EXCLUSIVE: Fishbowl L.A. has learned that Lions Gate Films is greenlighting “Saw 3″ just twenty four hours after its $30.5 million opening weekend.

Why, we haven’t seen numbers like this since… since… Well, since last month, when “The Exorcism of Emily Rose” opened at $30 million.

Well, no matter. Perversely, Variety’s Gabriel Snyder
points out that the movie pulled in — somewhat inexplicably — equal numbers of men and women. Nothing, it turns out, says “date movie” like a key embedded deep within your right eye. (See below.)

Anyway, our Gate sources tell us that while Leigh Whannell and Darren Lynn Bousman will probably involved creatively somehow, likely as not Bousman won’t be in the canvas chair screaming, “Action!”.

The really scary news, though, comes at the bottom of Snyder’s story: True, “Saw II” performed so well that it’s Lion’s Gate’s best weekend ever. But overall, box office of $6.97 billion is still down this year — a drop of 6.4%.

Aigh! Now THAT’S scary.

- Joel Stein uncovers unfair cable-pop-culture-talking-head-show compensation inequities. (Note: I was on one of these shows once and had to fight to get my parking validated.)

- Microtargeting comes to California. I wish someone would microtarget MEEEEE.

- Will November sweeps be less sweepy than usual?

- John Carroll gets a fellowship at Harvard. Sorry about the weather.

In Slate, Edward Jay Epstein looks at the entertainment industry’s habit of ‘pushing the reality envelope’ in its dealings with the press. Well, pushing the envelope is kind of a euphemism. Consider:

On Sept. 4, 2005, the New York Times printed the following intriguing correction:

An article last Sunday about film piracy included incorrect revenue data supplied by the Motion Picture Association of America. Hollywood’s global revenue in 2004 was $44.8 billion, not $84 billion. Of the total, $21 billion, not $55.6 billion, came from sales of DVDs and Videos.

The correction was the result of a Times reporter, Timothy L. O’Brien, asking the Motion Picture Association of America to urnish the combined global take of the major studios in 2004… Instead of supplying the New York Times with the actual numbers, the MPAA sent bogus figures. Hollywood’s DVD revenue alone was inflated by more than $33 billion, possibly to make the MPAA’s war against unauthorized copying appear more urgent. Of course, the reporter had no way of knowing these impressive-sounding numbers were inaccurate and published them in an otherwise accurate story on film piracy.

According to Epstein, stuff like this happens all the time. Imagine! Do any of you entertainment reporters have similar stories about being misled? Let us know. Anonymity guaranteed, if you want it.

Okay, it’s not quite Jayson or Judith, but a reader pointed out this sentence in an article in yesterday’s NYT about housing prices in Watts:

Ms. Arnold said places like Marina County, Bakersfield, Ontario and Riverside, all an hour or two from the city, are luring people away with houses twice the size for half the money.

We think that Marina County is really Ventura County. And we’ll chalk this up to a bad cell phone connection. But still, would it kill the NYT to buy a map? (Think piece idea- Bad Cell Phone Connections: The New Scourge of Journalistic Accuracy.) (UPDATE: Looks like ‘Marina County’ is ‘Moreno Valley.’)

Community activist/blogger/LAT critic/exclamation-point lover Brady Westwater landed a piece in Sunday’s Current section wherein he proposes that the dilapidated shuttered theatres downtown LA’s Broadway district be re-opened as an urban renewal project:

In the 1910s, 1920s and 1930s, L.A.’s Broadway District pulsated with entertainment. In its dozen still-standing theaters, Lily Langtry, Sarah Bernhardt and Lillian Russell sang, and the Marx Brothers, Bob Hope and Jack Benny made people laugh. Wyatt Earp and Albert Einstein were in the audience, among others.

Today, these theaters are vacant. In New York, meanwhile, 6 million people flock to theaters and inject more than $4 billion into the city. Yes, $4 billion.

Okay, fine, open up the theaters on Broadway. But please don’t make me go to ‘Cats’ again.

Things I don’t like to think about: 1) Paris Hilton’s speed-dial list. 2) ‘Girls Gone Wild’ proprietor Joe Francis. 3) Sexual humiliation videotaped at gunpoint. In the new issue of Radar, FishbowlLA’s favorite Seamy Hollywood Underbelly Investigative Reporter Mark Ebner ties together these elements in the story of Darnell Riley, a Seamy Hollywood Underbelly type who made his way onto 1) and is about to go on trial for allegedly forcibly producing 3), starring 2). Anyway, it’s an impressive piece of investigative reporting, and it will make you really want to take a shower. (And it’s not online, so you’ll actually have to buy Radar on the newsstand.)

