Royal Dutch Shell Posts $5.6 Billion Profit

LONDON — Royal Dutch Shell, Europe’s largest oil company, disappointed the markets Thursday with fourth-quarter earnings of $5.6 billion after one-time items and inventory changes.

The results were 15 percent above the previous year but well below analysts’ expectation of around $6.3 billion.

Stuart Joyner, an analyst at Investec Securities in London, described the results as “a substantial miss.” Shell’s stock price was down about 1 percent in morning trading in London.

The company’s earnings for the year were $25.1 billion, up 2 percent over 2011.

The disappointment was largely due to lower earnings in Shell’s core exploration and production business, mainly because of weak performance in the Americas, where Shell’s multibillion Alaska drilling program has encountered multiple snafus and delays.

Exploration and production earnings were $4.4 billion compared to $5.1 billion the previous year, with the U.S. exploration and production business reporting a $69 million loss, partly due to low natural gas prices.

In another disappointment Shell estimated that it only replaced 44 percent of the reserves of oil and gas that it produced in 2012. That indicated that the company’s exploration effort, despite increased emphasis and spending in recent years, is still not performing well.

The capital investment forecast for 2013 was increased by 10 percent to $33 billion — another worry for the markets, as it suggests that Shell may be having trouble controlling costs.

On the positive side, Shell’s huge Pearl gas-to-liquids plant in Qatar is now fully operational and adding a hefty 235,000 barrels per day of oil equivalent to Shell’s production for the quarter.

Shell said that it was likely to increase its dividend in the first quarter of 2013 to 45 cents a share, a 4.7 percent increase over the first quarter of 2012.

“Shell is competitive and innovative,” the company’s chief executive, Peter Voser, said in a statement. “We are delivering on a strategy that others can’t easily repeat.”

Shell also had cause for relief on Wednesday when a court in The Hague dismissed most aspects of lawsuits brought against it by Nigerian farmers and fishermen seeking damages for pollution from oil spills in the Niger Delta.

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Toyota recalls nearly 1 million Corollas, Lexus IS sedans

Toyota is recalling 907,000 vehicles, mostly Corolla models, around the world for faulty air bags and another 385,000 Lexus IS luxury cars for defective wipers.

Toyota Motor Corp. spokesman Naoto Fuse said Wednesday there have been no accidents or injuries related to either of those defects, but the Japanese automaker received 46 reports of problems involving the air bags from North America, and one from Japan.

There were 25 reports of problems related to the windshield wipers.

Being recalled for air bags that can improperly inflate are 752,000 Corolla and Corolla Matrix cars in the U.S. as well as thousands of similar vehicles in Japan, Mexico and Canada, manufactured between December 2001 and May 2004.

The problem windshield wipers can get stuck if there is heavy snowfall, according to Toyota.

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Facebook Graph Search Still Doesn’t Speak Human

Despite hiring a couple of linguists to get its new search engine to move “beyond ‘Robospeak” and actually understand how people talk, Facebook hasn’t actually taught Graph Search how to do that very well just yet. And that’s a problem, no matter which way the social network spins it. Unlike Google‘s pattern-matching search engine, Facebook’s new recommendation-based social search platform tries to understand full sentences. And that takes context, something that’s very hard to teach even the smartest computers, as one of the linguists that worked on the project, Amy Campbell, told The New York Times‘s Somini Sengupta. 

RELATED: Why Facebook’s Graph Search Can’t Give Users What They’re Looking for… Yet

In order to think more like a person the Graph Search team taught the engine 25 synonyms for “student” so that when someone types in “Stanford Academics that work at Facebook” the engine knows to look for “students” — 275,000 different ways in fact. But it turns out that an English class isn’t the future of machine learning: a grammar and vocabulary lesson proves a lot easier than complex sentient thoughts, and that’s where Facebook’s new product breaks down in practice.

