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Lumina, you beat me to it, lol. I was going to say that the "play" part of the first domain you listed is much more suggestive, and lets the user know that an action will be required of some sort. (action words, yay!) Plus, it is easier to remember and say, which could help in your branding efforts while the project gets off the ground.
If it isn't too much work for your staff, I would consider branching off into individual actors interviews, instead of grouping them into one long page. This will allow for better optimization on each page, and better usability for traffic, since they dont have to scroll through a huge page with many interviews. At the bottom of each, have a link that allows users to access the next interview easily. This way, you are focusing on a wider scope of keywords, have multiple opportunities for rankings, and can set up a top-level menu item based around the event with links to the internal pages.
Something like:
DOMAIN.com/inside-tick-tick-boom -- landing page
DOMAIN.com/inside-tick-tick-boom/interviews
DOMAIN.com/inside-tick-tick-boom/interviews/actors_names
By using this method you also will have multiple opportunities for social sharing, since you have an increased number of pages each with their own share links.
Hope this helps!
Definitely agree with Rand. When you submit your requests, send Google a note saying that the person is trying to get you to pay to have the links removed, possibly even including the email/text that stated he wanted you to pay. I doubt it will take them long to respond. I would NOT pay the person a dime. Submitting the request via the clients webmaster account should take care of the damage.
"That still leaves the issue of returning keyword rankings back to 'normal'. I'm still wondering what effect physically removing the links (and coughing up the cash) would have versus submitting a disavow file for all low quality directories in the client's profile."
Google's disavow tool is made for this. Otherwise, a competitor could submit your site to as many bad places as they wanted, and there wouldn't be anything you could do about it. As long as you submit a complete report of all the links in question, you should be fine.
"We can pay this ninja $800+ to have him/her remove the links from his directory network, and hope it does the trick."
Ninja? More like a clown, lol.
We saw some similar ranking movement, in which sites rose very high, then settled towards the bottom of the page. This could possibly be due to the update getting implemented, then being finalized. I am all for the proactive approach, but I think you should wait about a week before making any changes on your site. While you are waiting to see if anything shifts again, do some competitor analysis. Take a look and see who replaced your spot. See if there is anything they do better. This way, if nothing changes you have a better plan of action of what areas need "fixing"
It's highly doubful. Just having a site like slideshare link back to you would not single-handedly cause your ranking to plummet. My guess is there were already some underlying factors that existed, and you got slapped by Google's Panda 4.0 update.
Take a closer look at any competitors that ranked higher during this time period, and analyze their backlink profile in Moz's OSE. I would look for clues as to what is working well in your industry for both users, and search engines.
Google is pretty good about deciding what URL to index within CMS based sites. If you have already set your canonical pages, the next step would be setting them in Webmaster tools URL parameters, and blocking them from being indexed in your robots file.
If the site was submitted, and its already in effect, you will have to wait and see if there is any negative linking. You will not be able to disavow any URL's until you know about them.
At the same time, Google isn't stupid. If this was all that it took to bring down a website in ranking, people would be using it daily on their competitor's URLs. What I am trying to say is: wait and see. A one time submission is probably not going to make or break you in any way. If you were submitting daily pings, and had a track record of being a spammy site, then I would think otherwise.
I am for adding the company name at the end. If a person is searching for a brand or company, you should have more than a few places where that name or brand is mentioned.
I understand that branding involves much more than this, but due to how the site is set up, I don't see anything wrong with it. You are not extending your title past the character count, not putting your name at the beginning of the title, etc. The page titles are already very short, so I see no harm in it.
With is being so easy to rip off anothers brand name with a domain or URL, I personally agree with using using a company name in the page title, unless your company name is extremely long, and jeopardizes the character count displayed.
Then, there is always this:
http://searchengineland.com/quantifying-brand-bias-search-results-rand-fishkin-moz-189824
I'm sure some will disagree with me, but that's what makes the internet such a great place. Being able to agree to disagree 
You could use javascript to load the popup, causing it to not be readable. Search engine spiders cannot read javascript. If you have a dynamic content such as a dynamic menu that uses javascript the search engine spiders will not find and follow the links in that menu therefore, the spider will not be able to index the rest of the pages on your site. Works the same for popups.
