Look at it this way: Hollywood hasn't sold a domestic crisis to moviegoers in years. At least not as a drama, anyway; Michael Moore exceeded documentary standards with Fahrenheit 9/11, but the War on Terror, Hurricane Katrina and other recent, rattling history are nowhere at the box office. Vietnam hit and (mostly) missed between 1975 and 1990, with exceptions including The Deer Hunter, Coming Home Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July. Since then, it's all about the distractions; 24 works because Jack Bauer is your kind of torturer. He's as much of an escapist as you are.

The financial meltdown offers few such release valves. The familiar, curious comforts of Wall Street and Boiler Room are flying off rental shelves, according to The New York Times, but the next crop of business-themed productions — from Lifetime's Candace Bushnell adaptation Trading Up to the Gekko follow-up Money Never Sleeps — are as stillborn as Stop-Loss and Body of Lies before them. Maybe they need dancing chihuahuas, as Paul Haggis hints to the NYT, or, as an NBC programming boss told Bloomberg today, at least "exemplify the foolishness of the human condition in the world of finance'':

Time Warner Inc. has slated Confessions of a Wall Street Shoeshine Boy for 2009. The movie follows a reporter who uncovers corporate criminals by befriending the man who polishes their wingtips. [...] The New York-based media company will release The Wolf of Wall Street in 2010, based on the autobiography of a stockbroker involved in a 1990s securities fraud. [...]

The rush to exploit the crisis may lead to films lacking nuance and depth of character, said Stanley Weiser, who co-wrote the original Wall Street and wrote W., the film about George W. Bush that opened on Oct. 17.

"They'll make cartoonish villains out of these people,'' said Weiser, who said he wrote a script summary for the Wall Street sequel, then stopped work when the original's co-writer and director, Oliver Stone, dropped out.

Better cartoonish than otherwise, these days, though, with the summer shaping up the way it did and BHC giving up its box-office supremacy last weekend to the video-game adaptation Max Payne. Or maybe skip the money drama altogether for now: We're already worried enough about the industry surviving itself, let alone a prolonged recession (or worse). Anyway, if ever the climate looks troublesome in the near-term, just remember what our old friend Arthur the Haitian Weatherman always says about the extended forecast: "Pretty much everywhere, it's going to be hot."

• In Hollywood, the Wall St. Plots Will Thicken [NYT]

• Hollywood Casts Wall Street as Villain to Tap Anger at Crisis [Bloomberg via DHD]

· 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]