The only Oscar I ever held belonged to Elliot Goldenthal, who won for his diverse, Mexican-tinged score for partner Julie Taymor's Frida. The New York couple (together since 1984) are equally serious about opera, film and musical theater, which all demand very different skill sets.

The composer on a studio movie plays a delicate role, not intruding too much on the proceedings--coming in late in the production during maximum duress--while reading the whims of the director. Taymor trusts her partner, who has delivered some of his best work on such films as Titus; she lets him fly. Goldenthal did great work on Across the Universe, for example, one of several collaborators on the massive project of reinterpreting 13 songs in the Beatles songbook. (I still listen to that Grammy-nominated soundtrack.) He cleared the air around the songs by using unexpected instrumentation, like glass harmonicas. "But you allow the ghost to be heard," he said. And with new star Jim Sturges, "you never got the sense there was a gap between acting and singing."

Goldenthal's now finalizing the score for Taymor's demi-musical The Tempest, starring Helen Mirren as Prospera and Ben Whishaw as a singing Ariel. The movie uses Shakespeare's own songs. "It's a challenge to find something mysterious and not arcane, and not Elizabethan sounding," he says. "It has to sound like something you've never heard or can categorize. I have to compose around the Shakespeare meter." Miramax is juggling 2009 vs. 2010 release decisions.

Goldenthal happily scored five Neil Jordan movies in seven years, including the Oscar-nominated Michael Collins, and delivered two over-the-top Batman scores for Joel Schumacher. But it took guts (or a forgiving space of 13 years since Heat) to reteam with director Michael Mann, who is not easy. And Public Enemies was a tough assignment: a thoughtful movie set in both folksy Depression-era rural areas and sophisticated jazz-age Chicago that needed all the support and liveliness that Goldenthal could provide. He worked with archival songs by Billie Holiday ("she's hardboiled, not namby pamby or sentimental") as well as Diana Krall and large orchestras, and enjoyed playing with Mann's long silent stretches and montages."You build musical themes brick by brick, mortar by mortar," Goldenthal says, "in a structural building-like way."

Working with clear good guys and bad guys on Batman movies is easier than Mann's fuzzy moral dualities. But Batman was more fun to do the first time, Goldenthal admits. After that it got a little tedious. "I prefer other challenges, when you're not exactly sure what the expectation of the character is," he says. "With Heat and Public Enemies, Michael was drawn to the notion that there are no heroes or villains in the movie. There are gradations of good and bad in the characters. You're not rooting for any of them."

Mann also allows for experimentation. "He's intensely fascinated about music," says Goldenthal. "There are a lot of positives in that. But as the process goes along, the later it gets, the more he he wants to change things. All the discoveries you made earlier, you're not sure whether they will finally be on the screen. He's clear at every moment, but that doesn't mean his feelings won't shift day to day. That's the job. Maybe I'll work with him again 13 years from now."

The composer also talked to Time.

Meanwhile Taymor is working with songwriters Bono and Edge on the Broadway musical version of Marvel's Spider-Man. She talks about her progress here:

On its surface, Drew Barrymore's directorial debut Whip It looks like a Fast & Furious-style look at an exotic world we don't know much about: roller derbies. The film opens in October and stars Barrymore and Juno star Ellen Page as a rebellious, angry teen roller derby contestant.

What every studio wants is a movie with at least one guaranteed target market, plus crossover potential to two or three more quadrants. This movie got made because of its potential appeal to several niches. It's a coming-of-age teen story with some romance, but it's also an action movie with babes attached (think Charlie's Angels, Blue Crush). Some men might even show up.

Mainly, it's an angry woman movie.

And that can be a mighty demo. Hollywood is often taken aback by how well femme bonding movies can do, pictures like Nine to Five, Fatal Attraction, Thelma & Louise, First Wives Club and Waiting to Exhale. Add Diablo Cody's upcoming Jennifer's Body to the list. Not that any of us identify with Jennifer Megan Fox. That's why Amanda Seyfried is in the picture.

UPDATE: Here's the Whip It trailer:

I had heard about Lisa Cholodenko's new movie, The Kids Are All Right, which she cowrote with Stuart Blumberg. (Michael Fleming runs the official start of production announcement here.) It's a great story: Julianne Moore and Annette Bening are long-time partners; each mothered a kid with sperm from the same anonymous donor. Doctor Bening has a brainy achiever girl (Mia Wasikowska), while designer Moore's son is a jock (Josh Hutcherson). He wants to meet his father (Mark Ruffalo) and talks his 18-year-old sister into getting permission to approach him. The father doesn't mind. But complications ensue when he gets involved with his son's mother.

I hear the script is very sexy. We'll see how much winds up in the indie movie, which started shooting in L.A. Tuesday. Cholodenko (High Art, Laurel Canyon) has great chops, but hasn't broken into the mainstream. One market niche the filmmakers can count on: the under-served lesbian audience will turn out in droves.

USA Today presents a first look at Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, starring Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham-Carter and Anne Hathaway, pictured here as the Mad Hatter and the white and red queens, respectively. The on-line story allows you to explore cool large photos via zooms.

[Hat Tip: In Contention]

In the overall scheme of things, a $57-million budget is pocket change to a studio, especially a big-spender like Sony. So why would Sony chairman Amy Pascal risk alienating a star like Brad Pitt and a director like Steven Soderbergh by pulling the plug on baseball movie Moneyball hours before it was to start shooting? She's sending a message to Hollywood, loud and clear. She's asserting her power to just say no. Finally, in this economy, the studios are spending less on fewer available slots. That's also what Brad Grey is signalling at Paramount by ditching production execs John Lesher and Brad Weston: he's saying, "There's no room for error."

