Roman Polanski will spend at least another night in jail.

Sources in Switzerland tell me that Polanski is not being released today from Winterthur prison.

The 76-year-old Academy Award-winning director of “The Pianist”  remains behind bars until his estate in Gstaad is approved for his home sentence. Wire reports claim that workers have been preparing the property for his arrival.

Observers wondered today if Polanski would be transferred home after his lawyer visited him at the prison. But insiders say it may yet take a couple of days before everything is worked out.

The cruel irony of Michael Jackson’s death is reflected in the boxoffice.

The movie about Jackson’s rehearsals for shows that never took place, “This Is It,” hit $240 million worldwide this weekend. That gives Jackson the biggest concert film and documentary ever. Jackson’s kids will wind up very wealthy from this film thanks to his executors. Remember, Sony paid a $60 million advance. The footage from all those rehearsals has become a bonanza. And this column told you first that AEGLive had 100 hours of it.  That was back on June 29th, four days after Michael was killed.

Of course, all Jackson ever wanted was to somehow get into the film business.

Back in 1991, he actually “stole” back the finished tapes for his “Invincible” album in June of that year. He held them for ransom until he got a part in Barry Sonnenfeld’s “Men in Black II.” In the end, he got his way. Sony got him the part, “Invincible” was finally released, and the following year Michael had a cameo in the movie.

Through the years, Jackson was easily taken in by anyone who promised him a film role. He was constantly accessible if an indie producer showed up with a hare-brained scheme to start a production company with Jackson’s money — or just his name, as his cash ran out.

Jackson has a weird role in a little-seen DVD release called “Miss Cast Away,” written and produced by Bryan Michael Stoller.

He also made a deal with Prince Abdulla of Bahrain to make movies, then reneged but kept the Prince’s $7 million advance.

By the way, if you want to see one of Jackson’ s major dance influences, check out this clip from YouTube that marries “Billie Jean” to Bob Fosse’s 1974 choreography/performance from Stanley Donen’s “The Little Prince.” Add a little James Brown, and voila! you have Michael Jackson.

As for “This Is It,” Sony would love to say the movie got to $250 million. That would mean leaving it in theaters through the end of the year. The DVD release is set for January 26th.

Sandra Bullock is a favorite of mine. I don’t know why exactly. It’s not like I know her. Like you, I know her on screen. But I like to root for her.

On Thanksgiving, she did the hardest thing ever in her career: She beat the vampires of “Twilight: New Moon.” Her likable new film, “The Blind Side,” finished at No. 1, just a couple of gleaming jagged teath above “New Moon.” (The latter is back to no. 1 of this afternoon.)

Not only did Sandy (that’s what I’m going to call her) top the vampires, she beat herself and her naysayers. The reason: “Blind Side,” from Warner Bros., has already made more than $60 million in eight days. (It’s up to $76.3 through this morning.)

On the other hand, a truly terrible Bullock film, “All About Steve,” from 20th Century Fox, has made only $33.8 million in 82 days. That movie got such bad reviews — and Sandy produced it! — that some reviewers were saying her party was over.

Never!

In fact, 2009 has been a pretty good year for Sandy Bullock. In June, her first release of the season, “The Proposal,” was a blockbuster. Co-starring with Ryan Reynolds (in maybe his best performance so far, too), Bullock pulled in a whopping $164 million in the U.S. in about 65 days. Its total worldwide boxoffice is almost $300 million. The Disney/Buena Vista release is a natural, too, for one or two sequels.

Consider this: Sandy’s generational competitor, Julia Roberts, has never had a year with two hits like “Proposal” and “Blind Side.” And certainly not after two decades or more in the business!

What did the Disney and Warners people know that Fox didn’t? The movie has to be “All About Sandy” — not Steve or anyone else. She has to play sophisticated yet vulnerable. Her big brown eyes have to suggest empathy. And the other characters have to like her. In “The Proposal,” for example, there’s talk that Bullock’s character has been difficult and self-centered, but that was all off screen. On screen, all we see is a nice girl trying to survive. Just like in her biggest hit, “While You Were Sleeping.”

She won’t win any Oscars this year, but never say never. (Attention, Bill Mechanic and Adam Shankman: Let her present this year at the Oscars, at least.)

Sandra Bullock (and please, Sandy, stay away from the plastic surgeons and dermatologists) is a player, and she’s here for keeps. Hope, as they say, floats.

