According to the Hollywood Reporter, the latest round of layoffs brings the company's total payroll down to 70 or 80. Just for perspective, Nikki Finke reported that they had 224 staffers in November 2008. How many more tear-filled dinners can they stand before they go from the Weinstein Co. to just the Weinsteins?

Today's Hollywood Reporter notes that TWC's bosses of acquisition and production Michelle Krumm and Maeva Gatineau left through the back door at the beginning of October, while production execs Michael Cole and Carla Gardini will follow with marketing VP Gary Faber in short order. All were Miramax veterans at the end of their first contracts with TWC. Harvey says he intends to replace them, and with Inglourious Basterds [sic] currently shooting in Germany and Rob Marshall's musical Nine on the way soon after, face-value presumes to believe him.

But we'd much sooner believe he'd sell the operation for parts — Basterds, Nine, the just-shelved Forest Whitaker drama Hurricane Season, Fanboys, Shanghai and anything else Fox Searchlight, Focus Features, Flopz™ or another willing suitor can squeeze into a shopping cart on a 60-second spree through the storage locker. (Sorry, though, Lifetime — you still can't have Project Runway.) Even if The Reader can surmount its rush-job ego drama to make a legit awards-season run, whatever prestige accompanies it will wind up attributed to everybody but poor Harvey. It's almost pitiable.

Almost. In the end, the Weinstein brothers' public incompetence is really too willful to lament and too insistent to shock. Take today's Variety item, for example, in which Bob Weinstein, whose genre arm Dimension has itself survived without a production president since buying out Richard Saperstein last year, announced a greenlight for 18 titles to be produced this fall and released to straight to the Dimension Extreme DVD label in 2009. (This coming the same day Dimension shelved its Cormac McCarthy adaptation The Road indefinitely.) They're all franchise installments or remakes — Pulse 2, Midnight Man 2 and 3, Children of the Corn, Chapter XXIV, etc. — budgeted between $3 million and $6 million. “Having learned how profitable a video library is and having already found great success launching franchises on video, this was a natural and obvious progression,” Bob told the trade.

Contrast that with his appearance sitting in for Harvey last week at Nielsen's Media and Money conference, where the Reporter cited his bearishness toward a "dwindling DVD market" and the vague hope that he might be lucky enough to exploit that library — not $75 million in new productions — through VOD and Web downloads. Is the Weinsteins' output deal with Showtime richer than we thought? And with almost as many empty desks as delayed titles left in the office, who is selling these films? How are they even getting made?

That said, Zack and Miri Make a Porno will probably open in the Top 3 next week with little more than stick figures on its poster and morbidly obese Kevin Smith regaling America with his stories of broken toilets, so what do we know? As you were, Harvey, we guess.

• Exodus at Weinstein Co. [THR]

• Dimension adds to video business [Variety]

Says Dread Central:

Despite an impassioned plea by AICN's Moriarty several weeks back for Harvey Weinstein to give Howard McCain's vikings vs. an alien creature feature Outlander a wide theatrical release it looks likes that plea fell on deaf ears (or should I say deaf eyes?) and the film will be getting dumped onto DVD in November.

Movies Unlimited just made Outlander available for pre-order with a November 18th street date listed for its release (pre-order it here). There's been no official DVD announcement from The Weinstein Company and I've not seen it listed on any other DVD websites, save for Amazon. Movies Unlimited is usually fairly reliable, although several months back they had DVD release listing for All the Boys Love Mandy Lane that didn't pan out.

Mandy Lane is another good example of the Weinsteins' increasingly head-scratching strategy; a teen horror movie (directed by Jonathan Levine before he made The Wackness) that recalls the heyday of the Weinsteins' Dimension Films, it was bought by Harvey and Bob at the 2006 Toronto Film Festival, then delayed and shelved for nearly a year until Senator bought it off of them (though, to our knowledge, it still hasn't yet seen an actual release).

While we know that times (and purse strings) are tight for the Weinsteins these days, we have to question the judgment of giving so many films in their library — including the star-studded ones — such a bungled release. We've got a wacky suggestion (and you'll have to bear with us, since none of us are Oscar-winning producers or anything): if your company is in danger of going under, why not simply buy movies you actually intend to release? We know, it's crazy... but it might just be crazy enough to work.

• Outlander DVD Landing in November [Dread Central]

Not coincidentally, The Promotion was one of the Weinsteins' titles distributed by Third Rail Releasing, the de facto dumping arm where TWC's (often expensive) stepchildren once quietly went to die. But don't take our word for it; in perhaps the must-read Weinstein chronicle of the season, Harvey comes clean to THR's Gregg Goldstein:

In fact, the Weinstein Co. has created a new distribution label, Third Rail Releasing, to handle films like the recent Catherine Zeta-Jones vehicle Death Defying Acts. Acquired primarily for the home video market, the Weinstein Co. released it in just two theaters to fulfill contractual obligations. "We should have had Third Rail two years ago, because it's a good way of differentiating between what we really believe in, and what has been for ancillary value," Harvey said.

But if the theatrical release is, as the cliche goes, just publicity for the DVD, what does Death-Defying Acts' $5,095 (yes — four figures, one comma) gross represent for this "ancillary value"? Harvey! Baby! Listen: Nobody knows these fucking movies exist. And that ridiculous Showtime deal you made this week? Cable carriers generally only pay for movies their customers have heard of. And your analogy in the BusinessWeek profile — "We're like Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls, who won all those titles and everyone wanted them to fail"?

Oh, Harvey. We miss you already.

