Last week was a bad one for Warner Twelve. First came news that the Hachette Book Group imprint had cancelled one of its upcoming tomes, L.A. Weekly columnist Nikki Finke's long-delayed exposé of fallen Hollywood superagent Michael Ovitz. Now, the death of auteur Robert Altman has hung a question mark over yet another entry in its slim, but very important catalog.

Altman had been working on a memoir, to be called The Process: A Director's Life, due for publication next November. A Twelve spokesman says it has yet to determine if the project will live on: "We haven't made any decision. We're going to let everybody deal with the reality of losing a father and a friend before we do that." Asked whether Altman had completed his manuscript, the spokesman said, "I can't really talk about it." As for Finke, who reportedly switched agents after her deal with Twelve fell through, the spokesman declined to comment. (A source tells Radar her cancellation was due to a "delivery issue." Finke said she was not yet prepared to comment.)

All this raises the semi-absurd possibility that Twelve will fail to live up to its name, which refers to its unconventional business model of publishing only a dozen "agenda-setting" books a year. And, indeed, the spokesman says it's not out of the question: "One of the things Jon [Karp, Twelve's publisher] and I feel very strongly about is if we don't have a book in a given month that we feel is worth publishing, then we're not going to publish anything that month. The whole point of Twelve is to publish quality. We're not going to crash a book just to fill a space on the calendar."

In that case, perhaps a name change is in order. Warner Ten, anyone?

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