RELATED: Why Google Isn’t Scared of Facebook’s Graph Search

For example, Graph Search doesn’t get vague pronouns. My query today for “photos Elle Reeve likes that she commented on” confuses Facebook’s beyond-robo engine. Instead, Graph Search results track down photos that my Atlantic Wire colleague “likes” but that I commented on:

RELATED: The Bad News-Good News of Tech Trademark Infringement

But Facebook’s ambiguity problem extends beyond “I” and “she.” Graph Search also has problems with double entendres, or sentences with nuance. The phrase “sports fans that like Lady Gaga play” has multiple meanings, notes the Times, especially because the word “fan” has its own special meaning on Facebook. (People with “Pages” have “fans.”) 

It’s not impossible to fix these specific issues. Facebook can add more relevant “context” to Graph Search as more people use it (beta testing rolled out over the last week). But never once has a machine perfectly understood our natural language. IBM’s Watson has come close, but it still made an embarrassing mistake every so often, and newer robots like Georgia Tech’s Simon are still getting there. Messups are okay (and entertaining) for a computer on a gameshow, or robots that might end up really helping bridge the computer-human divide. But, if I’m really going to use Graph Search as a way to find things in my day-to-day life, right now, those kind of hiccups should happen rarely to never — and Facebook’s slow phase-in excuse isn’t cutting it. If Graph Search can’t understand what humans want, it’s simply not doing its job. 

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Lindsay Lohan’s driving case returns to LA court

LOS ANGELES (AP) — A judge who has sentenced Lindsay Lohan to jail before will conduct her first hearing Wednesday on new misdemeanor charges of lying to authorities and reckless driving against the trouble-prone actress.

Lohan has been ordered to appear before Judge Stephanie Sautner for the scheduling hearing, which is the first time the actress has been required to appear in court in nearly a year.

Prosecutors in Santa Monica, Calif., have charged Lohan with lying to police about driving a sports car that crashed into a dump truck in June, reckless driving and obstructing officers from performing their duties.

In March, Sautner released her from supervised probation but warned her to stop partying and grow up.

“You need to live your life in a more mature way, stop the nightclubbing and focus on your work,” Sautner told Lohan at the time. The admonition came after the judge conducted several monthly updates with the actress and required her to perform morgue cleanup duty to complete her sentence in a 2007 drunken driving case.

Lohan has since filmed two movies but has repeatedly gotten into trouble, including a pair of arrests in New York that have not resulted in charges.

She was on probation for theft at the time of the wreck in California, and Sautner had warned the actress she could be sentenced to 245 days in jail if she didn’t behave. She has pleaded not guilty and a Feb. 27 trial date has been set.

The latest hearing may also resolve who will be Lohan’s lawyer for the criminal case. New York attorney Mark Heller has petitioned to join the case, but his involvement must be approved by Sautner.

Heller was traveling on Tuesday and did not return a phone message.

___

Anthony McCartney can be reached at http://twitter.com/mccartneyAP

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Well: Helmets for Ski and Snowboard Safety

Recently, researchers from the department of sport science at the University of Innsbruck in Austria stood on the slopes at a local ski resort and trained a radar gun on a group of about 500 skiers and snowboarders, each of whom had completed a lengthy personality questionnaire about whether he or she tended to be cautious or a risk taker.

The researchers had asked their volunteers to wear their normal ski gear and schuss or ride down the slopes at their preferred speed. Although they hadn’t informed the volunteers, their primary aim was to determine whether wearing a helmet increased people’s willingness to take risks, in which case helmets could actually decrease safety on the slopes.

What they found was reassuring.

To many of us who hit the slopes with, in my case, literal regularity — I’m an ungainly novice snowboarder — the value of wearing a helmet can seem self-evident. They protect your head from severe injury. During the Big Air finals at the Winter X Games in Aspen, Colo., this past weekend, for instance, 23-year-old Icelandic snowboarder Halldor Helgason over-rotated on a triple back flip, landed head-first on the snow, and was briefly knocked unconscious. But like the other competitors he was wearing a helmet, and didn’t fracture his skull.