Pascal can afford to let this movie go because it was always a risky play, and she clearly isn't willing to take a gamble right now unless she believes in it. (That might not have been true a year ago.) According to sources close to the movie, last week Soderbergh turned in a shooting script that was different from the earlier Zaillian draft that the studio had green lit. (Sony producer Michael DeLuca is on the movie.) Pascal felt the honorable thing to do was to allow Soderbergh to take the film to other studios, where he could presumably make the film he wanted to make.

If Soderbergh can't get the movie financed--which includes coming up with some $10 million already charged against the movie, including Zaillian's scripts and pre-production costs; the movie was slated to shoot Monday--it will return to Sony, who will go back to their Zaillian draft and presumably seek another director. (David Frankel, director of Devil Wears Prada and Marley and Me was circling the project at one point.) The studio may choose to take a write-off.

The question is, does Pitt stay on board? What does he think? He is loyal to Soderbergh, who has done well by him through three Oceans movies. Pitt can be notoriously indecisive about choosing projects--he dropped out of The Fountain, State of Play, and The Bourne Identity. For all major movie stars, there's a great deal at stake every time they step up to bat. They cannot afford to miss. Pitt is coming off a strong Oscar-nominated role in David Fincher's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button , which was expensive and barely scraped into profitability. He and CAA will wield some clout here.

Sony will meet in the next day or so to determine what happens next. Pascal and her production chief Matt Tolmach are fans of the Michael Lewis bestseller and Zaillian's script. What did Soderbergh do to change their tune? While he knows how to make popular Oceans movies, his track record on other studio mainstream fare is less consistent. (See: The Good German and Solaris, both starring one-time partner George Clooney.) Besides, Soderbergh's primary affiliation is with Warner Bros., not Sony.

What's so risky about this movie?

Baseball movies are hit and miss. Hits like Bull Durham, Field of Dreams and Major League are exceptions. For Love of the Game starring Kevin Costner is more typical, grossing $35 million domestically. Also, baseball doesn't translate overseas.

No star is a sure thing anymore. Even Pitt. (See: The Assassination of Jesse James by that Coward Robert Ford, The Mexican, Snatch.) His next, Quentin Tarantino's Cannes entry Inglourious Basterds, is far from a guaranteed hit.

Soderbergh isn't a tentpole director, outside the Oceans franchise. And he's coming off micro-budget The Girlfriend Experience and Che, both strictly high-end audience plays. But Soderbergh's a good match for this material. He used to play serious baseball in Baton Rouge; he had a great arm but lost his mojo at age 12. "I woke up one morning and I didn't have it," Soderbergh told Jess Cagle in 2001. "And I knew that I wasn't gonna be able to get it back. Whatever the thing was, it was just gone."

Soderbergh told ESPN what he wanted to do with this movie, including shooting this summer at baseball games, interviewing real athletes, and rebuilding parts of the Oakland As coliseum on a soundstage:

"We have the dramatic building blocks, so the question is how real can we make the world? My clearly stated goal is to set a new standard for realism in that [sports] world."

I really want to see him make Moneyball. I hope this contretemps gets worked out in his favor.

At the Produced By conference on the Sony lot last weekend, which was organized by Gale Ann Hurd and the Producers Guild, some of the best and brightest in the profession complained that nobody wants to fund movies for grown-ups these days. At Peter Bart's panel, Who Does What?, while producers Kathleen Kennedy and producing partners Lucy Fisher and Doug Wick talked about massaging tender egos, movies made to fill studio slots, fractious shoots turning out better movies than happy ones, and on-set disasters, they also complained that they can't make the films they'd like to make.

While big-budget high-concept four-quadrant movies get more care and feeding, "you've entered the business of making movies by committee," Kennedy admitted. "It's a challenge, once every department and the studio are weighing in, to protect the creative process." She described embarking on a $100-200 million studio tentpole as building a business from scratch: "You start a company, build it, hire everybody, create a commodity, market and distribute it, and you disband the company, even if it is successful. It's a ludicrous business model."

"It's what we do," sighed Fisher, who encouragingly suggested that with fewer companies making fewer movies these days, the studios are actually more powerful than the agencies, who no longer dictate or ram things down execs' throats.

Wick admitted that everyone is making less money--when movies that once cost $70 now cost $55 million, states like Michigan now look like viable places to shoot. As long as the talent you want is still willing to make the movie, that's okay. The studios are employing indie financing formulas and trying to apply them to talent, he said.

The current climate of fear causes less risk-taking and variation, said Kennedy. "They're all looking for the same thing. Tentpoles costing $150 to 200 million, formula pictures aimed at moviegoers 16 to 24, who are the movie-going demo. That's what's working. It's frustrating as a filmmaker. I've been in the business 20 years. My taste changes, evolves. Yet the baby boom generation is not going to the movies anymore. Few movies work in that demographic. I realize if I'm going to stay active and get movies made, I have to focus on what the studios want. They don't want movies that fall in the mid-range right now. They want big movies." (Here's EW's feature on adult films not working at the b.o.)

And these movies have to score right away, because three to four weeks later, they're gone. "We've entered the business of sports," said Kennedy. "Everybody's keeping track. Nobody talks about whether the movie is about, whether it's good, or the acting. That's changed a lot."