M. Night Shyamalan has entered the fray of industry people arguing about the shortening of the video window, telling a group of theater operators at the ShowEast convention that “if this thing happens, you know the majority of your theaters are closing. It’s going to crush you guys.” Meanwhile, Steven Soderbergh has emerged as the one major filmmaker who supports the shortening (or, even, elimination) of the window.

Will more filmmakers speak publicly on this issue? Probably. Will their public utterances have any real impact on the complex sequence of business decisions by large corporations that determine these kinds of industry shifts? Probably not. Will the video window shorten even further? My crystal ball is getting foggy.

Reading Michael Kinsley’s Washington Post column makes me think that during his sojourn in Los Angeles (okay, during his occasional visits to Los Angeles) running the LAT editorial page, L.A. culture rubbed off on him more than anyone realized. Today, for instance, he uses his column to essentially write studio coverage on the Plame leak investigation:

All the glam elements are there: a secret agent, international intrigue, sex if you know where to look, blogs, moral dilemmas, movie-of-the-week dialogue at the White House. (Aide: “Mr. President, somebody has inserted a lie into your State of the Union address!” The President: “This is clearly the work of al Qaeda. We must invade Iraq immediately. Or is it Iran?”) But somehow all these elements don’t cohere. Alfred Hitchcock coined the term “McGuffin” to describe the gimmick that keeps the plot moving. He said you need one. The trouble here is not the lack of a McGuffin but a surplus of them.

So, all you development people out there, you heard it from Kinsley. You don’t have to follow the Plame case. It’s a pass. No through-line.

Buried in a ho-hum Sony earnings story is perhaps central irony behind the movie business these days.

Yes, on the surface, it is perfectly fair to say that Sony’s had a lousy year so far: Turkeys like “Stealth,” “XXX: State of the Union” and “Bewitched” produced plenty of red ink, and so the studio posted a $59 million operating loss. (The Sony electronics biz wasn’t much better: Revenue is down almost by half.)

But it’s too easy to simply say that the litany of bad moves by Col chairwoman Amy Pascal is the only reason. Hell, as a kid in the 80′s I didn’t just sit through corny, derivative schlock like “Iron Eagle,” — I paid for a full price ticket and loved every second.

No, in Sony’s -poor 3rd quarter results, there is something revelatory.

It’s this: Game sales surged nearly 80% to $1.9 billion, and as a direct result, the kids aren’t watching the high priced TV spots that command them to go to the movies. Why? Because their PlayStation 2′s are hooked up to their TVs.

Thanks to PlayStation Portable and PlayStation 2, Sony’s games unit moved to a an operating profit of $73 million – where as a year ago, it lost money. Sony isn’t just robbing Peter to pay Paul – they’re Peter AND they’re Paul.

Even worse? “Spider-Man 3″ isn’t due out until 2007.

No wonder Amy’s got a headache.

Now that the initial excitable ranting has faded, people are starting to think seriously about what the big alternative weekly merger means for LA. Over at the National Review Online, Cathy Seipp argues against the generally-accepted notion that the New Times has a neo-con political slant:

The notion that New Times is neocon… is just ridiculous. The chain’s big strength has always been its investigative and irreverent focus on local politics, while the defining theme of neoconservatism is a hawkish foreign policy. When New Times L.A. drifted into commenting on foreign affairs (thankfully not often), its anti-Bush tone was predictably confused, ignorant, and reflexively pro-appeasement. (Is there actually such a thing as a dovish neocon?)

Nonetheless, Seipp predicts gloom for the lefty staff of the LA Weekly, whose new boss, New Times founder Michael Lacey, is supposedly “a combination of W. C. Fields and Pol Pot,” and clearly unsympathetic to the general political stance of the paper.

Meanwhile, Citybeat‘s Donnell Alexander suggests that the merger might be good news for, uh, Citybeat:

Word on the street, though, is that New Voice Times doesn’t have the monopoly on balls. Not here, or in Seattle, San Francisco, or New York. The deal could backfire, driving readers of conscience away from the streamline chain product. CityBeat, which stands to benefit initially from its new eligibility for national ad dollars, can grow as a strong indie publication.

Because, really: If you’re an Angeleno and you want to know about that fierce stream of homeless people coursing westward from downtown over the past week, who you gonna look to? KTLA? The Times? (No. Still too busy congratulating itself for the series that’s sent all that humanity scattering in the first place.) Blogs? Please. Your only option is in your hands. Don’t shop at Alt-Mart, and we’ll make things interesting.

My personal hope is that Michael Lacey revamps the movie listing section, specifically by increasing the font size. I had to use a magnifying glass to figure out where ‘Doom’ was playing last night.