P.S. Check out her very good cameo as Harper Lee in Doug McGrath’s extremely underrated Capote movie, “Infamous.”

Roman Polanski’s wife of  20  years, Emmanuelle Seigner, and their young son and daughter, are reportedly “decimated,” friends say, over the director’s two-month incarceration in a Swiss prison.

The prison Polanski has been held in since September 25th is no country club, they say. “It’s a jail.”

So news yesterday that the two-time Academy Award winning film director and Holocaust survivor Polanski is about to be released to house arrest in Switzerland in exchange for $4.5 million has been met with tears and gasps of relief. The artistic community agrees: the Swiss court is doing the right thing. Polanski is not a flight risk. He’s doing this for his children. The children, they say, have been visiting their father once in a week in the prison, and it’s had a terrible effect on them.

Once Polanski is home, he can concentrate on finishing his film, “Ghost,” which, if done, could be the opening night at the Berlin Film Festival in February. Polanski would not be able to attend, of course.

He will also now concentrate on extradition to the U.S. This will be tricky since in 2009 there have been numerous contentious volleys between Polanski’s lawyers and the court. Many of them have been based on revleations from the Marina Zenovich documentary “Roman Polanski Wanted and Desired.” Zenovich is currently in Switzterland filming for a sequel.

I originally wrote about this in a column earlier this year. The February 17th hearing which I attended in Los Angeles was a motion to dismiss Polanski’s case based on the documentary. Polanski’s lawyer, Chad Hummel wrote in his motion to dismiss the old case: “Following the release of the Documentary, the Los Angeles Superior Court has engaged in a course of conduct of issuing false statements with no factual support, denying fairness by ignoring facts readily available which are contrary to its assertions, violating its own Rules of Judicial Conduct…”

The judge didn’t listen, and left the case in limbo. But that hearing may have triggered a renewed interest in trying to trap and bring Polanski to the U.S.

A few weeks later I wrote about secret emails that had circulated in the L.A. Superior Court about Polanski.

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Whitney Houston sang live (to a a track) last night on “Dancing with The Stars,” which is a pretty big deal for any artist these days. Good for her! If there’s one thing to be thankful for this week in the Celeb World, it’s Whitney’s comeback. She also got a surprise: cousin Dionne Warwick was waiting for her at the side of the stage as Whitney finished “Million Dollar Bill.” Whitney is working hard out there at age 46, showing girls half her age how it’s done. And she looks great…Now all she needs are some Grammy nominations…

…James Franco’s “General Hospital” experiment is one weird ride. On yesterday’s episode he uttered what had to have been the funniest bit of dialogue in the show’s history. After using the word “dialectic” in a speech about art, he then told the girl he was trying to seduce about a lost love. This was the gist of it: “She was murdered by a man she didn’t even know. He used a number 4 steak knife,  and then was so despondent that he ran to an overpass and threw himself off.  Pieces of his body were scattered all over. To this day, I can’t eat meat.”

What is really going on here? For one thing, later someone said the word “visceral” in another speech. “Dialectic” and “visceral” are words that have never been spoken on a soap opera. So, who knows? All of it has to do with a real life artist named (John) Carter with whom Franco has collaborated on a number of projects. Carter, as he’s known, is into detached body parts and prosthetics. 

James is playing his real life friend as a murderous one-named artist called Franco who is part Carter and part Banksy, the real life mysterious British graffiti artist. It’s all very “meta” and very, very unlike a show in which the central character is a mobster doing a bad Michael Corleone imitation. (You can’t make these things up.) Will this trend catch on? If so, soon we’ll have Leonardo Di Caprio playing an environmentalist on “As the World Turns” and Angelina Jolie as an adoption expert on “One Life to Live.” Crazier things have happened…

…By the way: the song used in the “Precious” commercials is not in the movie. But it works well in the trailer. “Happy” is an old fashioned hot single, taken from Leona Lewis’s new album, “Echo,” which was just released. J Records’ Larry Jackson has put together a strong collection of potential hits for Lewis, and she sings the heck out of them. Lewis, of course, is part of Clive Davis’s fourth quarter attack on the charts that includes Whitney, Barry Manilow, Rod Stewart, and Alicia Keys. Really, Clive started Arista Records thirty five years ago. Unbelievable…

The reviews are in, and Peter Jackson’s “The Lovely Bones” did not go over well tonight in London. Or anywhere else.