It had gotten too easy to get too many movies made, the producers admitted. And they insisted that as difficult as things are now, it's still possible to make a movie out of a really great script. Fisher holds on to the hope that we're in the midst of a cycle that will eventually give way to creative rebirth, while Kennedy finds that working with foreign partners is a positive thing, as she did with Diving Bell and the Butterfly and Persepolis. Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson's TinTin will open overseas two months before it comes stateside.

The negative of working with foreign sales companies, said Wick, is "the weird board game you play" of picking actors from column A and column B who may or may not be right for the part, just because they are bankable in certain territories.

Even Clint Eastwood, who participated in his own panel with producing partner Rob Lorenz, was able to push and cajole and raise indie money to get two movies made that no studio wanted: Mystic River and best picture Oscar-winner Million Dollar Baby. "You're always having to sell, it's never easy, you always expect someone up there you're going to have to cross guns with," Eastwood said. "I've gotten to the point where I've made pictures that were successful without catering to the 'core,' teenage kids. I don't want to make pictures for teenage kids, but it's great if kids come to see Gran Torino or Iwo Jima. I like to get the adults to come out. It's a challenge to make subject matter the whole family can see."

The Malpaso way, which is Eastwood's way, is lean, quiet, streamlined, actor-friendly--as long as they're willing to deliver in just a few takes. When Kevin Costner didn't show up on time for a scene during Perfect World, Eastwood just shot over the shoulder of his stunt double and was ready to shoot his face too when Costner turned up, shocked. "I'm paid to shoot film, that's what I'm here for," Eastwood told the star.

Producer-director-actor Eastwood resists taking a proprietary credit on a film. "When I watch production credits go to people who have nothing to do with producing the film, it agitates me," said Eastwood. "I like to see credit go to people who actually do work, not somebody's brother-in-law or agent. I hire smart people who try to make me look good."

Typically, Eastwood's latest, the South African drama Invictus, which Morgan Freeman brought to Eastwood, who in turn brought in Warner Bros., came in under its $50 million budget and four or five days shy of its 55 day schedule. "They bought it right away," said Eastwood. "It was an easy sell. Nelson Mandela is noble subject matter."

At age 79, will Eastwood keep making movies at his current pace? "That's the plan," he said. And westerns? No other script has spoken to him as a wrap-up of the old west as Unforgiven did. "It doesn't seem as if many people are writing them these days," he said.

Outside the Star Wars Saga and the Raiders of the Lost Ark franchise (in concert with director Steven Spielberg), George Lucas's track record is not consistent. So eyes are on his next production, the World War II epic about the all-black Tuskegee aerial combat unit, Red Tails, which Lucas has been wanting to make for two decades. It finally starts shooting in Europe with a strong ensemble cast including Cuba Gooding Jr., Terrence Howard, Bryan Cranston, Nate Parker and David Oyelowo.

The WWII airplane genre is not necessarily a big audience lure: Tony Bill's $60-million labor of love Flyboys grossed just $13 million stateside when it was released last January by MGM. And Spike Lee's recent World War II epic Miracle at St. Anna, about black soldiers in Italy, did not fare well at the boxoffice for Disney, earning just $7.9 million. And each film grossed little more than $1 million overseas.

Red Tail is produced by Lucasfilm regular Rick McCallum and Charles Floyd Johnson and directed by Anthony Hemingway (The Wire, Battlestar Galactica) and written by John Ridley (Three Kings) from a story by executive producer George Lucas, who wants to "showcase the skill of the Tuskegee pilots,” he said in a statement. “We’re working on techniques which will give us the first true look at the aerial dogfighting of the era.” The air fighting we know Lucas can deliver.

Lucas and Ridley's story has the makings of a strong period actioner. Set in 1944 at the height of World War II, the black pilots of the experimental Tuskegee training program want to fight but are held back by military discrimination. Finally, Pentagon brass are forced to send the Tuskegee pilots into combat. They must provide safe escort to bombers in broad daylight. It's such a dangerous mission that even the Royal Air Force, faced with substantial losses, won't take it on. So the young airmen have much to prove as they take to the skies and show the world what they can do.

It's rare for a European actress to carve out a career in Hollywood. But honing her English with rounds of Berlitz and winning both the best actress Oscar and Cesar awards for La Vie en Rose have spun Marion Cotillard into a whirlwind of film roles. First, she went to Chicago to shoot Michael Mann's Public Enemies, playing moll Billie Frechette to Johnny Depp's gangster John Dillinger (July 1).

Three days later she was on the set of Rob Marshall's Fellini-inspired movie musical Nine, using her own singing voice as Luisa Contini opposite best actor Oscar-winner Daniel Day Lewis (November 25). The script for Nine was the last one completed by the late Anthony Minghella.

After just two days in Paris, Cotillard flew to the Morroco desert to shoot the French-language Le Dernier Vol (The Last Flight), co-starring her boyfriend, Guillaume Canet. Let's hope she catches a well-deserved break before starting her next, Inception, opposite Leonardo DiCaprio and Ellen Page.

Here's the Public Enemies trailer:

The recession is hitting the movie studios in the pocket books; they are trimming their budgets going forward, according to this Reuters report.

