For all its confectionery imagery, Christina Ricci scene-stealing and the few other things Speed Racer gets right, it still faces a box-office false start that could make Leatherheads look like a hit in comparison. We sketched a few of the hurdles here yesterday (number one being its own studio's resignation to its underachievement), but at this point there's only one that counts: Larry and Andy Wachowski need to climb out of their hole.

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Guardian reporter Sean Michaels has discovered a sort of epistolary parallel universe in which A Clockwork Orange is a late-'60s time capsule from hell: A recently unearthed letter from the period propositioned director John Schlesinger — presumably between his Oscar-winning films Darling and Midnight Cowboy — to helm the film with Mick Jagger in the lead. It gets better: The Beatles were reportedly interested in contributing songs. Alas, Schlesinger evidently had a problem with novelist Anthony Burgess's infamous ultraviolence; "the film's extreme delinquency wasn't 'the sort of subject I particularly want to tackle,' " the director told executive producer Si Litvinoff, thus opening the door for Stanley Kubrick's dystopic 1971 masterwork starring Malcolm McDowell. Michaels spends a few minutes fancying the alternate Jagger/Beatles version, but really, we'd rather not imagine this at all unless... no. Just no. Sorry we even brought it up. No. [The Guardian]

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A startling revelation from the '60s emerged this week when Dan Richter, who played the contemplative ape in the prologue of 2001: A Space Odyssey, acknowledged a top-level, primate-swiping security breach on Stanley Kubrick's set. It all started with the embittered recollection of losing a special 1968 Make-Up Oscar to Planet of the Apes — and then, like a slo-mo bone in the prehistoric sky, the conspiracy theories flew:

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We thought yesterday's news of Nicole Kidman allegedly hanging on to placenta deriven from her 2001 miscarriage was juicy (er, bad word choice?) enough, but it took a little research into the blob's backstory to turn Andrew Morton's claim into a full-fledged screenplay-worthy scandal. As you'll recall, back then we still relied on greasy newspapers for our gossip as The Internets were still years away from taking off as a veritable information highway. And man, was there ever a lot of gossip circling around the set of Moulin Rouge around the time little Placenta came on to the scene. We did some research on Lexis Nexis this morning and, after the jump, we present the complete history of some of the gorier deets surrounding the Cruise/Kidman divorce, co-starring Ewan McGregor, Stanley Kubrick, and Penelope Cruz.

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