THR’s Kirk Honeycutt is not the only reviewer who’s panned the much-anticipated film translation of Alice Sebold’s best-selling novel. A spy in London called it “dull, lame and disappointing.” Yikes.

This isn’t good news for Paramount on a boxoffice basis. Of course, the studio will hope to spin the movie to the book’s large fan base. But Oscar-wise, it would seem that these “Bones” are fractured beyond repair. Believe me, in Oscarland, bad news travels fast!

Paramount can console itself with Jason Reitman’s “Up in the Air.” That’s their ace in the hole, so OK, it’s all good, as we so often like to say. But having said that (I’m stealing from the “Curb Your Enthusiasm” finale), the 10 best picture nominees are looking more like this:

1. “Precious”

2. “Up in the Air”

3. “Nine”

4. “The Hurt Locker”

5. “Inglorious Basterds”

6. “An Education”

7. “A Single Man”

8. “Up”

9. “Invictus”

10. Choose one: “Avatar,” “A Serious Man,” “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” “The Last Station,” “The Road,” “Sherlock Holmes,” “The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus”

Of course, it’s going to turn out that the change to 10 best picture nominations is the second-worst idea of the year, following, of course, the closing of Broadway to pedestrians and the installation of tables and chairs in Times Square. (Imagine that the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade is being rerouted to Sixth Avenue to accommodate the stupidest traffic plan in the history of New York!)

Next week, the New York press finally gets to see “The Lovely Bones,” and we’ll keep our fingers crossed that all these other people were wrong. But this is the problem when a studio insists on not showing a film to any press early to build momentum before a mass screening.

For what it’s worth, by the way, the completely unreliable Web site aintitcoolnews.com called the movie — about the rape and murder of a 14-year-old — “lovely.” Harry Knowles does note in his “review” that his wife was upset that all her favorite parts of the book were missing from the film. He doesn’t care since he never read the book but says now he’ll go out and buy it.

Daniel Craig and Hugh Jackman are getting ready to end their run in the Broadway play “A Steady Rain.” But fear not — the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater will not be vacant for long.

In fact, John Crowley, their director, is staying put. He will next direct Martin McDonagh’s “Behanding in Spokane,” right there, set to open March 4.

I can tell you that Crowley has lined up quite a cast for this black comedy: the always surprising Christopher Walken, the great and underrated Sam Rockwell, “Hurt Locker” star Anthony Mackie and Zoe Kazan.

McDonagh already has four Tony nominations for best play — for “The Beauty Queen of Leenane,” “The Lonesome West,” “The Pillowman” (also directed by Crowley) and “The Lieutenant of Inishmore.” I’m told the play is so good that Mackie turned down the much-anticipated revival of August Wilson’s “Fences” with Denzel Washington to be in it.

Mackie may have a little trouble with that March 4 opening night, though, if he gets his expected Oscar nomination for best supporting actor in “The Hurt Locker.” The Oscars are March 7. Maybe they can put off “Spokane” for a week when that happens!

THEATER NOTES

Congratulations to “A Steady Rain” our pal, co-producer Fred Zollo. The Craig/Jackman police drama has been totally sold out at every show, earning a 100% sell through–or more–since it opened. It’s nose-and-nose with “Jersey Boys”…

Sad news: Max Eisen, one of the last great Broadway press agents, has died at age 90. He represented thousands of shows including The Matchmaker, Li’l Abner, The Subject Was Roses, Raisin, The Effect of Gamma Rays…, Butterflies Are Free, Fifth of July, The Wiz and others (according to Playbill.com). In later years he also worked repping Sardi’s.

Max–like my late friends Mike Hall and John Springer–came from the era of Leonard Lyons, Walter Winchell, Dorothy Kilgallen, Jack O’Brian, and Earl Wilson. These press agents worked with those columnists creating excitement and buzz in the pages of the newspapers, on radio, and TV. They knew from real scandals, too, not minute trivia. Their adventures are chronicled, fictitiously, in the movie masterpiece, “The Sweet Smell of Success.” All of them would be appalled by the proliferation of the  lower tier blogs that repurpose (often incorrectly) material, and celebrities that now clog the press and diminish it.

Rest easy, Max.

