First, Vanity Fair canceled its annual Oscar bash. Now one division of HarperCollins is asking its expense account owners to cut back on T&E:

When editors go out to lunch with an author or a literary agent, they’re expected to pick up the check. What to do, then, when your employer has told you that you’re not allowed to? That’s what’s happening this month over at the flagship imprint of HarperCollins, where Jonathan Burnham has instructed his staff to “halt all [travel and expenses spending, known as T&E] for the entire month of March.”

In a memo sent to the imprint’s editors a little over a month ago and obtained by The Observer, Mr. Burnham indicated that he had to implement the measure because the house’s T&E budget for fiscal year 2008 was “already dangerously overspent.”

It’s not that they’ll never eat lunch in this town again, though. Graciously, agents are coming to the “rescue.”

The trend in indies is:here today, gone tomorrow.

“The window is definitely shrinking,” the vice president and general manager of New York’s IFC Center, John Vanco, said. “Art house films that, in the past, would play for 40 or 50 or 70 weeks, [such as] ‘La Cage Aux Folles’ and ‘El Topo,’ are, if not a thing of the past, then at least an exceedingly rare phenomenon these days. The theatrical engagement is, by necessity, more of a pit stop for most films now on their way to ancillaries than it was back when theatrical was primary and unchallenged by so many other movie-viewing options.”

Today, Mr. Vanco said, films are zipping through New York screens at faster and faster speeds. In part, the congestion is due to a growing mountain of titles — many shot digitally with shorter production schedules — all vying for big-screen debuts.

The notorious “some observers” blame documentaries, of all things [e.a.]:

Some observers say the problem stems from theaters becoming saturated by movies, often low-budget documentaries, that have no business showing in a theater environment. “Quite simply, there are way too many documentaries being released in theaters for anybody’s good,” said Mark Urman, the head of theatrical at THINKFilm, noting that a considerable number of New York screens on a weekly basis are being occupied by nonfiction films. “The vast majority [of these films] don’t warrant it, and what’s happening is that documentaries that would be much better served by a premiere on cable are flooding and clogging the theaters and guaranteeing that those who deserve the space are getting crowded out. It results in every title getting mediocre business.”

There’s light at the end of the (long) tunnel, though:

Mr. Urman’s frustration, though, is tempered with a sense of confidence that we are already witnessing the opening, turbulent chapter of a major “market correction.” That is, many distributors and filmmakers are beginning to realize that there is more money to be made — and attention to be found — in pursuing alternative avenues of distribution.

Yep. And not just in the movie business but in all media businesses. People who have been used to raking it in are going to have to put on their thinking caps and then get to work.

I was talking to a wise and well-known figure in the old-media world the other day, and he made a really smart observation.

The future of book publishing (as just one example), he said, is glorious. It’s only the present that’s a disaster.

We should all live long enough to enjoy a little bit of that future. In the meantime, the people in the movie business should make better goddamn movies. And the folks picking them up from Sundance should acquire a better nose for hits.

Throughout last year, Sundance’s most prominent titles suffered cruel fates in a crowded marketplace. “Grace Is Gone” was purchased for $4 million and went on to earn just $37,000 in America. The documentary “My Kid Could Paint That,” bought for $1 million, brought in $230,000 domestically.

Ohio and Texas voted to keep us on the edge of our seats for another few months.

I’m pretty excited about having picked up early on the fact that the Obama campaign was stalling. (On March 2, I noted that Obama was having a bad couple of days; on the morning of March 3, I noted the bursting of the Obama-mania bubble after NAFTA-gate broke; on February 28, I reprinted the results of a Pew poll which showed that voters had concerns about Obama’s inexperience.)

In retrospect, it seems obvious that the Clinton team read the same Pew poll and chose that moment to pounce with the red-phone-at-3 a.m. ad (which was so roundly derided in the leftosphere).

And yet Kit Seelye of the Times is suggesting this morning that a subtle shift in media coverage—specifically, the media wringing its hands over whether it is being unfair to Hillary—was the game changer.

I think a lot of other factors have to be taken into consideration, simply because many voters have only a glancing familiarity with what the media is broadcasting (or, more precisely, narrowcasting—since there’s no guaranteed mass audience for anything anymore) at any given time. More about this later, I hope.