Oh phew. Transformers 2: Rise of the Fallen will not be the last you'll see of acorn-faced Shia LaBeouf and his robot pals. Transformers 3: Fall of the Risen (or whatever) has secured a premiere date: July 1st, 2011. Of course by then the world be a sand-blasted junkyard of bones and teeth, a cold diseased sea lapping at scorched shores. But at least we'll have Megan Fox once again changing oil in her denim underpants. [Variety]

Jesse Eisenberg, from The Squid & the Whale and the upcoming Adventureland, will be playing poet Allen Ginsberg in an ensemble movie about a beatnik murder. This is likely the only time that Jesse Eisenberg will be competing with James Franco. [Variety] Meanwhile, Confucius say: "Please let area badass Chow Yun-fat play me in a biopic." Done! [Variety]

Sam Neill is joining the cast of that show Happy Town, about a secretly murderous little burg, playing the owner of a movie-paraphernalia shoppe. Full of dinosaurs!!!! [THR] The CW will have more opportunities to cast their "everyone under 5'7", please" version of America's Next Top Former Modeling Show Reality Star. They're redoing the New York auditions, after a stampede ruined it for everyone. [THR]

Catherine Hardwicke, once lauded for films like Thirteen and Lords of Dogtown, sold her soul to direct the Twilight chaste vampire goo fest, and is now adapting another YA klassic. Maxium Ride is about, shit you not, a group of teens who are half-human, half-bird. They are called the Flock. They are pursued by a group of half-human, half-wolf creatures. They are called Erasers. So. [THR]

The Writers' Guild of America is cutting 10% of its 185 employees, citing their $2 million operating deficit. So now WGA employees can join all those in their guild who are unemployed. [Variety] Meanwhile, the Weinsteins are spending money again! Recession over! They just snapped up Nowhere Boy, a movie about a young John Lennon. So good for them. Good for everyone. Except those 18.5 people up there. Sucks. [Variety]

Brad Pitt's Plan B production house will be cobbling together a screen version of John LeCarre's spy novel The Night Manager, Paramount will co-produce. [Variety] Meanwhile J.J. Abrams will produce a film version of an upcoming Wired magazine article about a diamond heist. [Variety]

Instead, when Little, Brown's young-adult division publishes the book in mid-March — conveniently coinciding with Twilight's DVD release — expect only the authorized good times: The casting process, the art direction, the chest-hair cultivation, the faint traces of vampire-summoning herbs outside Kristen Stewart's trailer, and the rest of the early-franchise mythology laid out in the style of Hardwicke's own journal from the set. We'll read it, though you industry moles should know that if/when we're quietly forwarded the missing segment recounting the day Summit changed the editing-room locks, we'll self-publish a special edition ourselves. Keep your eyes peeled.

• Director to publish book on making 'Twilight' [Reuters, art via MTV Movies]

"We've been kicked out of the Twilight editorial, so we're homeless, so please leave your name and number after the tone." [AP]

Hardwicke and Summit Entertainment officially confirmed their split on the basis of a late-2009/early-2010 release date for New Moon, according to Variety, a turnaround that Hardwicke declined with the script's first draft delivered only last month. Read: Summit doesn't have the time or inclination to haggle with CAA over Hardwicke's raise, especially facing budget spikes for co-stars Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson and for New Moon's more complex werewolf effects.

Moreover, Nikki Finke cites rumors about cinematographer Elliot Davis and editor Nancy Richardson saving Hardwicke's ass in the first place — not an unreasonable conclusion considering they've been doing it for Hardwicke off-and-on since Lords of Dogtown, sussing what life they could from characters smothered beneath the thick, surface-level sheen for which Hardwicke made her name as a production designer in the '90s. Still, difficult or sketchy or otherwise, nobody can take her biggest opening ever for a female director away from her; if she really wanted New Moon, she could have had it, '09 release or not.

But she didn't, and so begins Summit's new director hunt (if it's not months along already). On one hand, it hardly matters who the hell directs New Moon; the fan base isn't reading the name in the box at the bottom of the one-sheet, and unless Summit recruits, say, Joel Schumacher (God forbid), most critics might even view the switch as an upgrade. That said, we have our own wish list of filmmakers we'd like to see handed the franchise if Summit had any sense of adventure whatsoever:

· Jonathan Levine — Was a Toronto Film Festival sensation in 2006 with his indie thriller All the Boys Love Mandy Lane, which the Weinsteins bought, shelved and relinquished a year later just as Levine's second film, the pot-culture autobiopic The Wackness, was about to become a Sundance sensation. Between his inexpensiveness, his genre smarts and the smoky principles over which he and Kristen Stewart can surely bond, Levine should at least get an interview. Bonus: He's not with CAA!

· Nanette Burstein — If it's still the woman's touch Summit wants, then Burstein should be a front-runner: The Oscar-nominated documentarian had her fiction skeevy pseudoreality breakthrough earlier this year with another young-skewing Sundance hit, American Teen. It flailed at the box office, but so did Hardwicke's last two films before Twilight, so that hardly seems a deal-breaker.

· Tomas Alfredson — We told you back in September that Alfredson's bloody Swedish coming-of-age drama Let the Right One In would endure as the more memorable of this season's chaste young-vampire flicks. The critics have spoken affirmatively (audiences, too, to a lesser degree), and we nominate New Moon as Alfredson's English-language crossover.