Indeed, studies have concluded that helmets reduce the risk of a serious head injury by as much as 60 percent. But a surprising number of safety experts and snowsport enthusiasts remain unconvinced that helmets reduce overall injury risk.

Why? A telling 2009 survey of ski patrollers from across the country found that 77 percent did not wear helmets because they worried that the headgear could reduce their peripheral vision, hearing and response times, making them slower and clumsier. In addition, many worried that if they wore helmets, less-adept skiers and snowboarders might do likewise, feel invulnerable and engage in riskier behavior on the slopes.

In the past several years, a number of researchers have attempted to resolve these concerns, for or against helmets. And in almost all instances, helmets have proved their value.

In the Innsbruck speed experiment, the researchers found that people whom the questionnaires showed to be risk takers skied and rode faster than those who were by nature cautious. No surprise.

But wearing a helmet did not increase people’s speed, as would be expected if the headgear encouraged risk taking. Cautious people were slower than risk-takers, whether they wore helmets or not; and risk-takers were fast, whether their heads were helmeted or bare.

Interestingly, the skiers and riders who were the most likely, in general, to don a helmet were the most expert, the men and women with the most talent and hours on the slopes. Experience seemed to have taught them the value of a helmet.

Off of the slopes, other new studies have brought skiers and snowboarders into the lab to test their reaction times and vision with and without helmets. Peripheral vision and response times are a serious safety concern in a sport where skiers and riders rapidly converge from multiple directions.

But when researchers asked snowboarders and skiers to wear caps, helmets, goggles or various combinations of each for a 2011 study and then had them sit before a computer screen and press a button when certain images popped up, they found that volunteers’ peripheral vision and reaction times were virtually unchanged when they wore a helmet, compared with wearing a hat. Goggles slightly reduced peripheral vision and increased response times. But helmets had no significant effect.

Even when researchers added music, testing snowboarders and skiers wearing Bluetooth-audio equipped helmets, response times did not increase significantly from when they wore wool caps.

So why do up to 40 percent of skiers and snowboarders still avoid helmets?

“The biggest reason, I think, is that many people never expect to fall,” says Dr. Adil H. Haider, a trauma surgeon and associate professor of surgery at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and co-author of a major new review of studies related to winter helmet use. “That attitude is especially common in people, like me, who are comfortable on blue runs but maybe not on blacks, and even more so in beginners.”

But a study published last spring detailing snowboarding injuries over the course of 18 seasons at a Vermont ski resort found that the riders at greatest risk of hurting themselves were female beginners. I sympathize.

The takeaway from the growing body of science about ski helmets is in fact unequivocal, Dr. Haider said. “Helmets are safe. They don’t seem to increase risk taking. And they protect against serious, even fatal head injuries.”

The Eastern Association for the Surgery of Trauma, of which Dr. Haider is a member, has issued a recommendation that “all recreational skiers and snowboarders should wear safety helmets,” making them the first medical group to go on record advocating universal helmet use.

Perhaps even more persuasive, Dr. Haider has given helmets to all of his family members and colleagues who ski or ride. “As a trauma surgeon, I know how difficult it is to fix a brain,” he said. “So everyone I care about wears a helmet.”

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BlackBerry 10’s Debut Is a Critical Day for Research in Motion

OTTAWA — Research in Motion’s introduction on Wednesday of a new BlackBerry phone will be the most important event in the company’s history since 1996, when its founders showed investors a small block of wood and promised that a wireless e-mail device shaped like that would change business forever.

Now with just 4.6 percent of the global market for smartphones in 2012, according to IDC, RIM long ago exchanged dominance for survival mode. On Wednesday, the company will introduce a new line of smartphones called the BlackBerry 10 and an operating system of the same name that Thorsten Heins, the president and chief executive of RIM, says will restore the company to glory.

But Frank Mersch, who became one of RIM’s earliest investors after seeing the block of wood, is far less excited by what he sees this time around.

