Still without a contract, the Screen Actors Guild has sent a 12-page mailer to its members, arriving in mailboxes today, with a poll attached. It lets members choose one of two options regarding the $250 million offer from Hollywood studios and producers, the AMPTP:

• Continue negotiating with the AMPTP to secure a fair TV/movie theatrical contract for actors with better terms than the AMPTP’s June 30th “final offer."

• Accept the AMPTP’s June 30th “final offer" without modification.

The intention is to take the sense of the membership before September 15. With no deadlines or other upcoming lines in the sand, the stalemate has no pressing reason to be broken.

Nonetheless, the AMPTP wasted no time in sticking out its tongue in this statement:

"The two questions on the postcard "poll" are written in a completely one-sided way, characterizing the June 30 final offer as unfair.

The two sides then proceed to bicker over whether they are having "informal" talks. Yes they are, says SAG. No they're not, says the AMPTP.

Sounds like progress to me.

From Abu Dhabi we hear news of the cash float Hollywood has been waiting for: a $1 billion filmmaking fund, financed by the tiny, cash-rich emirate.

This is government money, (I feel the need to repeat this: Government. Money.) earmarked to make up to eight films per year over the next five years, a fund to be run by Edward Borgerding, a former Disney executives who now heads the Abu Dhabi Media Company.

Borgerding told all this to the Financial Times of London, ahead of a formal announcement on Wednesday.

This is fascinating news for a lot of reasons. First, Hollywood is getting hard up for cash as the money has dried up from private equity and hedge funds in recent years. Second, it is Dubai, not Abu Dhabi, that has been vying to become the capital of popular culture. Dubai has poured millions upon millions into its annual film festival, has built gleaming new entertainment spaces and pays vast sums to lure top entertainers.

Abu Dhabi, meanwhile, has spent a few billion to hire the Louvre and the Guggenheim to build satellite museums.

But apparently Abu Dhabi got the moviemaking itch too.

(Note to readers: I will be travelling to Dubai and Abu Dhabi both in October to report on cultural developments there and get to know the region. I look forward to sharing my discoveries with you on this blog, and in ArtNews magazine, which is sending me on assignment.)

This can only be good news for the movie industry. And I can't wait to see what fashions Armani comes up with to dress the new moguls from the Middle East, the Red Carpet Abaya.

Mac MacGuff: And this, of course, is Juno.Mark Loring: Like the city in Alaska?Juno MacGuff: No.

-- from "Juno," directed by Jason Reitman

Honest to Blog. What were the odds that commie-leftie-Obama-loving Hollywood would create the real-life template for the shenanigans playing out at the Republican Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota?

We're talking about the Sarah Palin drama about to come whirling down into the Xcel Energy Center like some hurricane blown up from the south. Except that this hurricane is coming down from the north, west of Juneau, Alaska, led by a former beauty queen turned schoolmarm politician-turned-vortex of hot molten media interest.

Juneau, Juno, what were the odds? It sure seems as if life will be imitating art today, as Palin brings her MacGuff-like clan -- teenaged pregnant daughter, Bristol, and the teenaged father of the baby, Levi Johnston. Rise, evangelical base, and hail their choice to keep the baby.

This sounds way too familiar. So I called my friend Jason Reitman, the director of "Juno" to ask him. " You'll recall that this tiny film that was not about teenaged pregnancy even while being about teenaged pregnancy somehow grossed over $100 million, and became Oscar nominee for Best Picture.

Reitman, first of all, is Canadian and not voting.  Regardless, any similarities between Juno and Juneau are, he insists, pure coincidence. "Twenty-four hours into this story, there's no real way to tell whether life is imitating art or not," he said from his home in Los Angeles. "You've got a 17-year-old pregnant teenager, and Juneau is the capital of Alaska. The coincidence is cute."

But, he insisted, his movie tried hard not to make a political statement. "'Juno' is not about pregnancy," he said. "It's a location. I do not want to tell people what to think. They have to come up with their own conclusion. Just don't judge." (Isn't that its own kind of conclusion?)

Reitman insists he has no political point of view on any of this. Who's business is Palin's daughter's pregnancy anyway?