PS Max published a guide to Jewish funerals back in 2003. Here was the story from the Daily News: http://www.atpam.com/Spotlight/MEisen.htm

“Fela!” got rave reviews, even at almost three hours, when it premiered last night on Broadway. But the big move to attract celebrities fizzled. Jay Z showed up (no Beyonce). New co-producers Will and Jada Smith stayed in Los Angeles. Their excuse was that Will’s 16 year-old son Trey needed attention after a sports injury.

For a while, Alicia Keys was being touted for the guest list, but she, too, didn’t materialize. (Come on, she’s finishing her album — it’s due in a couple of weeks!) Back to her in a minute.

The bold-faced names that did show were fine but not the dazzlement promised: Ben Stiller, legends Harry Belafonte and Judith Jamison, “Precious” director Lee Daniels, Gayle King,  Lou Reed, and actor Bobby Cannavale. You know things are bad when the photographers are submitting pictures of the investors.

But then again, last night we had the Rosie thing, and Armani had a dinner party for Cate Blanchett’s “Streetcar Named Desire” cast. There was also a screening of a Zac Efron movie. And Robin Williams was raking in some big names over at Town Hall.

A lot of people I met during the day at a lunch for famed director Jim Sheridan and his movie, “Brothers,” had never even heard of “Fela!” Here was the funny story of the day. Actor-playwright Sam Shepard has a two-man play opening in Dublin called “Ages of the Moon.” He wrote it especially for Stephen Rea (”The Crying Game”) and Sean McGinley. Then he got word — along with Irishmen Sheridan and director Terry George — that “Irish actor Sean McGinley was dead.”

“It’s not possible,” said Sheridan. “I just talked to him.”

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Rosie O’Donnell had a unique idea last night on the stage of the Palace Theater. She was raising money for her Rosie’s Broadway Kids, and this was the point when rich people bid on donated items like trips to Anguilla and two tickets to a Broadway show and dinner with its star.

She had none of that to offer, she told the mostly sold out crowd. To paraphrase: “I’m looking for people who want to donate five thousand dollars and get nothing.” So Rosie did what you never see in these situations: she worked the room until more than a dozen people pledged the 5K, then a dozen more for a thousand dollars, and then lots more at $100 apiece.

“Everyone has all this stuff, who needs more?” she asked rhetorically. But in this economy, it makes sense. Raising funds for her Maravel Performing Arts Center is no easy task. The time and manpower to find the donor items, etc, is too much trouble and not worth it. O’Donnell would rather devote the center’s time to working with the kids. The result pays off every time. After opening the night on the Palace stage with dancers from “West Side Story.” Rosie showed off her Broadway kids. As usual they were miraculous. It’s the quickest way to get wallets open.

But the night didn’t stop there. Rosie still secretly harbors hope for being the new Ed Sullivan. It didn’t work out a year ago when she did an ill-suited live variety show on NBC. But she should try it again, and soon. This version was smooth, fun, and unpretentious. Rosie served as emcee, and introduced a mix of icons (Queen Latifah) and newcomers. In the audience she pointed out Chita Rivera, Nora Ephron, and Natasha Lyonne. There was no forced merriment, just talent and some ribald jokes.

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Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie don’t just talk the talk, they walk the walk. According to the 2008 tax return for the Jolie-Pitt Foundation, the Hollywood couple sent over $6 million to charities last year.

Indeed, they more than doubled what they gave in 2007, which is pretty impressive.

In 2008, the pair parked just over $13 million in their foundation, and gave away half of it.

The biggest recipients of their largesse were: Global Health ($2 million), Human Rights Watch ($1 million), Brad’s Make it Right Foundation ($1 million).

Some other notable contributions: $500,000 to the Armed Services YMCA of the U.S. Army; $50,000 to the Springfield, Missouri Public Schools (Brad’s hometown); and roughly a million dollars to projects in Cambodia, the country from which they adopted their first child.

The nice thing about Brad and Angelina’s donations: there are no cults, no crazy projects, private religions, nothing untoward or wacky. It’s all about human rights initiatives and helping people. They’ve also kept their promises to places like Cambodia and Iraq. All together, the fair market value of the Jolie-Pitt Foundation is just over $12 million.

No scandals here. Just a nice story. By the way, Brad and Angie each put about $6 million into the foundation last year. Their lawyer, Robert Offer, added $10,000 out of his own pocket. And all they paid in expenses was $224,564 for grant management to Global Philanthropy Group. No one’s aunt or cousin got a salary, and there were no expenses laid off to “travel,” “conferences,” or “other.”

Nice!