The highly competitive rivalry between Deadline’s Mike Fleming and the film reporting crew at Variety has taken a contentious new turn. Reacting on Wednesday to a variety.com item by Jeff Sneider and Justin Kroll (with help from Marc Graser) about Warner Bros.’ pursuit of Ben Affleck as a possible director for a Justice League movie, Fleming lost it:

I’ve been reading a lot of stuff lately that has been of questionable substance, and I’m calling bullshit on this big Variety scoop today that implies Warner Bros. will get Ben Affleck as director of its Justice League film. This is a story I checked out days ago, and didn’t run when Affleck’s reps stated that it was not going to happen with him…

Just because the studio wants Affleck doesn’t mean he will do the movie, and several sources tell me he might take a meeting, but that’s it.

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Early today, PT time, Deadline reporter Mike Fleming cranked out an item with the headline:

Shortly thereafter, Variety’s Jeff Sneider tweeted the following response:

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Today is the first day on the TV beat job at Variety for AJ Marechal (pictured). She was an intern last year with the Hollywood trade from March through November.

Marechal’s salaried return continues a rather remarkable string of success for the program instituted in 1995 by current managing editor Kirstin Wilder. “During my college days, I interned at the St. Petersburg Times in South Florida and the News & Observer in Raleigh,” Wilder tells FishbowlLA. “I learned first-hand how important these opportunities can be and was determined when I came to Variety to put an internship program in place.”

From the get-go, Wilder insisted that the trade’s internship program be a paid one. The list of people who’ve jumped from intern to staffer at Variety over the years is long and impressive. Marechal joins a current group of internship-program grads that consists of chief film critic Justin Chang, music editor Andrew Barker, senior writer Marc Graser, graphic designer Dan Doperalski and film reporters Andrew Stewart, Jeff Sneider, Justin Kroll and Rachel Abrams.

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Late Thursday afternoon, Variety’s film editor tweeted out a  biting pronouncement:

This was quickly followed by a tweet from his colleague at variety.com:

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Since launch in 2009, TheWrap has proven to be a fertile training ground for entertainment journalists. Among the earliest examples of reporters who worked under Sharon Waxman before moving on to other outlets are Amy Kaufman (now with the LA Times), Josef Adalian (Vulture), Hunter Walker (New York Observer), Josh Dickey (Variety), Jeff Sneider (Variety) and Dominic Patten (Deadline).

Still, with the recent departure of Jason Scoggins, Cindy Kaplan and Joshua L. Weinstein for Film Funds LLC, the following photo now stands as a rather graphic representation of the kind of turnover Waxman (and others in the space like The Hollywood Reporter and the LA Times) must sometimes deal with. Of the ten people flanking Waxman in this April 1, 2011 birthday celebration snapshot obtained by FishbowlLA, only one person remains employed with the start-up company today.

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According to Variety’s Jeff Sneider, Lee Daniels wants Jane Fonda to play the part of Nancy Reagan in her his upcoming adaptation The Butler. The story of a White House servant spans many different administrations and Fonda’s role is not a main one. Still, with the actress’ CAA reps still needing to officially ink the deal, the mere possibility of Fonda-as-Ronald’s-First-Lady smacks of stunt casting.

Not to mention the kind of Hollywood move that will light up the blogosphere for days. Check out the punctuation at the end of this Fox Nation morning headline:

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A few weeks ago, we picked up a report from Variety‘s in-house BlogDogger, which claimed that the time-stamp for a Deadline.com item about an Emma Stone movie project had been falsified to match the 3:00am PT January 5 mark of a similar report on Variety. On behalf of Deadline, Nikki Finke responded a few days later, without—as Variety film writer Jeff Sneider and others subsequently tweeted—addressing the core issue of an apparent magical time-stamp. She explained that Deadline.com reporter Mike Fleming had been working on the same Stone news for several days beforehand, and this, apparently, justified whatever may or may not have followed.

Well, here we go again. According to BlogDogger, after Variety posted an item by Sneider and Josh Dickey on Monday night at 7:37 p.m. PT about the Sundance sale of The Surrogate, the article was followed in short order by similar items at LATimes.com and HollywoodReporter.com. Then, once again, a Deadline.com Fleming item appeared with a time-stamp that BlogDogger alleges was illicitly tweaked to cozy up to that of THR‘s third-place report posted at 8:19 p.m PT/11:19 pm ET.

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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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Here’s a great example of just how ridiculous it can get sometimes on Twitter.

It started Wednesday when Variety film reporter Jeff Sneider retweeted an Entertainment Weekly TCA article about Alex Trebek. Although the headline should have ideally spelled it “Lede,” the word was listed as “Lead:”

Within a matter of minutes, Movies.com contributor Scott Weinberg and Badass Digest reporter Devin Faraci were getting on Sneider’s case for spelling it “Lead.” Variety editor Chris Krewson jumped to his colleague’s defense and soon, the Twitter mini-brawl was on:

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