"Juno" is not about choosing to keep a baby or not, he said: "It's just about a teenaged girl who grows up too fast, and a 30-year-old man who won't grow up." Then the director went to put his toddler daughter to bed.

From today's Washington Post, a nod to "Loot" as a book to watch for this fall:

BY Marie Arana  |  AUGUST 31, 2008

There is special pleasure in pawing through books before they publish and imagining the insights they'll bring. Consider the years of work and accumulated wisdom that have gone into producing the 116 that follow. Here is a treasure trove of knowledge, from a chronicle of the White House war room to the artistry of Marc Chagall. Here, too, is a world of the imagination, from the slave trade as conjured by Toni Morrison to the nervous '50s with Philip Roth. This is but a mere fragment, a scattered sampling of what's in store for our readers as we head into the busiest season of the year.

Artistic Pursuits

• Breakdowns, by Art Spiegelman (Pantheon, Oct.). The creator of Maus looks back at the mad, MAD '60s.
• Chagall, by Jackie Wullschlager (Knopf, Oct.). Born dirt poor in late 19th-century Russia, he became one of the great artists of the modern age.
• John Lennon, by Philip Norman (Ecco, Oct.). The legendary musician began life as a psychologically scarred child, under the roof of his Aunt Mimi.
• Le Corbusier, By Nicholas Fox Weber (Knopf, Nov.) One of the most admired and reviled architects of the 20th century worked for Mussolini and the USSR, too.
• Loot, by Sharon Waxman (Times, Oct.). Who should own the great works of ancient art? And why were they stolen in the first place?
• Mona Lisa in Camelot, by Margaret Leslie Davis (Da Capo, Nov.). How Jacqueline Kennedy helped bring Da Vinci's masterpiece to America.
• Reagan, by Marc Eliot (Harmony, Sept.). Focusing on the actor's Hollywood years, an insight into the leader.
• Spellbound by Beauty, by Donald Spoto (Harmony, Oct.) Alfred Hitchcock's complicated and often scandalous relations with his leading ladies.

Update: My colleague David Gill writes in to observe that Greece has not, in fact, ruled out legal action against Shelby White, despite the return of these pieces. See his link in Comments on the reconstruction of the fragmented tombstone. (Photo is a composite of the two pieces, with thanks to Gill.)

Earlier:

Shelby White, the New York-based art collector and donor, has returned two pieces from her private collection to Greece, Reuters reports. This is in addition to items White has already returned to Italy, and which puts her out of further legal jeopardy.

The items, a bronze vase from the fourth-century B.C. and the upper part of a marble tombstone, have been put on display at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens. The tombstone will eventually be reunited with a lower fragment, which is housed at the Museum of Vravrona, meaning the tombstone can be exhibited as a whole for the first time. No word on how this monument came to be dismantled in the first place.

UPDATE 9/6/08: Jury selection was completed on Friday. Opening statements are scheduled for next Friday, Sept. 12.

PREVIOUSLY: The trial of Anand Jon has begun in Los Angeles Superior Court downtown. As promised, I will be posting updates on the case. Yesterday and today lawyers dealt with procedural matters and arguments over whose and how many computers police seized from Jon's apartment. Today voir dire began, the process of jury selection. Judge David S. Wesley cleared the courtroom, so no reports yet from that process.

Opening statements are set for September 12.

(Thanks to Los Angeles Magazine for linking to these posts through the trial, at www.lamag.com.)

The 33rd Toronto International Film Festival opens tonight in the Canadian metropolis, with the dollar at dismal near-parity with her Canadian facismile.

Yours truly is not there, being tied to her desk and ever so busy building The Wrap News. The festival, the unofficial opening of the serious movie season, will last until September 13.

But wait! Already four acquisitions were announced today, ahead of opening night, according to IndieWire:

• Strand Releasing took the U.S. rights to Terence Davies' "Of Time and City," which will have its North American debut during the festival
• Cinema Guild picked up the U.S. rights to Jia Zhangke's "24 City."
• Brillante Mendoza's "Serbis" was picked up by Regent Releasing in North America.
• Samuel Goldwyn Films announced its acquisition of U.S. rights to Rachel Samuels' "Dark Streets."

TO PR FOLKS IN TORONTO: I may not be there, but I still care. Please call or, preferably, email when you've got acquisitions to announce, bidding wars won. We'll post them here.

Within weeks of Paula Wagner's exit of United Artists, the studio appears to have gotten some get-up-and-go, buying the option rights to the best-selling thriller by Douglas Preston, "The Monster of Florence" for a six-figure sum.

Coincidence? We think not. Here's the backstory: screenwriter Chris McQuarrie, who wrote "Valkyrie" for United Artists, has had an option on Preston's book for over a year. He befriended the writer back in 2006, when Preston wrote the story of the Italian serial killer for The Atlantic Monthly, and got a handshake deal to develop a screenplay.

The book came out while Tom Cruise was busy shooting "Valkyrie" last year, and became a huge hit, spending two months on the New York Times bestseller list. Studios came after the rights, but McQuarrie had gotten there first. McQuarrie gave Tom Cruise the book, who liked it.

So why has it taken 10 months to make the deal? Good question. I asked MGM, they declined to comment. I asked a spokeswoman for United Artists, they said: "Tom made the decision, with Don Granger, the head of production," said the spokeswoman.

Sort of. Three people on different sides of the decision-making process confirm that it was Granger and MGM that got this deal done. "It was a mixture of Harry [Sloan] and Mary [Parent]," the top executives at MGM, said one of these individuals. By the way, McQuarrie will both write and produce the project. Cruise is not envisioned either as producer or star in the story, whose main character is the serial killer who terrorized Florence between 1968 and 1985.

The secondary character, who is not a murderer, is Mario Spezi, the Italian crime reporter who dogged the story for three decades, and contributed to the book.

Full disclosure: Preston, an acquaintance, has written a blurb for my new book, "Loot."

Sunday Update: Not only is this the worst earning weekend of the year, it's the worst-earning weekend since 2003. The top 12 pictures in release took in a total of $51.6 million, according to Media By Numbers, worse than every year in recent memory except 2003, "Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star" ruled the box office.

The Nicolas Cage action picture, "Bangkok Dangerous," did even worse than early estimates indicated, taking in a feeble $7.8 million for LionsGate, according to Media By Numbers. This former A-list star has had precipitous ups and downs at the box office in recent years, and it's more down than up.

The only thing to cheer Cage up might be that Vin Diesel had as bad a weekend as he did. "Babylon A.D." took in $4 million, for a two-week cumulative grand total of $17 million.

Overture's Don Cheadle film, "Traitor," is also a bust, dropping a vertigo-inducing 318 percent this weekend, and taking in just $4.6 million in more than 2,000 theaters. Cheadle is Oscar bait, sure, but as a leading man he has not proven to be a draw.

"Tropic Thunder" is still holding up, taking in $7.5 million.

"The House Bunny," which we presume cost $3.50, took in $5.9 million, and has racked up $37 million at the box office for Sony.

"The Dark Knight" continues to soar past a $500 million domestic total at the box office, now at $512 million after this weekend.

PREVIOUSLY:

Apparently this weekend will be one of the worst of the year, nothing is cracking $10 million. Early estimates from my studio sources:

• Bangkok Dangerous $8.5 million
• Tropic Thunder $6.5 million
• House Bunny $5.5 million
• Dark Knight $5.5 million

The year to date domestic gross is running behind 2007, though not by much. 

I had heard strong buzz about this film in Toronto, and apparently there's good cause for it. Darren Aronofsky's "The Wrestler," with Mickey Rourke in the title role, just won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival.

The film is about a retired wrestler making his way through the independent circuit, hoping to make it back into the mainstream. This might be the story of Aronofsky himself, a talented maverick with early success ("Pi," "Requiem for a Dream"), who stumbled painfully when he hit the mainstream. In the wake of his big-budget debacle at Warner Bros, "The Fountain,"  Aronofsky has gone back to his scrappy, indie roots.  This movie was financed on a wing and a prayer, and the distribution rights are up for sale in the United States, but something tells me: not for long.

(Incidentally, Aronofsky must be in a pugilistic mood. He currently has a film in pre-production called "The Fighter.")