· Deborah Kampmeier — The director of Hounddog works fast, cheap and is great with younger actors.

· Larry Clark — Speaking of younger actors, how fantastic would it be to see the man behind Teenage Lust, Kids, Bully and other benchmarks of corrupted youth entrusted with the supernatural romance of Bella Swan and Edward Cullen? And with the indie Summit having the option of releasing New Moon unrated, Clark could raise the bar on interspecial monster sex higher than ever. Probably a longshot, but if you've seen Clark's 2002 masterpiece Ken Park, then you'll know nobody does longshots better. Ahem.

Twilight's budget was only $37 million (plus at least that much in marketing), which should have Summit well in the black by the middle of next month. Stewart and Pattinson came cheap, earning about $2 million each for their roles as vampire Edward Cullen and his dewy teen love interest Bella Swan. Alas, those days are over: Looking ahead, one rumor has the studio adapting New Moon and Eclipse — the second and third novels in Stephenie Meyer's wholesome, bestselling bloodsucker franchise — simultaneously, probably at a combined budget pushing $160 million. Anything to improve the FX, we suppose (there are werewolves in the next one), and anything to make reading New Moon worth it for poor Stewart.

Their pricey return all but assured, Summit will move on to Hardwicke, who wasted little time and leverage last weekend pulling Favreau-ish media stunts about her doing Twilight's follow-ups right:

it's not confirmed that director Catherine Hardwicke will be back behind the camera. The director told the AP Sunday, ''I want to be sure that [the second film is] going to be done right. I don't want to rush into it. It's not like Friday the 13th or Halloween, you can't just do it super fast and knock another one out.'' Hardwicke indicated she wanted to be sure she and the film's producers were on the same page going forward.

Right, yes, the "same page." Just send it to her posse at CAA, would you, Summit? They'll take it from here.

• Squeezing more blood [Chicago Sun-Times]

• Summit Announces 'Twilight' Sequel "New Moon' [DHD]

Wait, wait, wait — there's a sequel coming for The School of Rock?

White nodded. What's it about, we asked? "I can't tell you."

"It's a studio!" Hardwicke groaned.

"I literally just turned it in," White added. "It's a little too fresh off the boat for me to get into right now. And I don't even know if it's gonna be made."

White was a little more forthcoming about the process for returning to the original without succumbing to franchisee cynicism. "It was easier," he said. "Every time you're creating something, you're always thinking, 'What is the pleasurable part of this? What is the theme that's going to resonate with people?' I've had experiences where I loved what I did, and no one came. And times when I said, 'This could use some editing,' and everybody loves it. Our job is to pretend we know what everybody wants to see, but I don't know. So with this, you want to have a reason to go to the well again. You want it to not just be a reason so people can cash in. But at least now I have a better sense of what it was we created — what worked and what didn't. I can kind of reboot it."

As we noted last week, the highly anticipated Twilight franchise appears to be far steamier and sexier than the books’ tween fans may have expected. And a profile on the film in yesterday’s LAT suggests the series’ author Stephenie Meyer may be just as surprised. Described by the article's author as "chaste," the Mormon mother of three sounds like the near opposite of director and "troubled-teen expert" Catherine Hardwicke. But as the article reveals, no matter how hot and bothered we felt after watching the teaser trailer, the actual action on set wasn't putting any of its gorgeous cast members in the mood:

Slathered in pale vampire makeup with alternating doses of sun, rain and "hail globs the size of golf balls," actors huddle in a heated ‘fire tent’ and stuff Kleenex to their cold, runny noses; they exchange rubber boots for Adidas just before the cameras roll.

It seems as though filming a vampire movie in Columbia Gorge hasn't exactly helped the central Romeo and Juliet-esque characters of Edward (Robert Pattinson) and Bella (Kristen Stewart) look as irresistible as they look in the teaser trailer: "They carry hot-water bottles (while PAs hold umbrellas over their carefully made-up heads)." But despite the very un-sexy sound of it, all that fog and mud may be precisely the right formula for creating a background for the alluring teenage blood-suckers Hardwicke has "re-imagine[d]...as evil rock stars. Gigandet wears a leather jacket festooned with what he jokingly calls his 'flair' - trophies from victims, ranging from police badges to wedding rings to schoolgirl baubles...Laurent rocks some dreads. Wild-huntress vampire Victoria, is decked out in a massive fur coat that would do Mick Jagger proud."

Knowing we'd still be attracted to Mick Jagger even if he was Kleenex-stuffed and soaked in white powdered makeup, we remain just as teased as we were last week.

• 'TWILIGHT' TAPS TEEN VAMPIRE ROMANCE [LAT]

One reason the vampire-next-door tale might be pegged towards the "cool crowd" has to do with its female director, , whose resume includes 2003's indie cult classic Thirteen, that dark but painfully realistic Evan Rachel Wood vehicle that revealed the real inner workings of its adolescent female protagonist's depressive mind. From the looks of this trailer, Hardwicke isn't afraid of scaring the kiddies, but the might just scare their parents. All we know is how drastically our former prediction that the franchise would be just another innocuous National Treasure or worse, Golden Compass, has been happily proven wrong. And all we want to do is fly away on bad boy Robert Pattinson's back, no matter how many windows we break.

• [/Film]