Bidding on eBay for Gary Coleman's pants (as explained here) is currently over $200,000. As you may recall, back when people were offering $700,000 to $1,500,000, eBay declared all those as "bogus bids" and deleted them. Apparently though, an offer of $200,000+ for a pair of sweatpants signed by an out of work child star does not warrant skepticism.

The auction closes in a day and a half. So you still have time to top that offer.

Here's everything you need to know about the Republican presidential race:

Mike Huckabee won the Iowa caucuses which made him the front runner…

…until John McCain won the New Hampshire primary, which made him the front runner…

…until Mitt Romney won the Michigan primary today, which makes him the front runner. At least until the next primary.

Rudy Giuliani hasn't won a primary yet but the news apparently isn't all bad for him tonight because John McCain didn't win. On Larry King Live, Ari Fleischer — who used to do this kind of spinning in the service of George W. Bush — said, "This is what Rudy needed." Apparently, what Rudy needed was to finish with 3% behind even Ron Paul and Fred Thompson. To be fair, he did beat "Uncommitted" by a point.

I hereby officially predict that a deal between the AMPTP and the Directors Guild will be announced tomorrow. On what do I base this? Simple: I have an extremely busy day tomorrow. I don't have time to deal with a DGA deal tomorrow — all the pieces I'll have to write, all the discussions I'll have to have — which is why there will be one. That's about as sound a basis for a prediction as anything right now.

Actually, I have heard nothing from anyone in a position to know how close to a deal they might be so just sit tight. Either they'll make a deal this week or they won't. I'm going to be very busy next week too, so it could happen then.

Glenn Greenwald has an interesting piece up on "judicial activism" in the court decision to not compel MSNBC to include Dennis Kucinich in this evening's Democratic debate. Basically, Kucinich sued on a "breach of contract" basis and the matter seems to have been settled — he was not included — based on the merits of that specific principle. But a lot of people who wanted him in the debates — either because he's their guy or they think he'd wound the other Democratic candidates or maybe because they just like short people — are charging "judicial activism." That is, as Greenwald notes, something a lot of folks charge any time a court decision does not yield their preferred outcome. I think he's right. The law does not always give us the results we'd like to see and it isn't always (or even often, I suspect) because judges are trying to engineer the results they'd like to see.

I caught a little of that debate, by the way. Tim Russert seemed to be trying hard to get the candidates to bash one another and they refused to do much of that…and even gave Russert a bit of hard time for trying to start trouble. At least in the portion I saw, it didn't seem like any candidate "won." The victory seemed to be for those who want to see the leading Democratic contenders stop firing at one another and to link arms to get one of their own elected. Apart from that, it wasn't of huge interest. In hindsight, the best argument for including Kucinich was that he might have gotten some squabbles going and livened things up. Of course, they could have done that by bringing in Gallagher to smash a watermelon.

Never mind all these polls about who's going to be President of the United States. Let's look at the really important one, the one that tells what you folks thought of the movie, Skidoo. Here are the final totals…

As you can see, almost half (47%) of those who voted did not watch the thing. A hair under 27% of you enjoyed the experience with 4.3% of you calling it a "fine motion picture." A slightly larger amount called it "one of the worst movies I've ever seen" and everyone else was kind of bewildered, which is where I came down on the issue. This poll has a margin of error of ±100% because the movie did, as well.

Since I wronged some of you by encouraging the viewing of this film, I'll suggest some good ones to watch on Turner Classic Movies. Tonight, they're running What's Up, Tiger Lily?, which was the very funny movie for which a team of clever actors redubbed a sixties Japanese spy flick with funny dialogue. Woody Allen was the front man but I hear the voice and wit of my pal (and a frequent patron of this blog), Frank Buxton.

Early Thursday morning, they're running the rarely-seen Taxi!, which was one of Jimmy Cagney's first movies. It's quite melodramatic but Cagney is, of course, electric in the lead. Matter of fact, they're running a number of rare Cagney movies that morning and more later this month.

Lastly, if you like Danny Kaye, you can view or record The Secret Life of Walter Mitty on Friday evening and The Court Jester early Saturday morning. Some or all of these should make up for causing you to watch Skidoo.

Millions of you are writing this morn to point out to me that there's a copyright date on the To Tell the Truth clip with William Gaines. It says 1970. There's also a plug in there for the 1971 Chevy Impala. So apparently Bill was not "telling the truth" when he said that Dick DeBartolo had been writing for Mad for seven years. This should serve as yet another reminder that you can never trust anything a publisher tells you.

The rumor that seems to be making the rounds is that the AMPTP and the DGA have already hammered out the main points of a deal and that they're just cleaning up language and addressing some minor points that need to be addressed. This may not be so but it's what people are saying and it at least feels likely. As I said the other day, it's always been unlikely that the DGA wouldn't be able to arrive at a deal. How good a one? And is it something that would work as well for writers and actors as it does for directors? That remains to be seen.

It may be seen quite soon. I suspect the AMPTP has something they think they can prove here; that this whole catastrophic strike wouldn't have happened if the WGA had just behaved like the DGA. I don't believe that for a minute. I think the studios thought they could steamroll over one union at a time starting with us and now that they know they can't, they're looking to make a deal and get their business back but to blame organized labor for their own refusal to negotiate. In any case, it's in their best interest to get a DGA deal done as quickly as possible, preferably while Nikki Finke is on vacation.

A number of folks seem to think a deal between the AMPTP and the DGA could be announced as soon as today. That seems too quick to me but I'm sure it's possible. It's not likely that the Directors Guild is raising any issues that take the studios by surprise or which they haven't already mentioned in informal discussions. Anyway, stay tuned on that front.

