At age 69, New Yorker film critic David Denby owns at least two marks of modern media distinction. He is not on Twitter, and he still gets to mete out erudite, long-form print media movie critiques. A collection of his magazine essays spanning 1999 to 2011 make up his latest book Do the Movies Have a Future?, out next week from Simon & Schuster.

At the New Yorker, Denby famously alternates on the cinematic beat with Cambridge, UK based professor Anthony Lane. Part Six of the book is also about “Two Critics” – iconic predecessors James Agee and Pauline Kael. In the piece about Kael (an amalgamation of 2001 and 2003 articles), Denby recalls how she delivered a death blow in the early 1970s via telephone, informing him that he was simply not cut out to be a film critic.

“I was a graduate student in California going nowhere fast,” Denby tells FishbowlLA via telephone. “And if Pauline Kael hadn’t taken an interest in me – and she took an interest in many, many people, particularly young people – I probably would have become a professor of film, which is of course not bad. But this has been a lot more fun.”

“When she said, ‘This is not really for you,’ of course it was a blow and I was very upset,” he continues. “But she wound up hurting my feelings and not my career. In fact, in some ways it was the best thing that ever happened to me. Because if I had stayed within that circle, I don’t think I would have ever grown up. She was so powerful that you wanted her approval. Internally, you conformed to her opinions… It was sort of like, ‘What would Pauline think?’ And I think that’s a bad habit for anyone to get into, particularly a critic. So in a way, by being kicked out, I was forced to be my own man.”

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There’s a great piece in the September 24 issue of Newsweek about Arnold Schwarzenegger by Laurence Leamer, a biographer whose works include several Kennedy family chronicles and another, in 2005, about the former governor titled Fantastic: The Life of Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Much has changed in the intervening seven years, in large part due to a May 2011 LA Times story that broke the news of Schwarzenegger’s love child. Leamer writes that although Schwarzenegger is convinced Maria Shriver’s brothers leaked that news, the siblings vehemently deny it (at the time, TMZ reported some friends of Shriver were responsible). Overall, the author paints a now less than fantastic picture of a man ostracized by his family:

“Arnold is up there by himself in his mansion all alone with his pictures and souvenirs of a career,” says one of his old friends. “He’s like Citizen Kane.”

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Here’s a vivid reminder of just how well Tom O’Neil and his group of goldderby.com editors know the Emmy Awards beat.

Thanks to a recent Skype discussion between O’Neil, Chris Beachum, Matt Noble and Daniel Montgomery about the Best Supporting Comedy Actor chances of New Girl’s Max Greenfield (pictured), the performer’s Hollywood agents realized the wrong episode had been submitted on the co-star’s behalf. Instead of “Control,” which Greenfield’s reps had selected, the DVD reproduction house somehow pressed copies of the episode “Bad in Bed.” Tipped by Gold Derby, the TV  Academy worked with the actor’s team to remedy the mistake and get new discs out to voters with special instructions in time for the September 17 deadline.

“It’s definitely one of Gold Derby’s top ten scoops,” O’Neil tells FishbowlLA via telephone. “But nothing will likely surpass our story about Katherine Heigl lashing out at her writers after having withdrawn from Emmy consideration for Grey’s Anatomy. She was ticked off at her writers, and then there was that whole backlash against her after the story broke.”

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Chalk up another TOLDJA! for Nikki Finke, from a beat she still pretty much owns (who, what, when, where and how each year’s Oscar broadcast is taking shape).

In this case, on the red carpet heels of an August 2 LA Times report that Jimmy Fallon and Lorne Michaels were in talks to handle 2013 broadcast chores, Finke quickly harpooned that notion, explaining that these efforts had begun and ended with exiting AMPAS president Tom Sherak. This past Wednesday, Fallon confirmed his non-participation during a Today Show interview from London and last night, Kim Masters added a Hollywood Reporter item that seemingly reconfirms Michaels will not be involved with any iteration of Sunday Night Live.

In the wake of all this, the question remains not so much who the Oscars should approach for the producing and hosting gigs, but rather who might actually say yes. Word is the list of those who regularly turn down AMPAS is long and illustrious. In her updated Sherak item, Finke for example noted that perfect A-list candidate Tom Hanks continues to pass.

