Film editor Gregg Kilday, senior editors Alex Ben Block and Borys Kit and the rest of The Hollywood Reporter film team have a new colleague starting today. He is Sean Phillips (pictured), making the jump after a long and illustrious stint with Yahoo.

From Janice Min‘s internal communiqué:

I’m very pleased to announce that Sean Phillips is joining us as executive producer of THR.com’s movies coverage. As such he’ll be responsible for expanding our digital coverage of movies with a particular focus on growing our already-expanding consumer audience.

Sean has significant experience in this area. While at Yahoo over the last nine years, he has focused on content programming and worked closely with the sales and marketing teams to help expand the Yahoo! Movies audience from about 5 million monthly unique users to more than 32 million monthly uniques, and helped drive the business from $6-7 million in sales to $38 million annually.

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It’s been a while since a reporter jumped the bridge from one of Hollywood’s oldest trade publications to the other.

Tatiana Siegel, who worked for The Hollywood Reporter from 2003-2007 before later stinting at Variety, is now back with THR as a contributing editor. She joins a film team managed by Gregg Kilday that includes Tim Appelo, Alex Ben Block, Borys Kit and Pamela McClintock. Per today’s announcement:

Siegel will be based on the east coast and will contribute to coverage of the Toronto International Film Festival in September. She will also continue to make appearances as a film expert on TV networks.

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It’s a question many Los Angeles Film Festival watchers have been pondering this week. How the heck did Film Independent manage to convince Woody Allen to make an appearance at tonight’s opening night gala screening of To Rome With Love?

Based on the above Hollywood Reporter headline, a brief Q&A with artistic director David Ansen conducted by Gregg Kilday has the tantalizing answer. Not so fast. Hilariously (given the headline), here’s the non-answer provided by the critic-turned-programmer when asked about The Woodman’s rare west coast public appearance:

“I don’t know what his thought process was… I had told Tom Bernard and Michael Barker of Sony Pictures Classics that we’d really like to have Woody for opening night. And they came back a few days later and said, “We’re on.”

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The Twitter account for Quentin Tarantino‘s next movie threw out a casual query this afternoon, asking for possible Django Unchained taglines. Faster than you can type “Duck, You Sucker!”, the first round of suggestions is in.

The winner at this early stage is venerable Hollywood Reporter journo Gregg Kilday. His proposed tagline is, “Makes Mandingo Look Like Uncle F*cking Tom.”

Second prize for Round One goes to Jim Vejoda of IGN, thanks to “Django: It’s Belgian Gypsy for Bad Muthaf****r.”

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It’s very easy for bloggers working without a proofreader to occasionally blank on a person’s name and either misspell a first-last or fudge the info completely, failing to catch the mistake(s) until after the item has published. FishbowlLA can personally attest to this hazard of the trade.

In the case of Nikki Finke last night, perhaps she had Pixar Chief Creative Officer John Lasseter on the brain because it was announced earlier Monday that he will be receiving a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame November 1. In any event, when it came time to report on President Obama’s Hancock Park neighborhood movements, she placed the POTUS at Lasseter’s imaginary place rather than that of Will Smith‘s production partner, James Lassiter:

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Months before media outlets begin providing those printable Oscar ballots to help keep track of office pool tallies, the Hollywood Reporter has shared an equally intriguing scoresheet.

In a sidebar to this week’s print magazine article by Gregg Kilday and Kevin Gray about a high-level split at PR firm 42 West, there is a listing of leading Oscar publicists and the projects they likely will be tubthumping post-Telluride-Toronto-Venice.

Although not quite on the level of the main-article alleged friction between Leslee Dart and departing 42 West partner Cynthia Schwartz, FishbowlLA was struck by the specter of Michele Robertson vs. Dawn Taubin. Robertson could well be handling Warner Bros. titles J. Edgar, from perennial shoe-in Clint Eastwood, and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, while that studio’s former head of marketing, Taubin, will be pushing early season favorite The Help.

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Although Variety‘s Andrew Stewart was unable to attend the Thursday, November 11th Los Angeles Press Club panel discussion examining the challenging future of entertainment trade reporting, that still left Gregg Kilday of The Hollywood Reporter, Bob Tourtellotte from Reuters, Andrew Hampp of Ad Age and The Wrap’s Josh Dickey (pictured), subbing for a screening-diverted Sharon Waxman.

During a 90-minute discussion moderated by NPR contributor Anthea Raymond, each panelist made fine observations about the current state of the Hollywood and Madison Ave. trade nation, touching on everything from the broad re-purposing of an Us Weekly story about Beyonce being pregnant (she wasn’t) to the Mad Hatter beats of Twitter feeds.

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Is being able to instantly syndicate an opinion on a film to thousands of your closest friends affecting the opening weekend of less-than-great films?

Pshaw.

Michael Sragow at the Baltimore Sun writes:

This summer, movies such as “Bruno” and ” G.I. Joe” have had unexpected tumbles at the box office – just within their opening weekends – while “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” survived blistering critical reaction to become a blockbuster.

Box-office watchers say the dramatic swings may be caused by Twitter and other social networking sites that can blast instant raves – or pans – to hundreds of people just minutes after the credits roll.

Later in the article Gregg Kilday of the Hollywood Reporter is quoted:

“Even if you don’t have Twitter, a lot of people, especially kids, have long had the ability to text each other, sometimes from within the theater,” he says. “And for a lot of the mass-market movies, the potential audience will go whether friends tell them they’re good or not.”

Yeah but no one wants to see a panned Twitter trending topic. Unless it sucks but there are robots who turn into cars and Megan Fox is running in slo mo apparently…

Via IWantMedia.com