Universal has released its Public Enemies marketing materials. Shades of Bonnie and Clyde. Here's the trailer for Michael Mann's Depression-era gangster picture starring Johnny Depp as charismatic machine gun-blasting bank robber John Dillinger. The FBI's Christian Bale is trying to keep him behind bars. Oscar-winner Marion Cotillard (La Vie en Rose) plays the gangster's moll.

Rumors surround Slumdog Millionaire's Oscar-winning director Danny Boyle: he may be interested in directing the musical remake of My Fair Lady, which is still being written by Emma Thompson, who likes her old Cambridge pal Hugh Laurie in the role of Henry Higgins. Keira Knightley is attached as Cockney flower-girl Eliza Doolittle. Boyle has the necessary exuberance for the gig and hails from British theatre, where he directed Shakespeare and all sorts of things, but is he a devoted musical lover? Boyle was heading toward directing the South African apartheid drama Ponte Tower. He has back-burnered Solomon Grundy, based on the nursery rhyme about a short-lived baby, as being a tad too close to The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. My Fair Lady could be just the right escapist tonic for dark times.

Things were still tough for women in the film industry in 2008, reports San Diego State professor Martha Lauzen, whose Celluloid Ceiling surveys behind-the-scenes participation by women in the top 250 domestic releases each year.

o In 2008, women comprised 16% of all directors, executive producers, producers, writers, cinematographers, and editors working on the top 250 domestic grossing films.

o Women accounted for 9% of all directors on these films.

o Twenty two percent (22%) of the films released in 2008 employed no women in the roles considered.

The complete report is on the jump:

Let's play a game of true or false.

Summit says NO, Madonna will not appear in Twilight sequel New Moon, despite what you may read.

Director Marc Forster has worked with screenwriter David Benioff, twice, on Stay and Kite Runner, but until the Quantum of Solace director sees a finished screenplay, he's just interested in Benioff's Kurt Cobain biopic.

In a sign that studios are in no mood to take any chances these days, Ridley Scott's Nottingham will now be called Robin Hood. Don't mess with a brand name. And Russell Crowe will not only be trim and fit, he will play just the one role, not two, Scott tells MTV News. Production starts in two months.

TRUE, DreamWorks' money woes have jeopardized Steven Spielberg's Lincoln, which was to be his next picture after the currently filming TinTin, reports Kim Masters on Slate. EW has more.

TRUE, Zac Efron and Rob Pattinson will present on the Oscar show, but not together. The show will stress young Oscar attendees on the Red Carpet, hiding many others for a big reveal on the show itself. (TRUE, the Academy is trying to pull younger viewers.) TRUE, Dreamgirl Beyonce will sing, but new mother MIA will NOT sing on the Oscars. UPDATE: She might attend, though.

TRUE, Watchmen screens for junket press Tuesday night in L.A. Unfortunately, I have to do something else. Here's an early Time "non-review" and the latest clip:

After everybody had checked their cameras and phones, J.J. Abrams stood in front of the packed Paramount Studio Theatre Wednesday to unspool four scenes from Star Trek, about twenty minutes. With the movie not opening until May and the first trailer out this week, it felt a tad early for a show-and-tell. Underwire posted their reaction.

Right at the top, Abrams admitted he's not a Trekkie. But when he read Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman's script, he said, "it was adventure and funny and romantic and sexy and epic yet intimate -- everything you'd want." He had to do it.

Casting the role of Captain Kirk that was originated by William Shatner back in 1966 was tough. "He had massive shoes to fill," he said. Unlike Spock, "you couldn't fall back on pointed ears. It had to be him."

The first clip introduced Chris Pine as Kirk, trying to pick up language expert Uhura (Zoe Saldana) in a bar. She's initially dismissive, then sees how smart he is. He's drunk and gets into a bar brawl with some Star Fleet Academy cadets. Bruce Greenwood's Captain Pike breaks it up and tries to recruit Kirk, because he knew and respected his late father, who died the day he was born. "We want you if you are half the man your father was," he tells him. Kirk is hooked and turns up at the Star Fleet recruiting call the next day (on a very cool motorcycle). "I wanted the movie to feel fresh and earthbound, as well," said Abrams.

Kirk is a troublemaker at the Academy, natch, and has to sneak onto the U.S.S. Kelvin as it takes off to deal with an emergency on Planet Vulcan. Physician Bones (Karl Urban, who feels the right age, while Pine and Heroes star Zachary Quinto seem a tad young) infects him with a virus to get him on the ship; Kirk figures out that the mission is a Romulan trap (their leader is played by Eric Bana) and warns Pike and Spock on the bridge. "Bana is oddly relatable even though he is mostly evil," said Abrams.

Arch-rivals Kirk and Spock don't get along. In the third clip, acting Captain Spock dumps Kirk on a snowy planet, where he meets a much older Spock, played by Leonard Nimoy, as well as the irrepressible engineer Scotty (Simon Pegg). "Coming back from the future to change history is cheating," Kirk tells Spock. "It's a trick I learned from an old friend," Spock says. "Live long and prosper." Abrams admitted that he was abashed at giving notes to Nimoy.

The big action footage in the fourth clip was stunning, involving Kirk and a sword-wielding Sulu (John Cho) parachuting down from a shuttle to shut down signals that are being sent from a bore platform far above Vulcan. It's very scary. So is the Russian accent used by Anton Yelchin as Chekhov. All in all, I was more impressed by the footage than the trailer below:

This shot of Johnnie Depp as the Mad Hatter in Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland is making the rounds. Everyone likes to repeat that Will Smith is Hollywood's only bonafide movie star capable of opening movies no matter what he does, but Depp is in there too (unless he's in an outright art film).

