Friday morning headlines

Jobless numbers: Nationwide unemployment in October was 4.4 percent, a five-year low, though the number of new jobs fell well short of expectations, at 92,000. State and local numbers for the month will be out in a couple of weeks. Politicians: spin away.

Dems in '08?: That's what NYT columnist Floyd Norris is suggesting, based on the past performance of the consumer price index. Here's the deal: If voters just before midterm elections think the future looks much better than the present, the incumbent party will win the White House in the next election. If voters think the future looks worse, then they'll be ready to throw the rascals out. And these days voters think the current situation is better than future expectations. Norris, who dreamed up this indicator, says that the only time it didn't hold up was 1996. Column is available online through NYT Select subscribers.

UA details: Tom Cruise and Paula Wagner will own at least 30 percent of United Artists as part of the deal announced on Thursday. Parent studio MGM will provide Cruise and Wagner with some upfront money to get started, but after that production money is expected to come from hedge funds and private banks. Some of that may be part of a new $100 million fund being formed by former Sony executive Jeff Sagansky. The deal got all the predictable headlines, but there's a lot of skepticism given the limited experience that Cruise and Wagner have in producing movies (much less running a studio). "Good for Tom — it's a great press release," media analyst Harold Vogel told the LAT. "But it's little beyond a press release and the revival of a moribund label that happened to be available."

No-win situation: Tribune's decision to open its auction process to bids for individual parts of the company isn't exactly receiving rave reviews on Wall Street. There are two big problems: The value of the newspaper assets has declined in recent weeks because of the industry's advertising/circulation woes, and the tax bills would be horrendous on any of the sales. Wall Street analysts are throwing different numbers around, but the bottom line is that selling off the parts probably won't result in a higher total price than selling it in one piece. That's roughly $8 billion, well under what the major shareholders had been hoping for. Of course, the Tribune board could always decide to suspend the bidding process due to lack of interest, but that will push down the stock price even further. LAT and WSJ lay out the problem. Interesting note: The Journal story mentions in passing that Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. has expressed an interest in Newsday, one of the Tribune properties. That's right, News Corp. also owns the NY Post. The antitrust lawyers would love that one.

'Studio 60' blues: NBC wants to pay a lower license fee to Warner Bros. for the troubled show, according to the WSJ, but Warner might not go along because there's not much chance the series will make any more money through non-network means, such as reruns or overseas sales. NBC, of course, is looking to cut costs wherever it can, and if this were any other drama, it would have been history weeks ago. The only plus is that the show draws a large concentration of high-income households - drawn in, no doubt, by "West Wing" creator Aaron Sorkin. Is that enough? Probably not.

Gibson gets award: Looking for whatever good PR he can get, Mel Gibson was on hand to receive an award from the Latin Business Association because he hired an all-Latino crew for his new movie "Apocalypto." "If I was in the film, it would have wrecked it," Gibson said, drawing laughs from a crowd of about 300 people at the Beverly Hilton. It was his first public appearance since the drunk driving arrest.

Grazers pull back: Producer Brian Grazer and his wife Gigi listed their Pacific Palisades home for $27.5 million last week and then quickly took it off the market. The house is on a gated three-acre property. Its six-bedroom main house was built in about 1940 and was once owned by Gregory Peck. Amenities include a screening room, billiard room, pool, art studio and gym.

First American backdating: The Santa Ana-based title insurer says that there may have been improper backdating of options granted to executives. The company said it was delaying filing its third-quarter earnings and that it expected to take a write-down. First American has been in cut back mode because of the housing downturn.

Gas report: Lower still. After 11 straight weeks of declines, gas price averages in most Southern California areas are now one dollar or more below the record peaks they reached in May of this year. The Auto Club's weekly survey show that the average price of self-serve regular gasoline in the Los Angeles-Long Beach area is $2.402, which is 6.6 cents lower than last week, 31 cents lower than last month, and 36 cents lower than last year.