• "Slumdog Millionaire," Coming Soon From Warner Independent Pictures! [The Lost Boy]

Fox Searchlight and the makers of Slumdog Millionaire ended a rough week on just the upnote they needed: After days of "unwarranted media attention" investigating its young cast's unusual compensation structure, the AP offered a more reassuring update from the parents of 7-year-old Rubina Ali Qureshi, who reportedly made the equivalent of $700 for 30 days' work but is the beneficiary of free education and a trust fund that'll cash out at age 18. "Whatever a parent could have done, they have done much more than that," said father Rafiq; mother Munni added that she "felt very happy that my daughter had become a star."

And Rubina herself, whose safety Fox reps told us was compromised as recently as Wednesday? Expect her in Searchlight's for-your-consideration ads by next week: "I would like to study and also pursue a career in the films," she told the AP. "Our movie should definitely get an award (at the Oscars) because it's such a nice movie." A born campaigner. Beat that, Focus.

• Child star, parents happy to be part of `Slumdog' [LAT]

A Fox rep sends word to Defamer that this week's coverage of young Slumdog Millionaire stars Rubina Ali and Azharuddin Ismail's questionable compensation scale has thrust the children and their families into grave danger. "Due to the exposure and potential jeopardy created by the unwarranted press attention and violation of the privacy of the children and their families, the filmmakers are arranging for flats for Azhar and Rubina, and their families, that will be paid directly by the filmmakers," we're told. This is in addition to supporting the kids' education and trust funds noted in our initial BacklashWatch report on Tuesday, and reiterated today by the same rep.

While we sincerely empathize on one hand, we're tabulating numbers on the other: $85 million (and counting) worldwide gross. Ten Oscar nominations. Four Golden Globes. One huge SAG Awards honor recognizing the film's ensemble — slum kids included. We're not here to broker settlements, but it seems clear enough that Slumdog's social implications require a little more finessing under the circumstances than those of rolling out Little Miss Sunshine's yellow bus or Diablo Cody's back story for impressionable Oscar blue-hairs. Try as you might, Searchlight, you can't have "unwarranted press attention" both ways.

Speaking of which, some persistent Indian protesters will get a police investigation into whether or not the term "slumdog" — coined by Millionaire screenwriter Simon Beaufoy — is in fact an offensive reference to Mumbai's slum-dwellers. Director Danny Boyle and Co. received the word yesterday; the worst-case scenario would require retitling the film in India without the word "dog." Good luck with that.

• Protests at Indian cinemas over 'Slumdog Millionaire' [Guardian]

The Telegraph today noted complaints by the parents of Rubina Ali and Azharuddin Ismail, two of the kids cast straight from the slums into Danny Boyle's game-show/romance fantasia. Happy as they are for Slumdog's success in the States, they're still wondering if their children got precisely what they're worth for carrying over a third of the presumptive Best Picture winner: according to the parents, roughly $700 for Ali and $2,400 for Ismail (for 30 days' work each), who play the younger versions of the film's characters Latika and Salim, respectively.

That's "less than many Indian domestic servants," reports the Telegraph, and in any case, Ismail's father has already spent the cash on TB medicine. Boyle has mentioned paying for the kids' educations and establishing a trust fund for each, and both the filmmaker and Fox Searchlight issued statements saying they were sensitive to criticism it had exploited either youngster; the studio even confirmed it would revisit their compensation. What's another $10,000 in the Oscar campaign, right? Especially coming just three days after another report cited critics of Slumdog's "stereotypical depiction" of Mumbai:

"It's a white man's imagined India," Shyamal Sengupta, a film professor at the Whistling Woods International institute in Mumbai, told the [LAT]. "It's not quite snake charmers, but it's close. It's a poverty tour." [...]

"These ideas, that there are still moments of joy in the slum, appeal to Western critics," said Aseem Chhabra, an Asia Foundation associate fellow and culture critic.

It would be an ugly claim even without precedent, but one of your editors last year ran into a similar controversy afflicting the Best Documentary Short nominee Salim Baba, which tracked a Calcutta man who made a living showing movies to slum kids on a 100-year-old Lumiere projector. Great film, went to 70 festivals, audience favorite, and for whatever reason, it hit a wall after its subject went to the press, accusing the filmmakers of the same bad faith.

The producer said the subject soon retracted the charge, but who knows? It didn't alter the film's chemistry, but for a doc short financed via credit cards, without a studio behind it, voted on by a small branch of the Academy, it very well may have upset the Oscar balance. Slumdog's scenario is magnified in proportion to its stakes, and maybe the parents are just greedy. (And even granting that, can you blame them?) But if an unscrupulous opponent actually wanted to stir the open sewers near the young stars' Mumbai hovels, the smell probably wouldn't go away by the time Oscar polls close Feb. 17.

In other words: You've come this far, Harvey. Do your worst.

• Slumdog child stars miss out on the movie millions [Telegraph]

• Indians don't feel good about 'Slumdog Millionaire' [LAT]

With critical raves in part pushing it to a $416,000 opening since last Wednesday, Slumdog is Searchlight's fifth best opening average in the last five years. The three titles just above it:

2007: Juno ($59,124 per screen; $143.5 million cumulative gross)

2006: Little Miss Sunshine ($52,999 per screen; $59.9 million cumulative)

2004: Sideways ($51,760 per screen; $71.5 million cumulative)

All of which went on to earn Oscar nominations for Best Picture, and all of which won for Best Screenplay. Of course I Heart Huckabees trumped them all with $73,044 per screen, and we all know how that turned out. Still! Clear spots in your Oscar pools, and let the Obama transition team know where they'll find the real economic stimulus. You can thank us later.

• 'Slumdog Millionaire' hits jackpot in first round [THR]

Moreover, the voters he hasn't alienated over the years will crawl over each other to be a part of Rourke's comeback story. Fox Searchlight is packaging it as we speak, and Rourke himself was candidly — maybe too candidly — selling its prototype at a press conference following today's screening.

"I mean, if I knew it would take me 15 years to get back in the saddle and work again because of the way I handled things, I really would have handled things differently," he told the crowd. "I just didn't have the tools. I'm doing things differently this time around — understanding what it is to be a professional, be responsible and to be consistent. Those are things that weren't in my vocabulary back then. Change for me didn't come easy; I didn't wanna change until I lost everything until I realized that you better change, or, you know, blow your fucking brains out. Either you change and go on with life, or you're just a piece of shit.

"Everything I felt was that I would be weak — that it was a weakness to change, for the armor that I put on my whole life. I was too proud to change, because my strength at the time was a weakness. I'm all right with it now, and yeah, it took me 15, 16, 17 years out of the game. But it's really nice, because I get to come back and work with these people here."

He gestured to his left, where Aronofsky, Tomei and co-producer Scott Franklin were seated alongside him at the dais. They're probably short-listers, too, along with screenwriter Robert Siegel, likely the first Onion alumnus to be considered for an Academy Award. Really, that's the story we can't wait to write, but we'll take this in the meantime.

But it's a sturdy fit for the adventuresome Rockwell, whom we cornered for a few minutes of his busy '08 (also including Frost/Nixon later this fall) and another round of Defamer's ongoing Five Questions:

DEFAMER: Look — Fox Searchlight gave us souvenir anal beads! Aren't they great?
SAM ROCKWELL: Those are great. This is a classy movie.

DEFAMER: No doubt. Victor has enough compulsions to require about a dozen different levels of research — sex addiction, choking, mother issues, etcetera. What did you prioritize here?
SAM ROCKWELL: Obviously we read the book a lot. [Director] Clark Gregg and I rehearsed a lot; he was very well prepared; he's an actor, which is great. He's sensitive to this. I went to seven or eight sex addiction meetings. I met a sex therapist; we talked a lot, and he showed me a documentary. I try to do a little bit of research on everything, some more than others. But sexual addiction is more like a food disorder in that you're really filling a void; it's different than any kind of alcohol or narcotic abuse.

