—The announcement arrived this morning, with Disney slotting six 'Works films per year, as per its usual. The first will arrive next year under the Touchstone banner, and Disney has committed to fronting P&A costs that provided one of several sticking points in the ongoing negotiations with its previous suitors at Universal.

—Regarding that relationship, Kim Masters's Daily Beast survey notes swaths of scorched earth trailing Steven Spielberg and Stacey Snider after months of failed negotiations with Uni boss Ron Meyer. Aside from the outstanding $250 million loan that DreamWorks needed to close the deal (which GE offered it after first denying it) and the dearth of HBO slots for DreamWorks films (which Universal had withheld throughout the process before finally offering two of its annual six), there was Meyer's unhappy discovery that the 'Works had in fact been secretly dealing with Disney:

When [Meyer] found out that DreamWorks was in fact talking to Disney, he got on the phone with DreamWorks chief executive Stacey Snider and said she and Spielberg had behaved "like pigs" (as has been reported elsewhere). Other words, like "despicable and deplorable," have also been used.

—Who even cares about Meyer at this point, asks David Poland: "If that's DreamWorks' biggest problem in the next years, they will be dancing in the streets." And anyway, maybe Universal — which already has Brian Grazer's four films per year — is better off standing alone without having to tend to DreamWorks' release slate as well. Cheer up, Ron!

—Plus there's still the matter of DreamWorks Animation, whose industrial traction is improving along with its stock price. The NYT today has both long and short views, neither of which come close to hinting where it might end up in a climate where desperate studios need the soundest cash machine they can get their hands on. And last we checked, Pixar wasn't going anywhere at Disney.

—And just our own nagging question around Defamer HQ: Does DreamWorks' entrance at Disney mean Miramax's eventual exit? And if so, who gets Scott Rudin? We be happy to temporarily set him up here if necessary; the basement cubicles are actually pretty spacious. Just let us know.

RON Meyer, the longtime head of Universal Studios, was an avid gambler who lost substantial sums playing high-stakes poker, sources say.

But a 10-month investigation into Meyer's wagering by Los Angeles Times reporter Kim Christensen has evidently hit a dead end.

"Christensen has interviewed dozens of people, and been to Las Vegas and back many times, but the paper hasn't printed one word," said one insider. [...]

"Ron used to be a card player," publicist Allan] Mayer told Page Six. "He never gambled beyond his means. He never gambled illegally. And he hasn't gambled in years."

Meyer is said to have won and lost millions of dollars over the years, dating back to when he was a partner at the CAA talent agency...Meyer, who did not compete in that or any other tourney, supposedly stopped playing a few years ago. "I think he outgrew it," said one source, who added that, "The Los Angeles Times was hoping they would find something on him, but there was nothing to find. He didn't do anything wrong. He doesn't owe anybody money."

We suppose we'll have to wait and see if the Times reporting ultimately turns up anything truly scandalous (remember, as Tony Soprano has recently taught us, gambling is only a problem if you don't have enough cash on hand to cover your unlucky runs), but in the meantime, we'll just have to assume that Stacey Snider really left Universal for DreamWorks because of career ambitions, and not because Meyer lost her in a poker game when Steven Spielberg cracked his pocket aces.

• H'wood High Roller Lost A Lot [Page Six]

"Ron Meyer held a screening of 'Borat' at his house for a bunch of people, including Pam and Bob," says an Anderson pal. "It was the first time Bob had seen the movie, and, well, he didn't like it. [...]

[Anderson's] friend tells Page Six, "Bob started screaming at Pam, saying she had humiliated herself and telling her, 'You're nothing but a whore! You're a slut! How could you do that movie?' - in front of everyone. It was very embarrassing. [...]

"Ever since that night, it has been icicles between them," the friend relates.

While her image in a 20-year-old Baywatch fanzine may have served to enhance the self-pleasuring fantasies of the movie's titular star and his naked, blubbery producing companion, Anderson's actual performance—mostly comprised of trying to outrun the wild-eyed, bride-trapping Eurasian—hardly qualified as either "whore" or "slut"-like. Surely this couldn't have been the first time Rock betrayed his jealous side, but humiliating the provocative sex symbol among Hollywood's most powerful during a private screening of her hit movie must have simply been the straw that broke the proverbial camel's toe.

• PAM SPLITS OVER KID BLOWUP [NY Post]

Ron Meyer, a softspoken man, who didn't even have a bad word for his former partner, the exiled Mike Ovitz, took the Methuselan Sumner Redstone to task for his spasmodic corporate governance with a well-delivered bitchslap, saying:

"I think the Tom Cruise thing was handled poorly ... to make a statement — for Sumner Redstone — that Tom Cruise is not the type of person that (Paramount) wants to be in business with ... frankly, I don't understand it."

Ka-pow! And all the Frestonians, to be sure, sprayed hot tears of mirth. Then, rebounding the bitchslap with backhand, Ron Meyers [sic] added, "Being an asshole doesn't get you results."

Once Meyer's cutting remarks were relayed to the senescent Viacom overlord by his staff of television-transcription scribes (he rarely watches the "devil's box" these days), it took his highest-level lieutenants the better part of the afternoon to explain to him that since Meyer is an employee of a different multimedia conglomerate, Redstone's demands that the "mouthy whippersnapper" be immediately terminated would be, at best, a purely symbolic move. And after two more hours of calming down their boss, he finally took off the table an offer that one of his minions "might find a little something extra in his paycheck if Meyer's car mysteriously explodes on the way home from work."

• Ron Meyer On Sumner: "Being an Asshole doesn't get you results" [The Corsair]
• Sunday Morning Shootout [AMCtv.com]

"I'm offended that my friendship would be questioned," he said on Saturday. "I like him the way anybody would like a friend. He's never given me any reason to feel differently about him. I'm not his judge, and all these charges against him haven't been proven. The only way I can judge anybody is how they treat me, and Anthony's never given me a reason to think of him as anything but a friend, and frankly, a stand-up guy." [...]

Asked by reporters to explain his repeat visits to Mr. Pellicano behind bars, Mr. Meyer said: "I visited him because he's my friend, and I don't have anything to hide. I know the truth, and I don't care what anybody thinks.

"I feel no need to apologize for being his friend," he added. "And when he's able to have visitors, I'll go visit him again."

It's an almost shocking display of loyalty in such a heartless. mercenary industry. We hope that Meyer's being completely sincere about returning and not just trying to cast his involvement with Pellicano in the most favorable light; there's a person with real emotions in that prison cell, one who's counting off the days until his last friend in Hollywood sits opposite him in the visitor's cubicle, when they can once again gently press their hands against the grimy glass divider that cruelly denies the two men the restorative power of a soulmate's touch.

• A Studio Chief's Jailhouse Visits to a Detective Raise Questions [NY Times]