Also coming up are Michael Mann's Public Enemies and Terry Gilliam's The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus, in which Depp, Colin Farrell and Jude Law share the role started by the late Heath Ledger.

[Hat Tip: Awards Daily]

German-born Roland Emmerich is a director of great visual and technological skill who can be brilliant (Independence Day, Day After Tomorrow) or awful (10,000 B.C., Godzilla). Having found his greatest success with end-of-the-world scenarios, he's going back to the well with 2012, due next summer. The teaser trailer for 2012, which Sony won in a bidding war, gives me a chill:

I ran into Steven Soderbergh this weekend at the AFI Fest Che party. He's going to start filming Cleopatra in April. "What's your favorite musical?" I asked him. Pause. He said his inspiration for the 3D musical was Rita Hayworth as Gilda. That's the stylized, ripe tone he's going for, he said. The movie will be shot with with hi-def Red cameras and star as the Egyptian queen Chicago's Catherine Zeta Jones (who worked with Soderbergh on Traffic).

Mark Olsen writes up Che, which Jeff Wells remains ga-ga over. I still think Soderbergh could have wrestled Che into submission at a more audience-friendly length. But all power to him. He's never, ever dull: he just wrapped filming his latest no-budget 2929 movie, The Girlfriend Experience, with porn star Sasha Grey.

Here's a clip from the Che press conference at Toronto.

[Photo of Steven Soderbergh by Jeff Wells]

Scott Rudin is on a roll. He has three possible Oscar contenders in the mix, Doubt, Revolutionary Road and The Reader (which he walked away from after a legendary tussle with Harvey Weinstein), plus ten or so pics in the pipeline for 2009 and 2010.

Here's a classic Rudin story: the hands-on producer (who won the best picture Oscar for No Country for Old Men) agreed to give John Patrick Shanley's Doubt to the AFI Fest after Paramount pulled The Soloist in favor of a March opening. But the fest would have to project a digital copy of the film, which won't have final prints ready until next week. Rudin persuaded key L.A. press to agree not to review Doubt until they screened the final film in 35 mm. And he was so appalled at the way the digital projection looked on the curved giant Cinerama Dome screen that he made sure the film will show on three flat screens at the Arclight.

As it happens, two Rudin stories are in the paper today: he's producing High and Low, a remake of the Akira Kurosawa 1963 Toshiro Mifune classic, to be directed by Mike Nichols from David Mamet's script at Miramax, and he's featured in our 75th anniversary package.

USA Today has a first look at Tom Hanks in the Da Vinci Code sequel, Angels & Demons. They got rid of Hanks' hairstyle, thankfully. The filmmakers are promising that all around, this movie is better than the first one. It better be.

Taking advantage of the Facebook community to find new talent, John Paul Rice, the producer of The Boy Who Couldn't Say No, is inviting folks to audition for a role:

Hey all,

I want to clarify a FEW THINGS for ALL who have received this invite...

1. This was my first crack at doing an invite on Facebook and the dates listed on the invite are from the day we posted (10/21/08) THROUGH to NOVEMBER 20th, 2008. Facebook does not let you change dates after posting, so to be clear, we are accepting submissions for auditions up to 11/20/2008.

2. We are only looking (at this time) for actors who are right for the role of JAKE WILSON. Why did I email you if you are not a male ages 16-20 years old? YOUNG MALE ACTORS you might be friends with or know of who you can forward this invite to and/or recommend. I have received a handful of emails with suggestions for potential JAKE's.

In short, we had great success last year finding discoveries of talent and this year are using all resources from the net to find the perfect JAKE who is likely and UNKNOWN (by mainstream audiences) but very talented and ready for a break-out role and film.

Thank you in advance to all my friends, fans and fellow colleagues for your time and help.

John Paul Rice
Producer, The Boy Who Couldn't Say No

Quentin Tarantino is moving full-speed ahead on casting his neo-spaghetti western World War II movie, Inglorious Bastards, which has a fab poster.

UPDATE: Rotten Tomatoes reports that Tarantino has a new title: Inglorious Basterds. I'm sticking with the spelling on the poster.

Not one to miss the opportunity to play with a cool new toy--especially if Chris Nolan did it on The Dark Knight--Michael Bay will wield jumbo IMAX cameras to film select scenes in his currently shooting The Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. The giant robot sequel starring Shia LaBeouf will hit IMAX theatres at the same time as the movie’s wide June 26 release.

The IMAX version of the film will run digitally remastered 35 mm letterbox sequences alongside scenes shot with IMAX’s cameras, which will expand vertically to fill the entire IMAX screen. Count me out. I preferred seeing The Dark Knight in good old-fashioned 35 mm. The IMAX stuff, while gorgeous, overwhelmed me with pixels. And Transformers did the same when I saw it in 35. My brain can only absorb so much info.

They've already taken down the European trailer for Ron Howard's film version of the Peter Morgan play Frost/Nixon, starring Frank Langella as beleaguered president Richard Nixon and The Queen star Michael Sheen as British talk show host David Frost. UPDATE: So here's the official Yahoo trailer.

It was smart of Howard to import the Broadway leads for the Imagine/Working Title/Universal movie, which has Oscar hopes on its sleeve. But making the transition from stage to screen with a talky reality-based drama like this is always tricky. Reactions?

