If you weren't aware, Warner Bros. claimed that the new film couldn't make the Wicked Witch green, since that was something specific to their film, and not L. Frank Baum's children's books. So instead we get a Glinda-riffic Michelle Williams all in white, a fashionably red Mila Kunis, and a darkly chic Rachel Weisz (channeling Charlize Theron in Snow White and the Huntsman) as the hottest witchy witches since Idina Menzel took the stage as Elpheba in Wicked.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yclgHQaAEJU

Oz centers on James Franco as a much younger wizard, who, as it appears in the previews, somehow lands in Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland (maybe the producers had some say in which way the wind blew), and befriends a red queen witch and a white queen witch. Though we haven't seen the film, we're hoping the rest of the plot revolves around the Wizard convincing his new friend to put on a magical art show at the Emerald City's Film Festival, culminating in a Marina Abramovic-style performance piece where a house falls on one--or preferably all--of them.

Also starring Zach Braff.

Real-life owls were stationed at both sides of the reception room at yesterday afternoon's press preview of Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole 3D at the Time Warner Center.  One was available to be photographed with the many children in attendance, the other, a barn owl, was in a glass cage under a red light.

"We heard that the other one can be a bit grumpy," said someone with Warner Brothers PR. "How awful would it be if he bit one of the kids?"

The informational flyer beside the more ornery of the two described barn owls as "highly nocturnal."

The preview showed off some key scenes from the children's movie, a tale of two warring factions of owls in the style of Watership Down. In a speech to the assembled kids, execs and reporters, director Zack Snyder described the story as "Joseph Campbell-ian." The audience was then treated to a 300-style fight scene featuring the voice of Helen Mirren.

The film will be Mr. Snyder's first in 3D. After the viewing we asked him about the ongoing debate in the movie industry: is 3D the new standard for filmmaking?

"Yeah I don't know," he said. Then he joked: "Some day someone's going to make an art school film in 3D then this whole debate will be over. "

Then he demonstrated some mid-air fight choreography on us, curling his fingers into owl talons and screeching. Mr. Snyder is not tall, but we found ourselves backing away, slightly.

Up, up and away!

Sucker Punch is scheduled to start filming this fall, and Warner Brothers has already earmarked October 8, 2010, as its release date. Now, maybe we’re being a bit cynical, but if all of that actually happens according to plan, we’ll be shocked. We understand that the studio is still counting all the money they made on The Dark Knight, but we can’t see how it would be fiscally responsible for them to push ahead with Sucker Punch, especially in the wake of Watchmen. Whether Mr. Snyder bungled the film creatively is unimportant—for the record, he produced a perfectly mediocre adaptation of a perfectly mediocre comic book. What is important, however, is the economics of it all. Watchmen, under any metric, has been an outright disaster. The film has been out for 18 days and will probably just barely squeak past $100 million at the box office later tonight. By the end of its run, Watchmen will be lucky to top out at $115 million. Considering Mr. Snyder’s film cost at least $150 million to produce, plus the untold millions that were spent on marketing—not to mention the legal fees that Warner Brothers had to pay even to release the film—$115 million won’t even pay for a DVD featurette on Dr. Manhattan’s penis.

And after all that, we’re supposed to believe that Warner Brothers is going to give Mr. Snyder another hundred million to waste away on a hyper-stylized, hyper-violent film? One, we might add, without a built-in audience (it’s an original script) and no major movie stars. The mere thought of it is ridiculous. The studio would have a better chance of making money if they owned AIG stock. Let's just say we won't be writing Sucker Punch's October 8 release date down in pen.

Mr. Isaacson, the CEO of The Aspen Institute and the former top editor at Time, started his career in newspapers, and was also an engineer of Pathfinder, Time Inc.'s early—but failed—news portal, so you'd think he would be a hard-core print partisan. Not so:

After sifting through some possible industry-saving scenarios, like eliminating papers' print editions (hello, Christian Science Monitor!) or waiting out "the long winter," Mr. Isaacson makes a proposal:

One of the obstacles standing in the way of users paying for content, according to Mr. Isaacson, is Internet service providers, which "get to charge customers $20 to $30 a month for access to the Web's trove of free content and services. As a result, it is not in their interest to facilitate easy ways for media creators to charge for their content."

What's strange about that statement is the fact that Time Warner Cable—which announced in May 2008 its intention to spin off from Time Warner but hasn't been approved to do so yet—is the country's second-largest provider of cable and boasts of delivering 8.3 million high-speed services to residential customers in 28 states on its Company Highlights page.

Presumably some of those end users are reading newspapers—not to mention Time, Inc. publications—for free.

That is, when they're not watching pirated Warner Brothers movies like The Dark Knight, which Brian Stelter and Brad Stone in today's New York Times report has been illegally downloaded "more than seven million times around the world."

“I don’t think people want to watch a show of a woman involved in putting innocent people in jail,” said Sam Zherka, perhaps optimistically. Zherka, owner of the libertarian-leaning Westchester Guardian and the Flatiron's V.I.P. Club, helped organize the protest. 

The anti-Pirro poster boy and leader of the group is Jeffrey Deskovic, who was wrongfully convicted of rape and murder three years before Pirro became the Westchester D.A. She denied numerous appeals, and in 2006, Deskovic was exonerated, after spending 16 years in prison.

“She kept the ball rolling against me,” Mr. Deskovic said of Pirro.

Now, he would like the WB network to suffer for putting Pirro back in the limelight with Judge Jeanine Pirro, a syndicated afternoon show that sounds a lot like Judge Judy.

Most of the other protesters were Westchester civil rights activists familiar with Deskovic, who is now an activist and reporter for Zherka’s newspaper, but others had more general complaints.

“It was a little bit of everything,” said Teodoro Chavez, explaining why he took the train down from Westchester with his friend Richard Guzman. They were concerned with prosecutors in general (two people Pirro put in jail, Richard Deguglielmo and Anthony DiSimone, have since been cleared upon findings of prosecutorial misconduct) and Pirro in particular. 

“Prosecutors are overzealous,” said a New York City man named Steven who raised his poster over his face when I raised the camera. “They’re horrors!”

Judge Jeanine Pirro is the latest act in Pirro's post-Westchester career. In 2005 she launched, then aborted a bid for Hillary Clinton’s Senate seat. A year later she lost the attorney general's race to Andrew Cuomo. She is currently under investigation for wire-tapping her husband, and in February she broke her tooth during a guest spot on Fox News.

“Pirro had a future,” said Chris Guerrero, a messenger walking by the protest. “I don’t know what the heck is wrong with her now.”

This is the true story of Brooklyn resident Michael Martin, according to Reuters, which reports that Mr. Martin's contest entry, Brooklyn's Finest, is prepping for a May shoot in the very locations of his native borough that inspired him to write the script in the first place. It actually ended up coming in second, go figure, but caught the attention of a producer from Warner Bros. who happened to be looking for "a writer with an authentic and gritty voice" to pen a followup to 1991's New Jack City. Mr. Martin was his man.

Aside from getting Brooklyn's Finest ready for the screen (Antoine Fuqua is directing and Ethan Hawke will star), Mr. Martin is currently writing New Jack City 2 -- on his lunch breaks, that is. Yes, he still works for the MTA, although he was recently promoted to construction flagger. Only in New York!

Variety reports: