Screening Gotham: Gasp! Spurlock's Berlin Surprise a Stunt?

Some of today's movie news of note from around New York:

--Morgan Spurlock made the trip to Berlin over the weekend to screen 15 minutes of his much-anticipated documentary about the United States' search for Osama bin Laden, making scores of new friends with a non-disclosure agreement that "said they are going to kill me, my company and my family if I say anything at all about this," according to an unnamed source in Variety. Other anonymous complainants bitterly dared to suggest to indieWIRE that the top-secret screening was an unnecessary "stunt." UPDATE: Now Variety reports that naturally, while the others reached for their Kleenex, the Weinsteins swooped in and bought the film.

--And evidently reviving its Sundance buying spree, TWC also grabbed the French thriller Inside. Clear the shelf: Harvey didn't even show up for negotiations.

--A little late, but hey: Blood Diamond director Edward Zwick brought his didactic hack road show to New York last week, also earning plenty of allies at a diamond-industry conference with his keynote address analogizing African injustices to the Holocaust. "How many of us would accept the argument that those in Nazi Germany who stood idly by and watched the slaughter of 6 million are free of blame because they now claim not to have known what was happening?" he asked the mostly Orthodox Jewish audience. Oh, Ed -- you're the real gem.

--In a post entitled "We Know the Feeling," David Carr was clearly thrilled to be liveblogging Sunday's WGA East Awards at the Hudson Theater: "The lead writer from Days of Our Lives mentioned when they won for daytime dramatic series that they had just written their 13,000th episode." Bad timing, David -- America's pity quota is exhausted for the month. Nay, the year.

Posted at February 12, 2007 7:34 AM