Flickgrrl

How many young screen actors can you name -- 25 is the cutoff -- who might be the next George Clooney, Will Smith or Michelle Pfeiffer? Moviefone nominates these 25 (17 of whom whose work I know) and I think it's a pretty good list.

Shia LaBeouf (pictured), is a no-brainer. He was the human ignition of the entertaining Transformers, will be in Indiana Jones IV and was damned good in the underknown indie film A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints. I'm a big fan of AnnaSophia Robb (Because of Winn-Dixie, The Bridge to Terabithia) and Josh Hutcherson (Little Manhattan, Terabithia) and Elijah Kelly (Hairspray), and who doesn't like Keira Knightley and Scarlett Johansson?

Seems to me most of these names (including Smith, Clooney and Pfeiffer) started their careers on the small screen and got a lot of experience in weekly television. Which is why I'm a little surprised not to see Amanda Bynes and Kenan Thompson here, both of whom I like. Three generations ago, this list would have been dominated by vaudeville stars (Jimmy Cagney, Barbara Stanwyck, Mae West). Two generations ago, by radio and recording stars (Dean Martin, Doris Day, Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis, Jr.) A generation ago, it would have been SNL cast members (John Belushi, Bill Murray, Eddie Murphy). If people aren't watching television these days, where is the next generation likely to come from? YouTube?

Who's missing from this list? Vanessa Hudgens comes to mind.

No, Jodie Foster isn't firing back at Warner Brothers exec Jeff Robinov, who, alleges estimable blogger Nikki Finke, announced in the wake of the soft box office for Foster's The Brave One that Warners would no longer make movies with women as leads. My kneejerk reaction: Why would an executive punish women for a decision he made? What's he raving about?"

"Jeff never said that, it's not company policy," a Warners spokesperson told me on Tuesday, noting that Drew Barrymore, Sandra Bullock and Hilary Swank have production deals with the company and that next year's release schedule includes the sequel to Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants and an Amy Poehler/Rachel Dratch project called Spring Breakdown.

Finke stands by her story. And Robinov denies it. So what we have is a she said/he said. It has ruffled so many feathers in the Hollywood dovecote because what the exec allegedly said distills an unofficial separate-but-unequal studio policy regarding men and women in movies. My e-mail inbox is filled to the brim with indignation about Hollywood's antipathy to women.

“Women, like people of color, do seem to be held to another standard in Hollywood," Terry Lawler, executive director of the New York chapter of Women in Film and Television, e-mailed me this morning. "When a film with a central female character is a huge success, it is considered an anomaly, while the failures seem to be held against all women, rather than the particular circumstances of the failed films. So many women filmmakers who pitch female-centered stories have been told that the demographics of the movie-going audience will not support that type of film. When they give examples of huge successes, they are told that these were special circumstances that can't be duplicated.” Those huge success include Nancy Meyers' Something's Gotta Give, Amy Heckerling's Clueless, Gurinder Chadha's Bend it Like Beckham, and Julie Taymor's Frida.

"It's almost a relief to have someone say what the industry thinks collectively -- that female-driven films are less interesting and less of a draw at the box office than male-driven films. It's much easier to address blatant sexism than subtle sexism," says Martha Lauzen, the San Diego State University professor who has been tracking the employment of women in the film industry for the past 15 years in her annual "The Celluloid Ceiling" reports. "The alleged statement by Robinov reveals a remarkable lack of awareness regarding other factors influencing the box office success of films, such as how a film is sold, the amount of advertising support it receives, the competitive environment opening weekend, the quality of the film, etc. Can you imagine a studio head saying, 'the latest film by [insert name of top male star here] didn't do well. We're not going to make any more films with male leads?' Of course not. The statement [would be] absurd."

Lauzen's latest numbers show that women made up only 7 per cent of directors in 2006 and 15 per cent of producers/screenwriters/editors. Those figures represent a donwtick from 2000, when 11 percent of directors were female. Last time I checked with the Screen Actors Guild, women accounted for approximately 31 per cent of the leads in feature films, which means that for moviegoers, the world looks 70 per cent male.

"The good news," cracked director Callie Khouri (screenwriter of Thelma and Louise, director of Something to Talk About) "is that when the annual meeting of the Directors Guild takes place, there's never a line for the women's bathroom."

I wish I could find some humor in this, but for the 20 years I've been reporting that Hollywood product is too male and too pale, the situation for women on the screen and behind the camera has continued to deteriorate. A decade ago when out of 130 Oscar nominees there was only one African-American, people of color in Hollywood protested the "blackout" and the industry responded by opening doors and opportunities. When are women -- in the industry and the audience -- going to stand up and say, why the hell is Hollywood providing opportunities for our sons that they would deny our daughters?"

Your thoughts?

The cultivated Scottish rose has gone from here to eternity. (There she is, saying hello, young lovers, in The King and I.) She could make you think about the erotic life of nuns (Black Narcissus), the Electra complex (Bonjour Tristesse) and Western imperialism (The King and I), all the while projecting intense sexuality and propriety. Riddle me this: An Affair to Remember isn't a particularly good movie, but she is so compulsively watchable (even when she sings that ridiculous Irish lilt in the Boston nightclub with the green schmatte on her head) she elevates it to mythic. In their two films together, Affair and Dream Wife, she needled Cary Grant to romantic perfection.)

This lovely specimen of pale fire is hottest at her coolest. I prefer the emotional complexity of her European films (Narcissus, The End of the Affair, Bonjour, Tristesse) to her American blockbusters From Here to Eternity, The King and I and Affair. What is your favorite Kerr performance? Why? Show all work.

This extract about great movie endings from the book Ten Bad Dates With De Niro made me think of what makes for a resonant finale in this era when so many movies do not end so much as stop, prompting audiences to muse, "Is it over?"

Pictured is the final shot from The Searchers, John Ford's masterpiece starring John Wayne as the former cavalry officer who spends years tracking down the niece abducted by the Comanche. When he returns to civilization at the edge of Monument Valley, he is like Moses, someone who can lead his people to the promised land but not enter himself. It's a haunting coda to the film, bringing resolution for some of the characters but not for Wayne's, doomed to be the eternal outsider.

Everyone loves the end of Hitchcock's North by Northwest, where in under a minute, Cary Grant saves the microfilm, the world and Eva Marie Saint -- and gets to biblically know the object of his affection, as symbolized by the railroad train hurtling into the tunnel.

Director Billy Wilder was a master of movie endings, most famously Some Like It Hot, where Jack Lemmon takes off his wig to reveals to admirer Joe E. Brown that he's a guy. "Nobody's perfect," Brown deadpans -- the perfect comic ending.

Dramatic endings are harder, as they rely more on mood than on dialogue. It's hard to beat the close of The Godfather , as Diane Keaton exits Al Pacino's inner sanctum to get beverages for his visitors and sees the emotional door closing on her as his minions gather around the new godfather.

The award for best ending goes to.....?

Should the Disney animation The Lion King be rated R for risque? That's what blushing Britcrit Peter Bradshaw suggests in a recent post. (Pictured are a snuggling Simba and Nala.) Methinks he's seen the movie once too often. Youthinks?