Did "The Golden Compass" kill 600 jobs?

More than a tad simplistic, I confess, but that's certainly how it looks from here.

Yesterday came the news that Bob Shaye, who founded New Line Cinema in his New York apartment in 1967, and fellow executive Michael Lynne were being ousted from the somewhat-indie studio. And now comes word that New Line will be folded into Warner Bros., costing the jobs of some 600 employees and adding another big block to the move to consolidate movie production and distribution in the hands of fewer and fewer people.

You probably can't lay all this at the feet of "The Golden Compass," but it does indeed seem to be the final nail in the studio's coffin. Shaye, in particular, had been hoping for "Lord of the Rings" kind of magic, but the anti-religion (much removed from the movie anyway) baggage and the fact that Philip Pullman simply doesn't have the mainstream appeal of a J.R.R. Tolkein were just too much to overcome.

Despite the neutering of some of the book's message, I liked the flick enough to be looking forward to the sequel, "The Subtle Knife," but the chances of that happening now look to be about nil. It apparently has a script by Hossein Amini, but is still listed only as "announced" at the IMDB, with no cast attached as of yet.

But beyond that, what are we really losing in New Line? Well, in its best days, New Line launched the career of Paul Thomas Anderson and revived that of David Fincher (starting with "Se7en"), so for that at least we can be thankful. And they were of course also the studio that backed a little trilogy known as "The Lord of the Rings."

On the downside, they also birthed the career of Brett Ratner and his "Rush Hour" movies, but hey, everybody makes mistakes (and those were at least ones that made mad cash.)

One very important thing that New Line did early, before it got into horror (both "The Nightmare on Elm Street" and "Friday the 13th," among others) and "urban" (I hate that term!) fare ("House Party" and "Menace 2 Society," among many others), was a big boon for the city of Baltimore's oddest native son, and for that we should all say thanks.

I can only imagine the look on Bob Shaye's face when he saw Divine trailing a poodle and eating its excrement. But to its credit, New Line still did distribute even the grossest of John Waters' films, and they were there when he finally made some less shocking and pretty darn good ones ("Hairspray" and "Pecker" being my favorites.) Waters hasn't made a movie since 2004's "A Lowdown Dirty Shame," and is now teaching film at some kind of European university. He's also in the beginning stages of a flick called, appropriately enough,"Fruitcake," but who knows what studio will now bother to get behind that.

Waters himself gave a perfect eulogy of sorts to the Hollywood reporter: "To me, the scary thing is when I was younger, when you went to pitch a movie, there were 20 places to go. Now there are only a handful. They just keep buying each other."

It's hard to believe that the little studio that backed this seriously off-kilter but sometimes very funny dude would later go on to something as ambitious as "The Lord of the Rings." And yes, in case anyone is wondering, "The Hobbit" will still apparently go forward under Warner/New Line's guidance, with Guillermo del Toro still in talks to take the reins.

And what does New Line leave us with as its last offering? A goofy Will Ferrell comedy. I'll probably go see "Semi-Pro," but it would be hard to call that going out on top. In its defense, New Line did also just release Michel Gondry's "Be Kind Rewind," which I did have the chance to see and am still digesting.

The bottom line: Nobody wins in this sad story, and the biggest losers will be the movie fans who will get fewer and less diverse offerings as Hollywood studios merge into what might one day just be one gigantic conglomerate (here's hoping not!). In a crass move on my part to inject at least a bit of levity at the finish, here's the final one sheet for Pixar's Summer 2008 offering "Wall-E," a critter cute enough to make even the most cynical person smile a little. Peace out.