· The week started with ex-Miramax/present Film Department topper Mark Gill declaring at length to LA Film Festival attendees that, "Yes, The Sky Really is Falling":

The marginally good news is it won't hit the ground everywhere. The strongest of the strong will survive and in fact prosper. But it will feel like we just survived a medieval plague. The carnage and the stench will be overwhelming.

Of course, it's fashionable to bitch in the independent film world. It's what we do. We brood. We wear black. We drink too much coffee, followed by too much alcohol. And we bemoan a future devoid of real culture, homogenized to death by unfeeling conglomerates, and increasingly determined by ADD-addled 14-year-olds with nothing but internet porn and Grand Theft Auto on the brain.

Gill tried to end on a positive note ("If you really want to make movies—even after all the unvarnished bad news I've dumped on you today—then by all means do it"), but by then the place looked like Jonestown. By most accounts around the festival this week, it still does.

· Production on Nailed shut down for the fourth time as David Bergstein's Capitol Films once again failed to meet payroll on the set.

· Capitol's sister company, ThinkFilm, is on the defensive against director Alex Gibney, who initiated a lawsuit to reclaim his Oscar-winning documentary Taxi to the Dark Side. They hate each other — in public.

· Variety's resident indie coroner Anne Thompson counts off more dumb money in various stages of decompostion, including Philippe Martinez, Sidney Kimmel and Crash financier Bob Yari.

· Edgy horror and foreign-fare distributor Tartan Films shut its doors permanently on Thursday.

· Toby Emmerich has downgraded from a Mercedes to a Lexus hybrid. Indeed, repent — the end is near.

[Photo Credit: IndieWIRE]

More than $4 million is allegedly owed to Boston-based Allied Advertising, which filed suit last week in Los Angeles. Today, meanwhile, Variety reports that Mammoth Advertising filed a second suit against Think in New York for another $428,000 in fees dating back to September:

Think had previously posted a check for $80,000 that bounced.

Some of the fees owed are related to a media plan purchased for Think's Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, the Sidney Lumet-helmed film that was released in October and has grossed upward of $19 million. Mammoth contends it has not been paid a cent of the $257,000 it claims it's owed despite repeated payment requests.

But it's not all bad: Think doesn't even have to distribute its recently acquired Roman Polanski documentary to win an Oscar for it. At least someone over there was thinking ahead.

• David Bergstein/ThinkFilm Sued for Fraud [DHD]

• ThinkFilm's bills pile up [Variety]

THE WEINSTEIN COMPANY: Nikki Finke has spent the last two days trying to make something out of the Weinsteins reportedly falling two months behind on their residual payments to the Directors Guild of America. Gasp! Or something: An anonymous, "prominent Hollywood helmer" notified Finke that arbitration could start within "twenty days" if the matter isn't resolved. Harvey Weinstein himself followed up to say he knew nothing about it and that he was looking into the third party that handles the payments. The DGA itself acknowledged the delinquency Wednesday, and it didn't quite sound like the meltdown Finke was praying for:

"The DGA has had a long and productive working relationship with The Weinstein Company and its predecessor. It is sometimes the case, with various companies, that residuals payments are late. We are working directly with TWC to resolve this issue and see that our members receive prompt residuals payments."

So! Scandalous! Now Finke is actively soliciting dirt on other studios who've fallen behind: "I would like to shame them into paying up," she wrote Wednesday. But don't call her a gossip. SCORE: We doubt Harvey Weinstein has ever "honestly misunderstood" anything in his career, and we certainly don't doubt his financial woes. But if the DGA's happy, we're happy.

THINKFILM: Its corporate parent CapCo may have staved off its SAG woes on the set of Nailed, but blogger AJ Schnack issued a "breaking" (if vague) news alert Wednesday that the troubled distributor should brace itself for a flurry of non-payment lawsuits from numerous directions. Variety followed up today with specific litigation in the works and a spirited defense from CapCo boss David Bergstein, who's introducing a new European sales arm in Cannes as we speak:

"I come from a distressed asset background, not the film business," Bergstein said. "When you're dealing with any distressed asset, whether it's a single film or a company, it takes you the first year just to straighten out those issues. You can't have problems for five years and expect them to go away in five minutes."

Variety also notes Bergstein is staying in Cannes on a yacht — named Pegasus. SCORE: Just another schmogul. We love ThinkFilm, but it's not looking promising.