When you think about it, the first inkling that director Spike Jonze wanted to use animatronic puppets for his adaptation of Maurice Sendak's beloved children's book Where the Wild Things Are was a warning sign. First of all, just look at Jonze's movies and sensibility and you know he's a maverick indie spirit, an artist. It's no shock that he ran into trouble making a mainstream studio movie with family appeal--especially at straight-arrow studio Warner Bros., which is better at making tentpoles than anything else. Which may be why they gave the guy $80 million??!!

While I applaud Warner chief Alan Horn for giving the director some time to figure things out, I agree with Patrick Goldstein that this may not have been an ideal match (much like the Wachowskis and Speed Racer) between director and subject. As exciting as it is to have Dave Eggers write the screenplay, again, Eggers + Jonze does not = family movie for all audiences.

That's what Warner Independent was supposed to be for, guys. (For a lot less money.)

IM Global CEO Stuart Ford has taken matters into his own hands and bought out beleaguered financeer David Bergstein's minority stake in foreign sales and distribution company IM Global. The deal was closed several weeks ago, sources say. Ford was on vacation and had no comment.

Aramid Entertainment Fund and Screen Capital International financed the transaction, acting as IM Global's bank. Ford bought out Bergstein's shares.

Meanwhile, the troubled project Nailed, which was shut down four times for not being able to meet its payroll, wrapped production last week. IM Global was selling rights to the Bergstein-financed picture at this May's Cannes Film festival. It is unclear whether Global will continue to sell the David O. Russell pic, which stars Jake Gyllenhaal.

IM Global is selling rights to thriller 44 Inch Chest, starring Tim Roth, Bunraku, starring Ron Perlman, horror title Paranormal Activity, the Tennessee Williams drama The Loss of the Teardrop Diamond, the Bill Maher doc Religulous, and Shelter, starring Julianne Moore.

Bergstein-owned ThinkFilm, which has been financially strapped, went ahead and opened Marina Zenovich's well-reviewed Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired in New York today; L.A., Boston and Washington, D.C. follow next week. Also in current release is Werner Herzog's doc Encounters at the End of the World.

Comic-Con is coming at the end of the month, and two movies sure to make a splash at the San Diego convention center are Frank Miller's neo-noir The Spirit and Catherine Hardwicke's vampire romance Twilight. I interviewed both directors for my column: Miller says The Spirit is in color, not black and white, and that he colors with emotion. Hardwicke talks about auditioning Robert Pattinson to play the vampire Edward Cullen opposite Kristen Stewart's Bella--- on the bed of her Venice beach pad. Only with those two was there serious heat.

And here's the Comic-Con sked. UPDATE: And here's EW's cover story and backlash to their ultra-glam cover shoot, which alters the appearance of the actors from the movie.

Ordinarily, you'd expect to see on the fall fest circuit Sam Mendes' Revolutionary Road, which stars Mendes' wife, Kate Winslet, and Leonardo DiCaprio, together for the first time since Titanic.

But the Scott-Rudin-produced adaptation of the Richard Yates novel won't be finished in time for Telluride, Toronto or New York because Mendes has been shooting the Focus Features comedy tentatively called Farlanders this summer, a road movie set for 2009 release co-written by Dave Eggers and his wife Vendela Vida, starring John Krasinski and Maggie Gyllenhaal SNL's Maya Rudolph as a young couple seeking the perfect place to bring up their new baby. Maggie Gyllenhaal also stars.

Mendes will return to the editing bay around Labor Day to do the final mix on Revolutionary Road, which DreamWorks/Paramount Vantage will open at year's end. Mendes wanted to squeeze in a pre-strike movie because he has two BBC Shakespeare productions to direct back-to-back in London.

Mendes' next feature film is Andrew Davies' adaptation of my favorite work of literature, bar none: George Elliot's Middlemarch, for DreamWorks.

And Eggers' (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius) other upcoming movie is his adaptation of Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are, for director Spike Jonze, which has been pushed back to 2009.

What do the movies Wanted and Eagle Eye have in common? They're fish-out-of-water scenarios that posit that an everyday schmuck --James McAvoy in one, Shia LaBeouf in the other--gets caught up in something exciting and scary involving a lot of action and danger and guns. It's the oldest trick in the book.

But the commercial recipe here is also to take a star with cred with the young male demo that opens movies (In Wanted's case, it's actually Angelina Jolie) and add them to the thriller genre mix with an older star (Wanted's Morgan Freeman, Eagle Eye's Billy Bob Thornton).

DreamWorks took this story idea by Steven Spielberg, got it written by John Glenn & Travis Adam Wright, Hillary Seitz and Dan McDermott, and when Spielberg didn't want to direct, added their Disturbia star-on-the-rise LaBeouf to the mix with his director, D. J. Caruso.

Here's the trailer for Eagle Eye, due in September.

DreamWorks should only dream that Eagle Eye does as well as Wanted--a great match of strong narrative and fab visual style that raises it above the ordinary--otherwise it's just another formula thriller.

Universal threw yet another Westwood block party premiere Saturday night, this time for $100-million summer sequel Hellboy 2: The Golden Army, the closer of the Los Angeles Film Fest, which lured some 100,000 attendees, up from last year. Hellboy 2 director Guillermo del Toro handed out two jury prizes worth $50,000 each to documentary filmmaker Darius Marder (Loot) and feature director Sean Baker (Prince of Broadway).

