Our tipster notes that Nancy is "just emailing everyone she knows, asking you to pass it on! So I did." As will we. No need to thank us, Nancy. Since you gave $10 million to Scientology, you need every penny.

Some pictures of the bed follow.

Hoping to become more of a superhero power player in Hollywood, Warner Bros. has been quietly reorganizing its comic arm, DC Comics, to focus its energies on blockbuster hits. They claim they've been working on this for months, but Disney's announcement that it was buying Marvel accelerated things a bit.

Warner had intended to announce details about its plans for DC Comics in January, as it begins a 75th anniversary celebration of the DC brand, Barry Meyer, chairman and chief executive of Warner, said in an interview.

But the Disney announcement resulted in so many questions about the possibly heightened competition "that it would have been disingenuous for us to suggest that we had not been thinking about it." He added that the Marvel-Disney announcement "reconfirmed in us our strong belief in how valuable DC really is."

That remains to be seen. While, yes, DC has the strong Batman franchise and, to a far lesser degree, a burgeoning Superman series, it's also unleashed a slew of stinkers, like Catwoman and Watchmen, which failed to live up to its potential. Marvel, meanwhile, had the X-Men trilogy, keeps rolling out Spider-Man flicks, made three Blade movies, Iron Man and will no doubt make a splash with the forthcoming Thor, Avengers and Wolverine 2 big screen adventures.

DC will have to look mighty hard for characters who can stand up to Marvel's icons. Our suggestion? Neil Gaiman's Sandman. Why, oh why, has that not been adapted?

Image via Madolan's flickr.

The movie cost $65 million, with another $35 mil for marketing. The Weinsteins were god damned determined to market the hell out of this! And that's great and all. But the WSJ explains the problem:

The company co-owns the $65 million film with Universal Pictures, so it will only reap half the profits — a symptom of the studio's financial troubles and the reason that even a hit like "Inglourious Basterds" may not be enough to save them.

Oh Harvey. Next time keep all of the Tarantino flick and sell off half of Miss Potter.

The Wrap got hold of the memo, which they say was written by CFO Irv Weintraub and contains compensation figures from 2007. Translations of the abbreviations:

Norman: Norman Brokaw, chairman
IW: Irv Weintraub, CFO
JW: Jim Wiatt
DZW: Dave Wirtschafter

[The Wrap]

To recap: Bill was working as a vaguely defined "adviser" for some investment funds owned by Yucaipa, Burkle's company. Then his wife goes and runs for president so Bill publicly "severed business ties" with Burkle, presumably to avoid being photographed with more attractive young women on Burkle's plane.

But! Bill's consolation prize was that Yucaipa would pay him $20 million when he left. For what? Nobody's really sure! But there were lots of things that could blow up in Bill's (and by extension, Hillary's) face, politically:

Mr. Clinton was one of the three owners of the foreign fund's general partner, along with Mr. Burkle and Dubai Investment Group (YGP) Ltd., an entity that was part of the business empire of Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the ruler of Dubai.

The Yucaipa connection presented other potential difficulties for Mrs. Clinton, people familiar with the matter said. In late 2007, the foreign fund invested in a Chinese media company, Xinhua Finance Media Ltd., whose parent company had past ties to the Beijing government.

Oh you know who else was connected to Clinton via Burkle? Convicted scam artist Raffaello Follieri! So, my working theory here is that taking the money would have caused too much of a headache for Hillary in the press, and also, since Bill's payout was theoretically tied to how much he earned, maybe there wasn't all that much money there to be had anyhow. But if you know better, feel free to share. [WSJ]

The NYT today reveals that Leibovitz took out more than $15 million in loans from Art Capital Group—essentially a very high class pawn shop specializing in art.

Last fall, Annie Leibovitz, the photographer, borrowed $5 million from a company called Art Capital Group. In December, she borrowed $10.5 million more from the same firm. As collateral, among other items, she used town houses she owns in Greenwich Village, a country house, and something else: the rights to all of her photographs.

In addition to the lawsuit for more than $700k from unpaid vendors, Leibovitz reportedly used the cash to pay back taxes and finance "a lengthy, costly and litigious renovation on the three adjoining town houses." Why one would pawn their town houses in order to raise money to renovate them, I do not know.

Obviously, a $2 million per year income is no savior from hard times. And hey, Julian Schnabel also pawned some real estate with the same firm to help finance his goddamn monstrosity of a pink, constantly-discounted celebrity condo building, Palazzo Chupi. Pawn shops prey on the rich just as they do the poor. Fairness!

[NYT. By bullshit trend specialist Allen Salkin, but with actual value! Good story Allen. Pic via]

MGM is paying dearly for the rest according to the NY Post, which reports today that the studio has spent $70 million marketing the Tom Cruise thriller in advance of its Christmas opening. That's about twice the average promotional budget for a studio opening expected to gross less than $100 million, putting Valkyrie's total cost at close to $160 million. Remedial Hollywood math thus suggests that MGM and Cruise's United Artists require at least a $275 million theatrical gross to break even after exhibitors take their cut, which seems... unlikely, however much better the film is than we initially feared.

MGM tells the paper its spending is in line with the average, and the campaign will doubtless also trickle down to DVD and the studio's waning output deal with Showtime. Still, for what UA takes from MGM's coffers versus what it puts back, the Valkyrie returns hint that Cruise may yet have a $15 million Sundance entry in his future just to even things out. More on Valkyrie — including pinpoint-accurate opening-gross predictions, as always — in tomorrow's Defamer Attractions weekend preview.

• Doubling Down [NYP]