There has been some debate on what Google can read within Javascript, but for what you are proposing, I don't see it being likely.
Here is a MOZ post on the subject, complete with a case study:
I honestly see your point, and understand both sides of the dillema.
As long as the replacement ad is highly relevant, and you are already ranking well for the expired ad, you could leave it in place. Ebay is known for doing this, in which an indexed ad is left in place, and you are shown relevant ads like the expired one. This is a risk you are taking. What you don't want to happen is have your users get frustrated by constantly seeing expired ads. I'm betting most people will come to the site by searching, and not by an internal link. You don't want to be known as the company that sells ads, not products.
Morally, no its not right. You should only have an ad for an item that exist, but yes, this method does work, and often.
I'm not so sure I would rush into anything without doing some research first.
Run a backlink profile in Open Site Explorer, and look at the domain authority. If the linking domain has a very high authority, and the content is not an exact duplicate, then I would leave them in place. People should use the disavow tool with care, as it can potentially do more harm then good if you are not careful.
You can also do a check for blacklisting on the linking domain, to ensure that it has a good track record.
I agree with Paddy. Did you do a backup before the changes? If so, getting your site back to how it was will be very easy, especially if you are using Cpanel. When you do your server reboots, make sure you are using the "graceful" method.
Here is a video explaining this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PddZ3FwHFZw
Webspam comes from so many sources, I would highly doubt you are going to see a negative effect from just one URL. If you are really concerned about it, check the server settings, enable Spam Assasin, and country IP blocks. We have seen the worst cases of spam come from Russia, Ukraine, Thailand, India, and China.
If you dont trust the URL, see if there is a page where your link is listed, and create a disavow request in Webmaster tools.
As long as they are all listed in the sitemap, dont worry about it. William is correct in that Google lifted the 100 links per page limit. The question is, do the links serve a purpose, or are they there to increase the page count? Perhaps you are not seeing the engagement or seo results you want due to the organization of the site structure?
BTW, who or what told you there was a need to reduce the link count? Unless you got manually penalized, why is there a need to do this?
Schema is designed to let you mark up individual items. For example, when a store has individual product pages, you should have the end page be marked up with data. As far as I know, there is no way to have multiple items maked up at the same time on one page. I'm sure you could code it that way, but I doubt it would be displayed or read correctly.
Here are two resources that may help you:
A few questions:
How many pages back in a site search do you see these? Meaning if you do a site:www.yourdomain.com how many pages back do you see these appear? If it's like page 10 or more, I doubt a user would ever see the URL's at all.
Second, I am curious as to why you have an image sitemap, and went to that length to include images in your submissions, but didn't name the images in an SEO-friendly format? For example:
http://www.elefant-tours.com//gallery/keys-hotel/07_img_0949triesx.jpg
...is a young woman sitting at a table, getting served a drink. I would think that the image could be named "hotel food dining" or something of that nature. Just an idea, probably not a huge deal, but every bit counts. You have no idea what a user might type in to get to a site. Someone might skip web results altogether, and go straight to Google images to find what they are looking for, especially in the hotel industry. They will be looking for what appears to be the most relaxing, and luxurious experience.
You could always disable the plugin, and make one big image sitemap. The sitemap URL you listed shows the image son that particular page. In a "all-in-one" image sitemap, you would list out the images and image location (URL) individually. Might work out better for you, as Google would get the big picture (pun intended) all at once.
Hope this helps!
If you search for "megeve property for sale", Google serves our META description as the snippet:
Looking at the relationship of the location, and the word sales. Means a user wants to buy, and your description contains that phrase.
However, we noticed that searching for just "megeve property" serves up a much better snippet taken from the text on the page:
User is looking for general info on the subject, and your on page does the job well. Almost sounds like a magazine article.
It sounded like you were asking for an exact answer. There you go. 
Google is most likely looking at the relationship between the words, and trying to serve the best result to interest a user aka Hummingbird in action
No problem. It's mainly for people who want an "all-in-one" that does most things very well, but none of them great
You can always get more accurate data from programs specific for that one thing, but then you have to manage and analyze multiple tools. Personal prefence really.
It would solve it if you had control over the domain. Park it on top of the new domain, and do a htaccess rule that automatically forwards the user to the new site if the old domain is typed in.