• The Weinstein's Shaky Second Act [BusinessWeek]

• Harvey and Bob hone their act [THR]

[T]he company is also developing its 2007 theatrical The Nanny Diaries as a half-hour multicamera sitcom for Lifetime. It's actually a second attempt by the Weinsteins at turning the popular series of books into a TV show; Miramax TV was involved in an earlier Nanny Diaries project at CBS. New version is in development at Lifetime, which is looking for a writer. ... The company is also developing a new take on the 1980s franchise Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, along with 2929 Prods.

We have high hopes for the latter, which we presume will eventually make its synergistic way around to Harvey's own Manhattan pad while he's feverishly working out his planned Broadway adaptation of... Finding Neverland? And The Wall? Like Pink Floyd's The Wall? Indeed — but it's just business as usual for the silent partner in a bunch of stage successes:

Because Weinstein's involvement in theatrical projects has been as a supporting producer and investor, his exploits have largely remained under the radar — so much so that some in the entertainment industry may have been surprised to see the producer among those onstage collecting trophies at the Tonys on Sunday.

Wait — Harvey Weinstein won a Tony? Harvey!! And here we'd thought all this time you had just gotten into non-profits! Why don't you ever tell us these things?

[Photo Credit: Getty Images]

• Weinsteins unveil mega TV plans [Variety]
• Weinsteins are bound for Broadway [Variety]

WHEREAS, Fraggle Rock was a 1980s-era HBO children's television series developed and produced by the late Muppets creator Jim Henson, and

WHEREAS, The Weinstein Company reportedly will join the Jim Henson Co. in adapting Fraggle Rock as a feature film, and

WHEREAS, Fraggle Rock: The Series is a warmly remembered part of our generation's upbringings, and

WHEREAS, Fraggle Rock: The Movie marks the Weinsteins' latest contribution to a burgeoning family tradition that also includes the Satan-appeasing rehash of Short Circuit and sundry teen slasher films, and

WHEREAS, Harvey Weinstein today tells Variety with a straight face: "One of our main priorities when we first launched the Weinstein Company was to feature a broad range of family-friendly franchises like Fraggle Rock," and

WHEREAS, this is a man who also prioritized buying the Halston fashion label and recently earned $107,435 on a $4 million investment in a John Cusack film, and

WHEREAS, the Weinsteins acquired and/or developed numerous successful, influential films for more than 15 years as the founders of Miramax Films, and

WHEREAS, the Weinsteins in no way, shape or form walked away from Miramax and its struggles with corporate parent Disney in 2005 with the intention of reviving Fraggle Rock and/or any "franchises" like it, and

WHEREAS, Harvey Weinstein watched in horror as Miramax developed (or co-developed) three Best Picture Oscar nominees in the years since the Weinsteins left, winning in 2007 (as well as claiming the Best Foreign-Language Oscar in 2005), and

WHEREAS, Harvey secured his sole Oscar nod in 2007 after threatening to shoot himself if it failed to materialize, and

WHEREAS, the director of Fraggle Rock: The Movie is also the man responsible for Hoodwinked, one of the ugliest animated films in recent memory and, not coincidentally, one of the Weinstein Company's rare successes;

WHEREAS, no living human being of any age, taste or discretion wants to see this film,

WHEREAS, we can no longer idly sit by as the Weinstein Company chases its tail, cannibalizes its imagination, squanders its founders' pioneering legacy, and sputters impotently out of our hearts and into cultural oblivion,

NOW, THEREFORE, LET IT BE RESOLVED BY DEFAMER,

1. The Weinstein Company be put to death by immediate closure and liquidation of its "assets," including but not limited to Fraggle Rock: The Movie, and

2. The Weinsteins' employees be immediately relocated to safe houses in Hollywood and New York for rehabilitation and eventual release back into the industry workforce, and

3. Bob and Harvey Weinstein be banned from future film dealings pending the results of a psychiatric evaluation and two years' community service counseling soul-deadened moviegoers at the multiplexes where their films receive wide release.

RESOLUTION PASSED this 13th day of May, 2008.

SIGNED,

DEFAMER

• Weinsteins roll with 'Fraggle Rock' [Variety]

The original asshole writers, S.S. Wilson and Brent Maddock, will return for another round of well-paid douchebaggery, which Weinstein's Dimension Films will foist on the American public as a "worthy addition to its family film slate" at a dark date to be determined. Self-loathing producer David Foster is coming back as well, pledging to "factor in advances in technology" and maximize soul-destroying audience pandering. No word yet on whether the shrill Indian scientist so expertly stereotyped by Fisher Stevens will make his own comeback, but whether it's Stevens or Guttenberg or fake-ass CGI or anything else you can conjure to make this anti-idea worse, that's what Weinstein will deliver. God is dead, goodbye cruel world. Seriously, fuck this movie.

• 'Short Circuit's' Johnny 5 still alive [Variety]

The Miriam Collection, named after the brothers' mother, launched in late January with the release of one of the last great epics not previously available on DVD, Anthony Mann's El Cid.

Weinstein clearly relishes being able to play kingmaker and give deserving films the true DVD VIP treatment, a la the fabled Criterion Collection.

The Fall of the Roman Empire, for example, is fully loaded," Harvey Weinstein said. "It looks and sounds astonishing, and the bonus materials fully explore the sheer magnitude and grandeur of making a film of this scale in a time long before the advent of CGI."

• Weinsteins start upscale DVD label [Yahoo]
• Meet The New Harvey [Fortune]