If you think this economy is causing problems for you, shed a tear for Steven Spielberg. As Kim Masters reports, DreamWorks, the film company that Spielberg co-founded in the '90s with Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen, "sold itself to Paramount in 2006 for about $1.6 billion, but the relationship with Paramount chief Brad Grey quickly soured. When contracts allowed it, DreamWorks partner David Geffen stepped out and stepped down. Spielberg and CEO Stacey Snider also left, planning to raise their own money and distribute their films through Universal. That's the studio that Spielberg has always considered his home. (He kept his offices there even after his company sold itself to Paramount.)" At the time, nobody thought that Spielberg would either be begging for pennies or sweating to close a movie deal anytime soon. But then the bottom fell out of the economy, and DreamWorks started ceding to Paramount its right to participate in the production of some hotly anticipated projects that it had developed, treating them as so many sandbags that needed to be tossed over the side. Of course, Spielberg has never lacked for a full plate, but at the moment he's been focused on Lincoln, the planned biopic starring Liam Neeson and written by Tony Kushner. Part of the idea behind the movie was to have it ready for release this year, as part of the celebration of Abe's 200th birthday, and Spielberg was hoping to begin shooting in a few weeks. But he was also hoping that he'd be able to raise the money. When he and DreamWorks found that tough sledding, they asked Universal, which was expected to ultimately distribute Lincoln, to chip in with financing. When Universal proved cool to that, DreamWorks entered into tentative, secret talks with Disney, talks that became a lot less tentative when it turned out that they weren't all that secret. When Universal, which thought it had an exclusive offer from DreamWorks, found out about the Disney negotiations, the studio pitched a fit and, in what Masters calls "an embarrassment that stunned Hollywood", told the aging golden boy and his company to go screw, "pushing DreamWorks into a hasty distribution deal with Disney—a deal less favorable, in certain respects, than the one that had been contemplated at Universal."

Lincoln is now in limbo, along with a few other DreamWorks projects (including Peter Jackson's The Lovely Bones) that the studio doesn't want to relinquish its rights to but can't afford to fund or buy outright. Spielberg is hoping that Paramount will foot the bill on Lincoln--Masters notes that the decision will be made by "Brad Grey—the man the DreamWorks team treated for a long time as a mortal enemy."

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Valkyrie, the Bryan Singer movie starring an eye-patched Tom Cruise as a German general involved in a plot to assassinate Hitler has had its release date pushed back from this October to February 13, 2009. This is the second time that the troubled production, which first generated headlines by upsetting Germans who wanted Cruise to git off their land, has had its release date rescheduled; once upon a time, it was a much-anticipated summer release, and the center of Cruise and producer Paula Wagner's plans to rejuvenate United Artists. (The previous center of that particular campaign, Lions for Lambs, crash landed into theaters last fall.) The reason for the original push-back was that Singer needed additional time to finish the film--and, rather astonishingly, he still does.

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Steven Spielberg has stepped down from his role as "artistic adviser" to the Beijing Olympics, in protest against the Chinese government's failure to use its influence to stop the Darfur genocide. In a letter to Chinese president Hu Jintao that was released to the public last week, Spielberg wrote, "I add my voice to those who ask that China change its policy toward Sudan." Spielberg's decision comes a little less than a year after Mia Farrow, in a Wall Street Journal editorial, hit the Schindler's List director in the soft places by suggesting that for him "to sanitise Beijing's image" at a time when "China is bankrolling Darfur's genocide" would threaten to turn him into the modern equivalent of Leni Riefenstahl. Now that Spielberg has distanced himself from the Chinese government, Farrow told Slate's Kim Masters that she's thrilled about his having had what she calls "a Lillian Hellman moment." (Apparently Spielberg made the announcement while wearing his Blackgama fur and revealing that he had been the model for the character of Nora Charles.)

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The death of Brad Renfro last week threw newspapers into a bit of a tizzy; few, if any, had a prepared obituary on file for the actor, who was only twenty-five years old and was regarded as, in the words of reporter John Rogers, "a relatively minor celebrity." News outlets have traditionally kept obituaries ready and on file, just in case, but one company rep who spoke to Rogers, Adam Bernstein of The Washington Post, said that he "couldn't recall any on a person under thirty." There have always been cases of celebrities dying young, of course. But now there seem to be more people who are very young and very famous — or, at least, who seemed reasonable famous recently enough that their deaths still count as news. In some cases, there's also the question of just how well-prepared one should be in the case of an event that, to put it crassly, not everyone would regard as shocking if it were to happen. (Last summer, Kim Masters of Slate ran a quote from an anonymous staffer at the gossip-heavy E! cable channel saying, "People feel like [Lindsay Lohan] is going to die — and we're not helping.")

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