“You’re in a very, very competitive market and you’re not the leader,” Mr. Mersch, now the chairman and a vice president at Front Street Capital in Toronto, said of RIM. “You have to ask: ‘At the end of the day are we really going to win?’ I personally think the jury’s out on that.”

The main elements of the new phones and their operating system are already well known. Mr. Heins and other executives at RIM have been demonstrating the units for months to a variety of audiences. App developers received prototype versions as far back as last spring.

While analysts and app developers may be divided about the future of RIM, there is a consensus that BlackBerry 10, which arrives more than year behind schedule, was worth the wait.

Initially RIM will release two variations of the BlackBerry 10, one a touch-screen model that resembles many other phones now on the market. The other model is a hybrid with a keyboard similar to those now found on current BlackBerrys as well as a small touch screen.

The real revolution, though, may be in the software that manages a person’s business and personal information. It is clearly designed with an eye toward retaining and, more important, luring back, corporate users.

Corporate and government information technology managers will be able to segregate business-related apps and data on BlackBerry 10 handsets from users’ personal material through a system known as BlackBerry Balance. It will enable an I.T. manager to, among other things, remotely wipe corporate data from fired employees’ phones while leaving the newly jobless workers’ personal photos, e-mails, music and apps untouched. The system can also block users from forwarding or copying information from the work side of the phone.

Messages generated by e-mail, Twitter, Facebook, instant messaging and LinkedIn accounts are automatically consolidated into a single in-box that RIM calls BlackBerry Hub.

Charles Golvin, an analyst with Forrester Research, called the new phones “beautiful” and described the operating system as “a giant leap forward” from RIM’s current operating system. Ray Sharma, who followed RIM’s glory years as a financial analyst but who now runs XMG Studio, a mobile games developer in Toronto, has been similarly impressed.

But both men are among many analysts who question the ability of BlackBerry 10, whatever its merits, to revive RIM’s fallen fortunes.

“If it’s good, it will help inspire the upgrade cycle,” Mr. Sharma said. “But it has to be great in order to inspire touch-screen users to come back. If it’s good, not great, I will be concerned.”

Mr. Golvin was more blunt. “They’ll need to prove themselves in the face of a simultaneous onslaught of marketing from Microsoft, not to mention the continued push from Apple plus Google and its Android partners,” he wrote. “This is a gargantuan challenge for a company of RIM’s size.”

In the year since he took over from the founders, Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis, Mr. Heins has certainly remade RIM. He cut 5,000 jobs in a program to reduce operating costs by about $1 billion a year. Along the way, he also replaced RIM’s senior management and straightened out its balance sheet. While unprofitable, RIM remains debt-free and holds $2.9 billion in cash.

With BlackBerry 10, RIM not only started over with its operating system, it also rebuilt the company through acquisitions. Its core operating system comes from QNX Software Systems, the design of the user interface is largely the work of the Astonishing Tribe in Sweden while other main components, like the touch-screen technology, came from smaller companies that are now part of RIM.

Integrating all of those acquisitions, analysts and former RIM employees say, added to the delays that plagued BlackBerry 10.

Now that the new phones are finally here, Mr. Heins is counting on RIM’s remaining base of 79 million users globally to eagerly upgrade. But where those customers reside may be as important in their numbers in determining the success of that plan.

In the United States, which leads the world in setting smartphone trends, about 11 million BlackBerry users switched to other phones between 2009 and the middle of last year, according to an analysis by Horace Dediu on Asymco, a wireless industry blog he founded.

Until the final months of 2012, RIM continued to increase its subscriber base through sales of low-cost handsets to less developed countries like Nigeria and Indonesia. Although BlackBerry 10 will be made available worldwide, the initial phones will be too expensive for a majority of BlackBerry fans in those regions.