DEFAMER: With that in mind, did you ever play devil's advocate with this — that sex addiction is more in the mind of the beholder?
SAM ROCKWELL: I've been working with an acting coach for a long time; he and I go to therapy, and we talk about that in our work. It's kind of like Alfie or Tom Jones, but we're psychoanalyzing this Casanova in a comedic way. A real Casanova is not a guy that looks like Brad Pitt or George Clooney; they're normal-looking guys in this very depraved world. It's not as glamorous as people think. Sex addiction can go from compulsive masturbation to prostitutes to people who've been sexually molested. It's a serious condition; it's nothing to be laughed about. But I think we respect the condition and are able to joke about it at the same time.

DEFAMER: We've been following you since In the Soup, in which you portrayed Steve Buscemi's mentally disabled neighbor. Sixteen years later, the "full retard" backlash is on from all sides. As someone who skillfully portrayed disability before it was Oscar bait, what's your take?
SAM ROCKWELL: Well, look, they're totallly missing the joke. It's about actors and awards shows. I thought Leonardo DiCaprio did it really well, but at some point you have to let the research go and intuitively daydream and just let your imagination go. It's a matter of taste really. Do you respond to Forrest Gump? I do. I respond to what Dustin Hoffman does in Rain Man. Hoffman tells a story about Midnight Cowboy where he found the limp for Ratzo Rizzo. He put his foot in like this, and he got all these letters from handicapped people afterward saying, "That's the most ridiculous limp I've ever seen — you're making fun of us." So you try to be as responsible as you can be, but it's just an artist's interpretation. [Tropic Thunder] makes fun of the actor's process and the hype that goes around it.

DEFAMER: When you take on Palahniuk, you're inevitably taking on Fight Club. Were you apprehensive about having to follow a classic?
SAM ROCKWELL: Absolutely. But the advantage we had is that this is the anti-Fight Club. This is a low-budget film. We don't have special effects or bells and whistles. This is a different kind of movie. It's an independent movie in every sense of the word. It's like Harold and Maude or The Fisher King and think of it as a different tone; Fight Club is darker. We've got a heavy subject, but we've also got anal beads.

The critical accolades to date suggest the campaign will only expand from there, perhaps starting with revisions to the publicity stills currently circulating in the trades. After all, we know Oscar voters love a comeback story, but rarely against the backdrop of slogans invoking the sucking of "a fat dick." Don't take our word for it, though; see above where The Hollywood Reporter got burned, Variety drew the line, and where a better tomorrow begins today with a little bit of Photoshop and a whole lot of love.

• 'The Wrestler' wins Venice's Golden Lion [THR]
• Fox Searchlight pins 'Wrestler' [Variety]

What worked for Paul Thomas Anderson the year before seemed to backfire this time. ... Fincher couldn't show one long sequence—the usual practice— because he needed to show the passage of time and the different faces of Button (Brad Pitt), so the concept of the movie would be clear. (Telluride wanted fewer, longer clips, but didn't get them until the eve of the showing.)

The other difference between Button and There Will Be Blood is the difference between a Paramount Vantage indie directed by PTA and a big studio director who has commandeered a major movie star and $150-million in big-Paramount resources. Insiders can't help but speculate on the eventual outcome of the movie. Will it get good reviews and be an Oscar contender? Will it lose a fortune? (Is it Memoirs of a Geisha all over again?) The real folks in Telluride will spread good word in their communities, which was Paramount's intention here. But the fanboys are interested in this movie too, and it may not be for them.

To wit, one Fincher obsessive took a stick to Button's tender skin ("I’m still excited to see the finished product, I’m just a little disappointed. Could it be that the film wasn’t what I expected, or maybe not what I wanted?"), while Fincher himself insisted the preview wasn't about marketing or "positioning" — i.e. situating Brad Pitt's name alongside Viggo Mortensen's in the early Oscar brackets. Which, of course, is where it landed almost instantly upon screening. Hats off.