Someone on eBay is selling a pair of Gary Coleman's pants, autographed by the former star of Diff'rent Strokes and gubernatorial candidate. The other night on his show, Jimmy Kimmel put in a bid and warned viewers, "Don't try to outbid me on this." Well, of course, people are trying. The other day when I checked, the top bid was up to something like a million and a half dollars with many folks bidding six and seven figure amounts. I immediately thought, "Hmm…I may be wrong but I have a hunch some of these aren't legitimate bids."

eBay has since cancelled out all the six and seven figure bids, labelling them as "bogus bids." But the auction is still on and as I write this, the top bid is $33,433.33 with about four and a half days to go. What I find amusing is that someone bid more than $30,000 for a pair of Gary Coleman's old pants and eBay apparently doesn't consider that a "bogus bid." What do we think the cut-off point is where a bid for Gary Coleman's pants is considered bogus? $50,000? $75,000? I was thinking more like ten bucks.

If you want to track this auction, here's a link. See if you can figure out which bid is Kimmel.

The Directors Guild sat down Saturday morn with representatives of the AMPTP to hammer out a renewal of the DGA contract, which expires at the end of July. An eager/nervous industry turns its eyes towards this bargaining, wondering what (if anything) it will mean to the ongoing Writers Strike. I can't imagine that it won't mean a lot and I think most of the possibilities are pretty good insofar as they might lead to a rapid settlement of the WGA dispute.

As I see it, there are four possible scenarios, one of which I'm going to rule out as extremely unlikely. That's the one in which the DGA goes in and just settles for an extremely rotten deal. If that happens, WGA and SAG will be royally screwed as that will be the precedent the AMPTP will argue is reasonable. Which is one of the reasons it's probably not going to happen. Many writer-directors and actor-directors would be furious (so would many director-directors), the DGA would be humiliated and, of course, that guild would have blown one of the best bargaining positions they've ever had. The WGA strike, with SAG marching bravely in lockstep, has empowered labor in this town, albeit for a little while, and put the studios on notice that they can't always get away with stonewalling on lowball offers, which is what they usually like to do.

The studios' wishdream — that they could establish the Internet marketplace without giving a decent share to those who create the material transmitted on the web — has failed. Not gonna happen. Whatever else happens in this strike, that much has been achieved.

So now the AMPTP has two concerns. They have to give up something significant in that area and they want to see how small a share that can be. That's Issue #1 for them. The second concern is that they want to do everything they can to not make the outcome of the Writers Strike look like a "win" for organized labor, thereby inspiring more unions to emulate what has happened. That bodes well for a decent DGA contract. The AMPTP's going to have make a deal with someone and they'd prefer it be the directors so they can say, "See? If you don't go on strike and make unreasonable demands of us, you get a fair deal!" (But of course, the DGA will get more than was offered to us before we went on strike…)

So Scenario #1 — the DGA takes a rotten deal — probably won't happen. Scenario #2 is that the DGA gets a decent deal and that becomes the template for a decent WGA deal. There'd be a lot of blame-shifting and credit-arguing as some tried to pretend the DGA got what it got just by being smarter but that still doesn't sound bad to me. What does sound bad is that the AMPTP would stonewall on all other points. Their position would be "We won't negotiate with the WGA but we will give them the same Internet and home video terms and raise minimums the same percentage." They would then presumably refuse to talk to us about the issues that concern the WGA but not the DGA, including matters like Animation and "Reality" Shows and maybe even the ethical issues such as late payments, free rewrites, the shopping of unacquired scripts and accounting practices. I don't know what kind of resolve there would be in the Guild to abandon all of those concerns if we were able to settle on New Media. I guess it would depend on how good that New Media deal was.

Scenario #2 is quite possible, perhaps even probable. Possible but less probable is what I'll call Scenario #3, which is that the DGA can't make a deal with the AMPTP and winds up either walking out of the talks or getting tossed out like we did. I don't think this would be a disaster either, but for a different reason. The DGA contract isn't up until the end of July so they'd still have plenty of time to come back and make a deal. We'd be back to the AMPTP versus the WGA again but with a key difference: It would be obvious that the WGA wasn't the problem. After all, the DGA — the guild that doesn't strike and which prides itself on speaking the language of Management — couldn't make a deal, either. Unless the studios are really willing to torch their businesses, they'd have to find a way to sit down with the WGA again and begin budging.

Lastly, we have Scenario #4. This is the one that scares me.

Scenario #4 is the one in which the DGA makes a deal that works for them but not for anyone else. As in Scenario #2, the AMPTP says, "Okay, we've made a New Media deal with the DGA and that's it. The WGA and SAG can take the same terms or they can walk picket lines until the world looks level…we ain't discussing any other formulas, any other numbers." But in this case, the deal is something like Internet Revenues based on how many shots you called or how much time you spent in editing. In other words, it's some set-up that would yield decent payments to directors but not to writers or actors. The first deal the DGA made for Pay TV was like that. It paid okay for directors but because of the differences in what we do, it would not have paid nearly as much to writers…and that strike became all about demanding a different formula when the studios insist we accept what the DGA accepted.

I'm not sure if it's possible to devise one of those formulas — works for directors but no one else — for New Media but I'd be very surprised if the AMPTP hasn't had accountants and lawyers trying to craft one. If they manage it and if the DGA takes it, this could be a much longer strike. Let's all think good thoughts that this won't happen.