RIM may also have confused its loyalists, particularly in North America and Europe, in the run-up to the BlackBerry 10 debut. Many of those users stuck with BlackBerrys because of their physical keyboards. But public demonstrations for BlackBerry 10 were centered on the touch-screen-only version and its virtual keyboard.

While some corporations have remained loyal to BlackBerry, RIM not only has to sell them on the new handsets, it also must persuade them to upgrade server software to accommodate the new operating system, a costly and time-consuming process. Companies whose employees continue to use older BlackBerrys will have to run two separate BlackBerry servers.

Mr. Heins’s pitch to those corporations is that the BlackBerry 10 server software will also allow them to manage and control data on employees’ Android phones and iPhones. But any corporation or organization that allows those phones to connect with its systems long ago installed mobile device management software from other companies, including Good Technology and SAP. RIM is likely to find that the competition in device management software is as severe as it is in the handset business.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 30, 2013

An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that Frank Mersh is the chairman and a vice president at First Street Capital in Toronto. Mr. Mersh is the chairman and a vice president at Front Street Capital in Toronto.

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Mayoral debate focuses on city's troubled finances

In the highest-profile debate so far in the Los Angeles mayoral race, three longtime city officials defended their records Monday night as two long-shot challengers accused them of putting the city on a path to insolvency.

The city's chronic budget shortfalls dominated the event at UCLA's Royce Hall, televised live on KNBC-TV Channel 4. Entertainment lawyer Kevin James and technology executive Emanuel Pleitez sought to maximize the free media exposure, portraying themselves as fresh alternatives to business as usual at City Hall.

James, a former radio talk-show host, described himself as an independent and accused rivals Wendy Greuel, Eric Garcetti and Jan Perry — all veteran elected officials — of being cozy with unions representing the city workforce.

"Bankruptcy doesn't happen overnight," said James, the only Republican in the race. "This happened over a period of time and it happened because of a series of bad decisions."

Pleitez struck a similar note.

"Our politicians in the last decade made decisions on numbers they didn't understand," he said.

"I'm the only one that has worked in the private sector and on fiscal and economic policies at the highest levels," Pleitez said, citing his experience as a special assistant to economist Paul Volcker on President Obama's Economic Recovery Advisory Board.

Greuel, Garcetti and Perry, in turn, pledged to show fiscal restraint as the city grapples with projected budget shortfalls totaling more than $1 billion over the next four years.

City Controller Greuel cited the "waste, fraud and abuse" her office's audits have identified at City Hall, saying they demonstrate her independence.

"As mayor of Los Angeles, I get not only being the fiscal watchdog, and showing where we can find this money, and knowing where the bodies are buried," said Greuel, who served on the City Council for seven years. "I've learned as city controller, you don't always make friends when you highlight what can be done better."

Garcetti, a councilman for more than a decade, said he had a record of "not just talking about pension reform, but delivering on it." When tax collections dried up in the recession, he said, the council and mayor eliminated 5,000 jobs and negotiated a deal with unions requiring some city workers to contribute to their health and pension benefits.

"Those are the things that kept us away from our own fiscal cliff," he said.

Perry also stressed her support for increasing worker contributions to health and retirement benefits.

"This is about long-term survival," she said.

By the normal standards of election campaigns, it was a remarkably genteel debate, at least among the three city officials.

Only Perry attacked her rivals, and even then, not by name.

Recalling her work with Garcetti and Greuel in talks with city unions, she faulted them for engaging in "side meetings and side negotiations," saying she was more transparent.

"As mayor, I will make sure that practice stops, that everything is done on the record — that all employees are treated fairly and all employees are given the same information," Perry said.

Neither Greuel nor Garcetti answered the attack.

As in previous forums, the most obvious contrasts among the candidates Monday night were in biography and style — rather than policy positions.

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Yahoo sees revenue climb this year, but long road ahead

(Reuters) – Yahoo Inc forecast a modest uptick in revenue for the current year as it revamps its family of websites but Chief Executive Marissa Mayer warned it would be a long journey to revive the Internet company‘s fortunes.