PICTUREHOUSE/WARNER INDEPENDENT: Still dead, but as observed by a deeply skeptical Patrick Goldstein, Warner Bros. president Alan Horn is still trafficking in primo denial about his studio's outlook for specialty film distribution:

"We haven't thrown in the towel. ... If there is a specialty movie that interests us or we find something we want to buy, we'll still do it. But marketing is marketing is marketing. I don't think you need a specialty label to market a specialty picture. The tools just aren't that different. Take Juno. In my view, its success wasn't a function of whether it was at Fox or Fox Searchlight. What made it a hit was the movie itself, not the marketing."

Wow. Like, WOW. We presume Horn is thinking of his own low-budget hit Michael Clayton, which succeeded despite a marketing effort worse than Crystal Pepsi's. Apply the same logic to WB's bomb Speed Racer, though, and he's kind of on to something. SCORE: We're with Goldstein — stick to the franchises, fellas.

ThinkFilm is known to owe substantial amounts to media outlets, among others. Sources say the company was going to announce an acquisition from Senator Entertainment this week but then canceled its press meetings. ...

Though the company saw an $18 million worldwide gross from Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, further problems emerged Thursday when ThinkFilm execs suddenly discovered there was no money for Friday newspaper ads for Then She Found Me. The following day, SAG pulled the plug on Nailed, telling members not to work due to the lack of required funds in accounts designated to pay the film's actors.

Yeah, that's a bit of a problem. As we noted Monday, all signs point to David Bergstein, the schmogul whose Capitol Films bought Think in 2006: Nikki Finke has another round of films affected by Capitol's cash drought, and Variety also notes squabbles with filmmaker Alex Gibney, who reportedly "threatened to take ThinkFilm into bankruptcy after the company failed to pay him his fees — including his Oscar bonus" after his Taxi to the Dark Side won this year's Best Documentary award. We've heard similar stories from the aftermaths of indies from Half Nelson to Off the Black to Murderball.

Additionally, around this time last month, we heard ThinkFilm was temporarily banned from holding press screenings at Chicago's Lake Street Screening Room when it fell five months behind on rental fees. (It has more debts in New York, where Think president Mark Urman recently complained to The Hollywood Reporter in an unrelated story,"It costs $700 to $800 to schedule a screening for one critic, and sometimes they don't make it.")

The Capitol deal was supposed to free ThinkFilm to acquire and push films more aggressively in the congested indie marketplace; we've seen hints and flashes, but the inconsistency can't be helping as they hit the market at Cannes. But at least Russell is back to work! A carefully timed, videotaped meltdown between him and Jake Gyllenhaal could be all Bergstein and Co. need to set the ship right.

[Photo Credit: Getty Images]

• Production resumes on 'Nailed' [Variety]

Rumors also are circulating that the state of South Carolina could withdraw its incentive monies because of the financing problems. Filmmakers hope to resolve the cash crunch and re-start shooting next week since principal photography is only at the halfway point. "I am confident we will finish," an insider on the pic just told me. "The financing on this like most indies is based on bank loans and bridge loans. This is a matter of waiting on the bridge loan. Hopefully, it will all be resolved."

But new information coming my way says David Bergstein's Capitol Films behind the pic is troubled. In 2006, he acquired a leading UK-based international sales company which over the years had built a good reputation in the movie biz and made a wide range of commercial and critical successes, including Robert Altman's Gosford Park. But now I'm hearing from NYC film financing circles that "a shitload of people are owed a lot of money," in the words of one expert in the field. "I heard this week that his major financing source, a hedge fund, has shut down and left him in the lurch."

This isn't the first of Bergstein's hedge-fund gambits to capsize at an inopportune time; last year's attempted buyout of Image Entertainment acrimoniously fell through a few months back when its primary funder fell under scrutiny from its investors. That and Nailed's problems may or may not be related, but Bergstein's money woes are also said to be trickling down to his American distribution subsidiary ThinkFilm, which, since the schmogul acquired the company in late 2006, have consistently flirted with having more titles in the pipeline than it can afford to release. (We hear they're in arrears with at least one NYC screening room, but they've also won two documentary Oscars in five years, so judge that progress for yourself.)

Anyway, Finke notes that the cast — including Jake Gyllenhaal, Jessica Biel and Catherine Keener — are standing by, ready to work when shooting resumes, hopefully this week. We've seen flimsier houses of cards survive, but this might be one that's withstood all it can. Let us know if you have an eye on the weak spot.

• SAG Orders Actors On David O. Russell Film To Leave [DHD]