As first noted here a few weeks back, ye olde stalled Robin Hood epic Nottingham is all but dead in the water now at Universal, where Ridley Scott, Russell Crowe and Sienna Miller were locked in to start shooting this month before a flurry of setbacks delayed it indefinitely. As presumed, labour woes and casting haggles were indeed among the pitfalls, but you have to know that an implosion of this magnitude can't simply stop there — as described after the jump, Crowe's weight, Scott's attention span, script haggles and other factors also conspired to keep Hollywood out of the forest this time around.

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A note slipped over the Defamer transom this afternoon hints that all is not well in Nottingham, Ridley Scott's reimagining of the Robin Hood legend which was set to begin shooting with Russell Crowe and a really, really, really excited Sienna Miller sometime next month. But we're hearing now that the film — which twists Crowe's Sheriff of Nottingham as the hero against Robin Hood's ruthless thief — is postponed indefinitely. SAG strike fears, as Miller alluded to in June? Unavailable historical background on Maid Marian's merkin? Inquiries to Universal (which last year paid seven figures for the script) and Scott's pals at Imagine Entertainment weren't immediately returned, leaving us in the lurch for a long weekend to come. Alas, we'll always have Costner.

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Announced in April as approximately the 20th collaboration in development between Russell Crowe and Ridley Scott, Nottingham promises the duo's stylish, "revisionist" take on the Robin Hood legend — produced by Brian Grazer, natch, thus establishing the film as a sure-fire front-runner for the 2011 Oscars among people who keep track of these things. They're out there, and we hear them twittering a little louder this morning as Sienna Miller is officially so! thrilled! to be attached to portray Maid Marian:

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With Leonardo DiCaprio and Russell Crowe working in the service of a screenplay by William Monahan (The Departed), the CIA-vs.-terrorist thriller Body of Lies is roughly what you get when Warner Bros. throws a platinum-plated kitchen sink at Ridley Scott's Oscar curse. Except rough is only the half of it, according to a script review published Monday:

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When roughly $25 million worth of Russell Crowe and Denzel Washington fans show up at the multiplex on long-gestating, twice-aborted Universal feature American Gangster's opening weekend, not even the succession of credits reading "Produced by Brian Grazer," "Based On An Idea By Brian Grazer To Do A Movie About A Magazine Article About A Drug Kingpin From The 70s" and "A Ridley Scott Film Shepherded By Imagine Entertainment's Brian Grazer, Who Simply Refused To Let This Crazy Dream Die" will give moviegoers an adequate appreciation of the Herculean efforts undertaken by the spikey-haired superproducer to finally bring his passion project to the screen. The LAT chronicles the mogul's heroism in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles (budget overruns! eight-figure kill fees! cost-controlling script rewrites that ripped the very soul out of the story!), here recounting the dark moment when a momentarily defeated Grazer had to tell original director Antoine Fuqua that Gangster had been shelved:

The loss cut deep.

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Master director Sir Ridley Scott (seen here casually relaxing IN UR PASTORAL IDYL) has taken the opportunity to use the Venice Film Festival as a sounding board to test out his new role as cinema's grumpy old man.

Scott let his thoughts be known on everything from science fiction genre flicks (dead as the western, apparently; as The Guardian's Paul Howlett says, Scott must've missed Sunshine) to how mobile phones - not pirating or the Scary Movie franchises - are "killing cinema".

But our favourite piece of Ridley news is that he has announced another cut of his epic science fiction classic, Blade Runner.

There have been five different versions of the film released so far, but Scott insists The Final Cut (sounds a bit like KISS' "Farewell" tour or John Farnham's "The Last Time") - to be released on DVD later this year - is how he originally intended the film to be, blaming the assorted incarnations of his Philip K. Dick adaptation on the studios' muscling in on his artistic territory.

"I wasn't used at that point in my career to having too many cooks in the kitchen, and I think there were many people who started to get involved.

"So out of it came a hybrid version of what I'd originally intended. Consequently ... we had a bad opening, bad previews, confused previews. I was killed by some critics ... then I thought it would be gone away for ever," Scott said.

Rumours that Rutger Hauer's "I've seen things you people wouldn't believe…" soliloquy has been dubbed to include the line "…Ridley Scott walking away from an editing studio saying 'I'm pretty happy with that, actually'…" could not be confirmed at time of press.