In Yahoo‘s first financial outlook since Mayer became CEO in July, the company outlined a plan to trigger a “chain reaction of growth” by overhauling a dozen of its online services to increase the amount of time users spent on its websites.

It also pointed to strength in its search advertising business and progress made in improving its internal operations.

Yahoo’s shares were 3 percent higher in after hours trade after the revenue projection was disclosed during an analysts conference call, shedding some ground after earlier rising as much as 4.5 percent.

But weakness in Yahoo’s display ad business, which accounts for roughly 40 percent of the company’s total revenue, caught some analysts by surprise.

“While the road to growth is certain, it will not be immediate,” said Mayer, a former Google Inc executive and Yahoo’s third full-time CEO since September 2011.

Yahoo said that revenue, excluding fees it pays to partner websites, will range between $ 4.5 billion and $ 4.6 billion in 2013, implying an annual growth rate of 0.7 percent to 3 percent.

Finance Chief Ken Goldman also warned investors to expect “an investment phase” in the first half of the year, which he said would impact profit margins.

“What was clear from the call is that this is a long-term turnaround story,” said Macquarie Research analyst Ben Schachter. “We shouldn’t expect anything to just snap back and correct itself.”

During the fourth quarter, Yahoo’s net revenue increased 4 percent year-on-year to $ 1.22 billion, as search advertising sales offset a 10 percent decline in the number of display ads sold on Yahoo’s core properties.

Mayer said the decline was the result of less activity by visitors to its popular websites, such as its Web email service, and to a lesser extent due to users accessing the Web on smartphones, where Yahoo’s ad business is not as strong.

Efforts to revamp its mobile properties, begun last year with a redesign of the photo-sharing service Flickr, remain on track, said Mayer, noting that Yahoo now has 200 million monthly mobile users.

“From a monetization perspective this is still a very nascent source of revenue for us. With any platform shift, revenue always followed users and mobile will be no different,” she said.

Mayer took over after a tumultuous period at Yahoo in which former CEO Scott Thompson resigned after less than 6 months on the job over a controversy about his academic credentials and in which Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang resigned from the board and cut his ties with the company.

Yahoo’s stock has risen roughly 30 percent since Mayer took the helm, reaching its highest levels since 2008.

Part of the stock’s rise has been driven by significant stock buybacks, using proceeds from a $ 7.6 billion deal to sell half of its 40 percent stake in Chinese Internet company Alibaba Group, said Sameet Sinha, an analyst with B. Riley Caris.

Yahoo said it repurchased $ 1.5 billion worth of shares during the fourth quarter.

The company’s fourth-quarter net income was $ 272.3 million, or 23 cents per share, versus $ 295.6 million, or 24 cents per share in the year-ago period.

Excluding certain items, Yahoo said it had earnings per share of 32 cents, versus the average analyst expectation of 28 cents according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.

For the first quarter, Yahoo said it expects revenue, excluding partner website fees, of $ 1.07 billion to $ 1.1 billion, trailing the $ 1.1 billion that Wall Street analysts expect on average.

Shares of Yahoo were up 59 cents at $ 20.90 in after-hours trading on Monday.

(Reporting by Alexei Oreskovic; Editing by Phil Berlowitz and Edwina Gibbs)

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How Fox Searchlight made the biggest deal at Sundance $9.75 million on an egg sandwich

NEW YORK (TheWrap.com) – The biggest sale at Sundance this year – “The Way, Way Back” – began with a promise and ended with a fried egg sandwich.

Producer Kevin J. Walsh, a former assistant to Scott Rudin, told the agents selling his movie that he’d make everyone food if they closed a big deal. But before he could cook, a bidding war broke out that would pit the favored Fox Searchlight against a half-dozen other studios, including Lionsgate, Paramount, Magnolia, FilmDistrict and Open Road.

Fox Searchlight won out and paid one of the highest prices for a Sundance movie in recent years – $ 9.75 million – for the story of an alienated 14-year-old (“The Killing’s” Liam James) on summer vacation.

