but DHD readers already knew what Joe Drake finally announced: that Lionsgate hired Alli Shearmur to head a new production arm as part of the studio’s expansion. See my previous from July 18th: Major Expansion At Lionsgate…

So my sources, BusinessWeek‘s sources, and now TheDeal.com’s sources all report that MGM is for sale despite the studio’s denials. Last night, the well-known financial website (whose articles require a subscription) noted that MGM doesn’t need Goldman Sachs because it already has relationships in place to, quoting…