His "insanely ambitious movie" Hellboy 2, Del Toro said, "comes from an exotic country inside my brain and my gonads. People think I do two types of movies: strange little Spanish films and big studio movies. This movie comes from a different place. It's the first of those big movies that belongs to the same world as Pan's Labyrinth. The imagination in it is unbridled."

True enough. Hellboy 2 is a hybrid of those two things. And thus some moviegoers, especially the core fanboys who loved the Dark Horse comics and the first installment, will embrace Hellboy 2's fantastic eccentricities, while others will be left behind, scratching their heads. I doubt the visually sumptuous pic will break out into wide acceptance, especially given the stiff summer competition. The first Hellboy was not a global hit in 2004 (it topped out at $98 million worldwide) but sold well over the years on DVD.

At the party, Del Toro admitted that the film's war between the ancient magical underground universe and modern humans is far from black-and-white. Like Del Toro himself, red-skinned warrior Hellboy (Ron Perlman) is ambivalent, caught between the rich primal forces that spawned him and his powerful human masters. Here's the trailer:

No matter how well this movie does, Del Toro is about to enter a new fantasy portal that will take four years of his life: J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit. Working closely with producers Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh, phase one will involve writing for three weeks in L.A., one week in Wellywood, phase two will reverse that (one week in L.A., three weeks in Wellywood) and then the directing and post-production phases will take Del Toro to New Zealand full time.

Here's the filmmaker's two-part Q & A at LAFF.

For his part, critic John Anderson likes Hellboy 2 a lot:

But the reason the movie plays so well has nothing to do with the leading man's paternal instincts; rather, it's rooted in del Toro's rococo instincts for the stylishly creepy and crawlingly macabre, his clockmaker's preoccupation with detail, and a flair for combining state-of-the-art technology with his taste for the antique, the gothic, the Catholic. Not to disparage the f/x guys, but what's onscreen in "Hellboy II" is all about the seismic eruptions in del Toro's head. Comparing his work to most fantasy cinema is like comparing cave drawings to the Cathedral of Cologne.

[Posted by David Cohen]

Yesterday's AP story on George Lucas's Red Tails, which is in pre-production, focused on the Tuskegee Airmen who will be the subject of the film, revealing that John Ridley is writing the script. There's been some speculation that Lucas might be returning to the director's chair.

According to Lucasfilm, Lucas is NOT directing Red Tails. As originally reported by Variety, he is an executive producer, with Rick McCallum and Charles Floyd Johnson producing. (Variety first mentioned the project back in 2006.) Ridley is writing. No other attachments yet, they say.

They have not started talking to distributors and aren't yet talking about their plans for financing. Lucas could pay for the whole thing out of his own pocket and barely miss it, but that doesn't mean he will.

Like so many other projects, they will push production back if there is a SAG strike.

And for those who are asking if a story about World War II airmen facing racism might appeal to a certain Lucas pal named Spielberg, known to have made movies that touch on African-American history and the Second World War now and then, be assured, we checked with Lucasfilm and he's never been involved with the project.

Nicole Kidman talks pregnancy, the rigors of shooting Baz Luhrmann's epic Australia, opposite Hugh Jackman, and other topics in Vogue.

UPDATE: Here's the article by John Powers.

Ricky Gervais cast Brit chum Karl Pilkington in his new caveman "high concept" comedy This Side of the Truth. Pilkington suspects Gervais wants him around to keep him amused. Judging from this hilarious on-set podcast, he may be right.

[Hat Tip: Underwire].

Michael Bay's Transformers 2 has a title: Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.

The DreamWorks/Paramount sequel began shooting last week in Pennsylvania, mostly exteriors. Bethel, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. are doubling for different countries. From the start, the filmmakers planned a hiatus into the Transformers sequel, whether or not there was an actor's strike. The movie shoots on location for a month and then returns to L.A. If there's a strike, they'll work on FX stuff and won't start up photography right away.

According to New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, later on this fall, NM will be the location of more filming of the pic, which hits theaters next summer. The first pic, starring Shia LaBeouf, Tyrese Gibson, Josh Duhamel, Megan Fox and John Turturro, grossed more than $700 million worldwide.

The new story, which Bay worked on himself during the writers' strike, will also be a simple emotional tale surrounded by amazing F/X. This time, instead of boy-gets-car-gets-girl, our young hero grows up and comes of age in college--they're shooting in Princeton! He has a long-distance relationship, becomes more independent and responsible. This time there's not only a female transformer, but geriatric transformers.

Peter Bart reports that Bryan Singer and Tom Cruise have begun the long-planned reshoots on Valkyrie. Here's the trailer:

Frank Miller of Dark Knight, Sin City and 300 fame is blogging about his directorial debut The Spirit. And there's a possibility he will direct a Buck Rogers movie, reports IGN.

Neophyte producers Halcyon started shooting the $200-million fourth Terminator movie Monday in Albuquerque, New Mexico, starring Dark Knight's Christian Bale and Avatar star Sam Worthington under the direction of McG. Set in post-apocalyptic 2029, Terminator Salvation pits a Messianic John Connor (Bale) and humankind against the rage of the machines. Halcyon hopes to deliver distrib Warners an intense, action-packed adventure with a PG-13 rating.

Karina Longworth reveals this frightening photo from the set of Woody Allen's latest picture, starring Larry David as the latest in a long line of Woody substitutes. (I have long wished that Allen would bring back my fave, Bullets Over Broadway's John Cusack.) I find David hard enough to take on the intimate home screen; I can't imagine what it will be like to be assaulted in large-scale mode.