The one big thing in their favor: Once “The Way, Way Back” premiered on Monday, everyone knew it would sell. The film not only drew a standing ovation, but almost every distributor stayed through the Q&A session with the filmmakers – a “rare” occasion, as one person close to the deal told TheWrap.

Fox Searchlight was an early starter out of the gate. It had already won an Oscar with Rash and Faxon, who co-wrote Alexander Payne’s “The Descendants.”

And at one point it was going to produce the film, back when Shawn Levy was going to direct and it was called “The Way Back.” Rash and Faxon’s script had charted on the 2007 Black List, which ranks the industry’s favorite unproduced screenplays.

The project stalled. Levy moved on to other films, and the script bounced around until Walsh came aboard as producer and decided Faxon and Rash should direct.

In hopes of sealing the deal, Searchlight sent more than a dozen of its executives to the Sundance debut, many of whom began firing off ardent emails to the filmmakers after they had seen it.

“They came wanting to love that movie, and they were going overboard in an impressive way,” a person with knowledge of the deal told TheWrap. “Multiple people at the company talked about how much they loved the film. It still didn’t mean they’d get it. Sometimes you have a distributor who does all that to justify lowballing.”

But Searchlight didn’t have a clear field. As the filmmakers attended an after party at the Grey Goose Blue Door on Main Street, several other distributors circled. These ranged from the massive, Paramount and Warner Bros., to the very large Lionsgate, to the medium-sized FilmDistrict, Open Road and Magnolia.

Another factor was that rival agencies CAA and WME had to play nice. The movie was written and directed by CAA‘s Faxon and Rash and stars WME clients Steve Carell and Toni Collette.

Around 7 p.m., the dealmakers retired to the WME house, where the discussions began. Alexis Garcia, Deb McIntosh and Graham Taylor from WME would handle the deal with Laura Lewis and Dina Kuperstock from CAA.

“We had some in-person meetings, some phone calls and a lot of the offers were apples and oranges,” Tom Rice of Sycamore Pictures, which produced and co-financed the movie with OddLot Entertainment, told TheWrap.

Fox Searchlight was an early starter out of the gate. It had already won an Oscar with Rash and Faxon, who co-wrote Alexander Payne’s “The Descendants.”

And at one point it was going to produce the film, back when Shawn Levy was going to direct and it was called “The Way Back.” Rash and Faxon’s script had charted on the 2007 Black List, which ranks the industry’s favorite unproduced screenplays.

The project stalled. Levy moved on to other films, and the script bounced around until Walsh came aboard as producer and decided Faxon and Rash should direct.

In hopes of sealing the deal, Searchlight sent more than a dozen of its executives to the Sundance debut, many of whom began firing off ardent emails to the filmmakers after they had seen it.

“They came wanting to love that movie, and they were going overboard in an impressive way,” a person with knowledge of the deal told TheWrap. “Multiple people at the company talked about how much they loved the film. It still didn’t mean they’d get it. Sometimes you have a distributor who does all that to justify lowballing.”

But Searchlight didn’t have a clear field. As the filmmakers attended an after party at the Grey Goose Blue Door on Main Street, several other distributors circled. These ranged from the massive, Paramount and Warner Bros., to the very large Lionsgate, to the medium-sized FilmDistrict, Open Road and Magnolia.

Another factor was that rival agencies CAA and WME had to play nice. The movie was written and directed by CAA‘s Faxon and Rash and stars WME clients Steve Carell and Toni Collette.

Around 7 p.m., the dealmakers retired to the WME house, where the discussions began. Alexis Garcia, Deb McIntosh and Graham Taylor from WME would handle the deal with Laura Lewis and Dina Kuperstock from CAA.

“We had some in-person meetings, some phone calls and a lot of the offers were apples and oranges,” Tom Rice of Sycamore Pictures, which produced and co-financed the movie with OddLot Entertainment, told TheWrap.