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The expression “to cut a swath” means to make a pretentious display, to attract attention. It’s a perfect description of some recently photographed behavior on an LA hiking trail involving director Rupert Sanders and actress Kristen Stewart.

SWATH also happens to be the handy abbreviation being used by the celeb media to refer to the movie that brought these two scandalous lovebirds together. That’s right. Sanders and Stewart cut a swath in and around him yelling “cut!” on the set of Snow White and the Huntsman.

Everywhere we look this morning, there are article mentions of SWATH director this and SWATH set that. It all adds up to some rather bittersweet etymological echoing.

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Not so long ago, the migration to Hollywood of Spanish-speaking performers was governed by a ludicrous business conceit. Here’s how Sofia Vergara’s now very rich business partner describes it in a Forbes sidebar to the magazine’s announcement that the Modern Family star is 2012′s highest earning TV actress:

“Most talent at that time was represented by their boyfriend, or their mom or dad,” says Luis Balaguer, 44, a veteran talent manager who hails from Madrid. “They would sign deals with networks, and the contracts would be in English; nobody bothered to read, let alone understand, the fine print.”

No longer, thanks in large part to Balaguer and Vergara’s company LatinWE. As ForbesWoman writer Meghan Casserly concisely details, the firm is growing by leaps and bounds as a talent representation firm, Internet portal developer, clothing line purveyor and more.

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The door has closed on a Hollywood gossip institution.

After many years at the helm of column “The Awful Truth,” Ted Casablanca (a.k.a. Bruce Bibby) announced last Thursday, right after Independence Day, that he was moving on from E! Online. This morning’s pick-up by TheWrap’s media reporter Lucas Shaw was the first we’d heard of it. From Casablanca’s farewell note:

When I first took this job at E! – in 1996, when the network founded E! Online – I was working at the established and respected Premiere magazine. Scores of people told me, “Online just isn’t the place to go.”

Everybody told me to pass on the job, and so I did. Then I called back the next day and an amazing man named Lew Harris said, yes, of course, I could change my mind. And I did.

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Long before Scott Feinberg joined the ranks of professional film awards bloggers in the fall of 2008, he started working as a Connecticut high school student on a book about classic Hollywood movies. One of the first big names he convinced to participate was Ernest Borgnine, who passed away over the weekend at age 95.

However, as Feinberg recalls in his Hollywood Reporter tribute to the late Oscar winner, this exciting “get” didn’t quite pan out as planned:

I spent hours and hours preparing for the interview… On the appointed day, at 8 a.m., I called Borgnine again. When he answered the phone, sounding disoriented and bewildered, I just assumed that he had forgotten that I would be calling him, so I said, “Hi, Mr. Borgnine, it’s Scott Feinberg. How are you?”

After a bit of a pause and then some stuttering, he replied, “My boy, do you know what time it is?” My heart sank. I realized that, in my excitement about the interview, I had somehow just assumed that Borgnine was in New York, not Los Angeles, and was therefore operating on Eastern Standard Time just like me. It was now clear to me that he wasn’t. I was mortified, quickly tried to explain the mistake, and then hung up. He was very nice about it all, but when 8 a.m. PST finally came around three hours later, I just didn’t have the nerve to call him back.

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Perez Hilton just landed himself another syndicated radio show. The gossip blogger has a new gig with Cumulus Media Networks to host “Perez Nights Live,” with co-host Adam Bomb. The show will, of course, have a celebrity focus and will air weeknights from 7-11pm ET in 50 markets–including Dallas, Houston, Atlanta and Detroit.

Looks like LA didn’t make the cut. Noooooooo!

[Photo: Helga Esteb/Shutterstock.com]

We admit it. When we first came across the THR headline “Fred Willard to Narrate PBS ‘Antiques Roadshow’ Spinoff ‘Market Warriors’, we thought it was some sort of joke.

But it turns out the Best in Show deadpan master was the network’s first choice for the VO component of Market Warriors. Debuting in July, the program will allot cash to a quartet of expert antique shoppers and task them with turning that bounty into the most valuable set of flea market purchases:

“We are sometimes criticized for not having a sense of humor,” concedes PBS president and CEO Paula Kerger. “And I think Fred will enable us to counter that a little bit.”

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