This past weekend, Chicago police arrested a man who had basically set up a recording facility inside a theater in order to make a bootleg copy of The Hannah Montana Movie. You can understand how it might have seemed worth the effort in these tough economic times: Hannah brought in $34 million in its opening weekend. Whatever degree of agita this might inspire in parents who can look forward to memorizing the dialogue in their sleep when the movie is (legally) released on DVD, it's also frustrating for those who work in the entertainment industry and are trying to catch a piece of what should be a potentially rich demographic: little boys. These rascals, it turns out, are much trickier and more elusive than little girls, who are shelling out for Miley Cyrus, the Jonas Brothers, and High School Musical. (Yet, "boys 6 to 14 account for $50 billion in spending worldwide, according to market researchers.") As Kelly Peña, a Disney researcher who some refer to as "the kid whisperer," confided to Brooks Barnes, "Boys are complicated." Peña, who works with a team of anthropologists and psychologists, is paid to interview often uncommunicative boys in order to get at the ideas and aspirations most dear to them and how they translate into cultural signifiers. “Wearing it," says a boy about the well-traveled Black Sabbath T-shirt flaking off his torso, "makes me feel like I’m going to an R-rated movie.”

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Pixar Animation Studios has sort of a funny relationship to its parent company, Disney: in terms of artistic and critical repute, its the company's prestige boutique line, yet it's also one of Disney's greatest cash cows. Last year's WALL-E was the fourth of Pixar's nine animated features to win the Academy Award, an achievement that is even more impressive when you consider that Pixar's first three features were made before the Academy bothered to create a category for Best Animated Feature. But last month, Richard Greenfield of Pali Research came up with an unusual way of celebrating the impending (May 29) release of the tenth Pixar feature, Up: he downgraded the company's stock. As Brooks Barnes reports in The New York Times, this was part of an overall expression of concern from "two important business camps — Wall Street and toy retailers" - about the commercial prospects of Up. The movie, which was directed by Pete Docter and Bob Peterson, and is to be released in 3-D, is about a 78-year-old man (voiced by Ed Asner) who, widowed and threatened with being moved to an assisted living facility, sets out for South America in a flying house powered by balloons, with an eight-year-old stowaway in tow. The naysayers fear that young audiences will find the aged protagonist and the lack of a prominent female character a turn-off. And the businessmen are expressing their lack of faith in the movie in a way that other moviemakers with strong critical reputations, such as Martin Scorsese, don't have to sit up nights worrying about: they're not lining up to produce lines of toys based on the film. "Thinkway Toys, which has churned out thousands of Pixar-related products since 1995’s Toy Story,” Barnes writes, "will not produce a single item."

This sort of talk pisses Pixar off, partly because they've heard it before.

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The New York Times has honored Dwayne Johnson with a profile. Despite reporter Brooks Barnes's rote tribute to the Artist Formerly Known as the Rock's "Paul Bunyan physique and Central Casting good looks", the piece raises suspicions that what really struck the editors as newsworthy is that, in these confused and festering times, at least somebody has got a long-term career plan. Having had mixed success with hit action films such The Scorpion King and non-hit action films such as The Rundown, and having had his acting praised for his work in such unlikely repositories for his talent as Southland Tales and Be Cool, the 36-year-old, six-foot-five-inch star is consciously making his pitch to the youth market. And not the tweens and the twentysomethings, either; it sounds as if his business cards should be printed with the motto, "You Know: For Kids!" A top executive at Walt Disney Studios says of Johnson, “He’s larger than life and has endless charisma but comes across as a regular guy on screen. That makes him a very unique talent.” But the judgement seems to be that, in a casting universe dominated, in Barnes's words, by those "who are either intense and brooding (Christian Bale) or pudgy and dorky (Seth Rogen)", the Rock lacks an "edge." That might help to explain why one is drawn to him, as to solid flotsam floating past in a hurricane, when he's passing for the most normal thing in the context of the storm of weirdness that was Southland Tales. "“Audiences, particularly kids," says director Andy Fickman, "seem to love discovering that a guy this big and this good looking is actually very sweet and very funny." As did the autograph-seeking stranger who, Barnes writes, interrupted Johnson's dinnertime interview to ask, "“Um, I’m sorry to interrupt you while you have a knife in your hand..."

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Universal would prefer that you not call its forthcoming American Pie: Beta House a direct-to-video release. The preferred corporate euphemism is now "DVD Premiere." And as Brooks Barnes reports in The New York Times, studios have reconceived the direct-to-DVD release as an important, pre-planned moneymaking part of the operation. The key element here is the proper way to continue to exploit a well-established brand name to which you own the rights. A few years ago, if you got the numbers back on the fifth Police Academy movie and found that the profits had dropped off considerably from the first installments but that the damn thing was still making money, you had a clear choice: you could decide that, as George Clooney said after the release of Ocean's Thirteen, "This tree has been sapped," and spend the rest of your life having nightmares about the money that Police Academy 6 might have made, or you could suck it up, green-light yet another sequel, and bring shame and dishonor upon your family.

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A business story by Brooks Barnes in The New York Times examines how the writers' strike is affecting social interaction "in the giant high school cafeteria that is Hollywood." As Barnes points out, "Only a rarefied circle of writers, of course, has the ability to truly mingle with Hollywood’s corporate royalty. The vast majority of writers are average folks who manage a middle-class existence or are unemployed in their chosen profession at any given moment. The union says the average income for a member is $60,000. But the union also counts as members dozens of creators of hit television shows, who can take home upwards of $5 million a year, and writers who command fees of $1 million for a screenplay or more." These are the ones who frequent the same restaurants, hotels, and luxury resorts as the bloated capitalist overdogs who run the studios, and who are finding themselves huddled in whispers about the greedy moneybags at the adjoining table at the Four Seasons, not the first place where you might expect to hear voices raised in a rousing, impromptu chorus of "Joe Hill." The strike does seem to be bringing inch-stained wretches of different tax brackets together: when David Letterman, having worked out a deal with the WGA to use his own writing staff (paid by his production company, not CBS), returned to the air last night, the ten "striking writers" who marched onstage to read the Top Ten list included Nora Ephron, the celebrity journalist turned Hollywood player (Sleepless in Seattle, the screenplay of When Harry Met Sally). In the meantime, writers and executives who were once nominally friendly and ducking past each other at grocery stores and their kids' school assemblies and being seated "selectively" at Campanile, whose manager, Jay Perrin, told the paper, “I don’t think a fistfight would break out. It is more like people cracking jokes about each other with more bite than normal.” The strike also crosses family lines; Barnes cites examples of striking writers who happen to be married to network executives, leading us to wonder if maybe Nora Ephron is taking notes for a future wacky romantic comedy while she's down there in the trenches. That might be reason enough to hope the strike will never end.