“When we went over there, we didn’t tell them it was exclusive. But quickly getting there, it was clear they were intending to make it work as quickly as possible,” an individual close to the deal said. “And it still dragged out for several hours.”

As they haggled over numbers, the two sides moved in and out of the condo. The agents would move while Fox talked about it. The Fox team had to move when the agents wanted to call people back at the WME house.

Meanwhile, over the night, Searchlight increased its offer significantly. Making a big bet on the first-time directors, $ 9.75 million, at 4:30 a.m. it finally closed one of the richest deals in Sundance history.

“Fox Searchlight considers Jim and Nat a real part of their family,” Rice said. “They made their interest known for a long time.”

The deal done, the negotiating team headed back to the WME house to play pool, listen to music, drink champagne and down vodka. Whiskey would have been ideal given the frigid weather, but Utah’s Byzantine liquor laws had dashed the hopes of a late-night liquor run. The local whiskey from High West Distillery would have to wait.

“We didn’t plan ahead for celebrations, and it isn’t too easy to improvise in Park City,” one person there recalled.

With a couple hours until the papers would be signed, pre-planned improvisation would have to do.

And Walsh made good on his promise: Fried egg sandwiches with asparagus.

“We cracked a bottle of champagne at about 6 a.m.,” he said. Good morning.

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Rescuer Appears for New York Downtown Hospital

Manhattan’s only remaining hospital south of 14th Street, New York Downtown, has found a white knight willing to take over its debt and return it to good health, hospital officials said Monday.

NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, one of New York City’s largest academic medical centers, has proposed to take over New York Downtown in a “certificate of need” filed with the State Health Department. The three-page proposal argues that though New York Downtown is projected to have a significant operating loss in 2013, it is vital to Lower Manhattan, including Wall Street, Chinatown and the Lower East Side, especially since the closing of St. Vincent’s Hospital after it declared bankruptcy in 2010.

The rescue proposal, which would need the Health Department’s approval, comes at a precarious time for hospitals in the city. Long Island College Hospital, just across the river in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, has been threatened with closing after a failed merger with SUNY Downstate Medical Center, and several other Brooklyn hospitals are considering mergers to stem losses.

New York Downtown has been affiliated with the NewYork-Presbyterian health care system while maintaining separate operations.

“We are looking forward to having them become a sixth campus so the people in that community can continue to have a community hospital that continues to serve them,” Myrna Manners, a spokeswoman for NewYork-Presbyterian, said.

Fred Winters, a spokesman for New York Downtown, declined to comment.

Presbyterian’s proposal emphasized that it would acquire New York Downtown’s debt at no cost to the state, a critical point at a time when the state has shown little interest in bailing out failing hospitals.

The proposal said that if New York Downtown were to close, it would leave more than 300,000 residents of Lower Manhattan, including the financial district, Greenwich Village, SoHo, the Lower East Side and Chinatown, without a community hospital. In addition, it said, 750,000 people work and visit in the area every day, a number that is expected to grow with the construction of 1 World Trade Center and related buildings.

The proposal argues that New York Downtown is essential partly because of its long history of responding to disasters in the city. One of its predecessors was founded as a direct result of the 1920 terrorist bombing outside the J. P. Morgan Building, and the hospital has responded to the 1975 bombing of Fraunces Tavern, the 1993 and 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center, and, this month, the crash of a commuter ferry from New Jersey.

Like other fragile hospitals in the city, New York Downtown has shrunk, going to 180 beds, down from the 254 beds it was certified for in 2006, partly because the more affluent residents of Lower Manhattan often go to bigger hospitals for elective care.

The proposal says that half of the emergency department patients at New York Downtown either are on Medicaid, the program for the poor, or are uninsured.

NewYork-Presbyterian would absorb the cost of the hospital’s maternity and neonatal intensive care units, which have been expanding because of demand, but have been operating at a deficit of more than $1 million a year, the proposal said.

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