Meanwhile, in Paul Schrader's Adam Resurrected, Jeff Goldblum drew accolades for portraying, and we quote, "a Berlin cabaret performer who survived a concentration camp by playing a dog for a commandant." And if there is a Juno-esque revelation to emerge literally out of thin air, handicappers had an eye on Slumdog Millionaire, Danny Boyle's chronicle of an Indian slum kid who wins on his country's version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire. And why not: Fox Searchlight has a horse in the race every year, and even without a stripper-screenwriter subplot or some ensemble, yellow-bus witchcraft, critics love Boyle, and the studio has spun gold from less-likely sources like Once.

Look for more after the Toronto Film Festival, which begins Thursday and will define the film's trajectory — if Hollywood ever makes it to Canada, that is. Good luck with that!

I guess I've been bumped up the publicity ladder...20th Century Fox is gearing up to publicize "Choke," so they have all these Chinese factory anal beads. It was all of these things coming together.

UPDATE: A photo of the actual Choke anal beads swag after the jump!

While such giveaways are always good for sparking conversation, we'd warn producers that the tactic can also sometimes backfire. We're reminding of a recent Lionsgate promotion in which entertainment journalists across the country were gifted with Hostel 2-branded urethral sounding rods—a fringe S&M practice most of them were entirely unfamiliar with, resulting in the majority of the nonplussed recipients either tossing the stainless steel devices, or using them as makeshift letter openers.

UPDATE: A reader tipped us off to this photo of the actual Choke anal beads on a Flickr account. Anus sold separately. [Flickr]

• WEB EXCLUSIVE: Chuck Palahniuk up to Snuff [dailytexanonline.com via Reverse Cowgirl]

Not part of the open call in New York in October, Mr. Woolard had been under consideration since November, and was quietly being groomed by the film's director, George Tillman Jr., before being officially selected.

"We set up a boot camp for three months just for him," Mr. Tillman said from New York, where he is preparing to begin production with Robert Teitel, his partner in State Street Pictures.

With the sizable share of lip-syncing planned for Notorious, Tillman didn't even necessarily require a seasoned rapper to fill Biggie's shoes. More glaringly, Searchlight's marketing and publicity overlords, who could sell snow to Eskimos (alas, there aren't enough Eskimos in the Academy to secure a Best Picture win), have clearly outdone themselves by positioning Notorious as both the early favorite for Juno-esque quasi-underdog glory and cheaply trivializing a share of the audience whose appeal it will primarily court. "We want the movie to be an anthem for a generation," studio boss Peter Rice told NYT reporter Michael Cieply. Terrific, Pete, but keep it short — at least 100 members of that generation already want their three or four hours back.

• Film Skirts Loose Ends in Death of a Rapper [Source]

The "Little Miss Sunshine" people are clearly scraping the bottom of the barrel when it comes to pre-Oscar publicity. This Sunday, my friend and I were having brunch on Third St in West Hollywood when a busboy came out with a tray of cupcakes and people started taking them. "Would you like a free cupcake, for 'Little Miss Sunshine'?" he asked us. We of course said yes and he gave us not one, but two yellow-iced cupcakes. Heath Ledger was there, so maybe it worked on him. Pretty gross, in my opinion.

In Searchlight's defense, targeting Third Street brunch spots is a savvy move, as the odds of getting a cupcake into an Academy member's hand at such a location is probably 50/50 on a Sunday. Maybe they can even take the adorable guerilla campaign a step further, planting publicists throughout the restaurants on that strip, who can spend all afternoon enthusiastically talking about how delicious the little yellow-iced treats are, hoping that the relentlessness of their endorsements might convince any nearby Oscar voters to put aside the nagging feeling that the cupcake they just finished was really overrated.

• Previously: 'Dreamgirls' Team Embracing Nontraditional Marketing Opportunities During Oscar Crunchtime [Defamer]