The latest new Aston Martin commissioned for the 22nd James Bond movie, Quantum of Solace, was en route through Italy to the Bond set when it veered off the twisty road and plunged into Lake Garda. The driver was able to free himself and swam to shore. The car was worth $250,000.

UPDATE: Robert Bernocchi of the Italian website badtaste is all over this and sent an English report before it happened:

Hi We just published a lot of pictures from the Garda Lake set of Quantum of Solace, currently filming in Italy (sadly it's bad weather!).

They just filmed some scenes in Siena (we linked a video where Daniel Craig climbs a gutter pipe!), and then they moved to Garda Lake where this week they filmed one of the most spectacular scenes of the
movie. It's a car chase along the Gardesana, a famous and beautiful road around the lake (which is the biggest lake in Italy), between Malcesine, Limone and Tremosine: they closed the road and mounted some cameras on some Aston Martins to do some camera car. The scenes involved 40 stuntmen (half Italian and half European stuntmen), six doubles of Daniel Craig, many Aston Martin DBS (we published a video
of the camera-car) and a Black Alfa Romeo 159 (a famous Italian Car), which was the Bad Guy's Car. The scene is described as the FIRST SEQUENCE of the movie - 15 minutes where we see a spectacular car
chase, a tremendous crash and then a gunfight. This scene is a Second Unit, directed by Dan Breadley.
They'll continue filming around Garda Lake until April 25, when production moves (with Daniel Craig) in Carrara until May 13. They'll film some important scenes in the very famous quarries of marble, with a flying camera (I think they'll use cables).

You can see many pictures from the filming (thanks to the newspaper Brescia Oggi) and some videos in this article:

We'll try to get more pictures soon!

See you
Robert

Sigourney Weaver is one tough babe. She starred for James Cameron in Aliens, and returned to the director's set on Avatar. And she survived to tell Stephen Schaefer the tale.

In retrospect, the MGM-UA idea is starting to look suspect.

When movie star Tom Cruise and partner Paula Wagner had a producing pact at Paramount, a studio controlled the purse strings, with the power to say no.

But put Cruise and Wagner in charge of a studio, and you have Wagner assembling a slate on the one hand, but who does she answer to? Cruise! And CAA (and husband Rick Nicita) are helping to package projects like Lions for Lambs, which was doomed to be a noble failure from the start. From Cruise/Wagner's perspective, coming from big-studio projects, at $35 million Lambs probably seemed like a modest effort. But it was still too expensive for what it was. Its $15 million domestic gross (of which less than half is returned to the studio) didn't cover its marketing costs. It also earned $42 million overseas. The just-launched DVD release will have to bring the movie into the black.

And Valkyrie is a perfect storm. I hear that director Bryan Singer, who has runaway director tendencies anyway, has run up a $90-million negative tab, which probably seemed reasonable to him, since he was coming off the $200-million Superman Returns. Because Cruise had to promote the opening of Lions for Lambs, Singer postponed three key scenes of the Valkyrie shoot, including one big battle sequence in North Africa. (That's when Cruise's Nazi officer loses his right hand, plus two fingers from his left hand, and an eye.)

But pushing the movie's release date back twice has made it look like tainted goods. Cruise and Wagner took a calculated risk pushing it back to February, knowing that an October date was facing off against the looming Presidential election. As soon as Wolfman and the Pink Panther sequel moved off of Presidents Day, UA jumped on the date. Their October weekend usually yields a b.o. of about $55 million, the thinking went, as opposed to Prexy Day, which usually generates about three times that. Singer and Cruise signed off on the promise of a possible Superbowl spot, Berlin Film Fest launch, and a bigger boxoffice bonanza.

They must have known how the town would react. When you say: "No, we don't have a summer movie, it's a fall movie," it really means: "we don't have a commercial movie that will stand up to the competition in wide release, but a quality smart film with possible Oscar potential that needs critics, so we'll go for fall." But push that same movie again into February, and it conjures up All the Kings Men, which was too weak to earn rave reviews and had no identifiable core audience.

The trouble with the whole MGM construct is that a decision about making or picking up a movie for release has to be based on a slew of market equations. Targeting your audience is crucial. Just because Hot Director Bryan Singer and Major Star Tom Cruise want to make a period movie about a Nazi hero doesn't make it worth $90-million (not to mention marketing costs). (Much as I loved it, Alfonso Cuaron's Children of Men shouldn't have cost that much either. Who was the audience?)

MGM CEO Harry Sloan was smart to hire Mary Parent to run MGM. She will run studio production, marketing and distribution. (That's why Rick Sands is out.) She will be damn sure to pick movies she can market. That's half the battle. And Hollywood sat up and took notice of this move, because they know that Parent gets it.

This Wired story is worth reading just for the inspired art of Harvey Weinstein as Darth Vader, right. Reportedly, he's been up to his old scissor-happy tricks with the Star Wars doc comedy Fanboys.

EW has exclusive pics of Benicio Del Toro as Wolfman. Who would we rather see exploring his out-of-control id, Edward Norton as The Hulk, or Benicio del Toro as The Wolfman? Hmmm.

Who's your fave Wolf Man? Michael J. Fox? Michael Landon? Or Lon Chaney (pictured)?

I opened a promo clock in the mail at work on Friday, for 300 director Zack Snyder's film adaptation of the Alan Moore classic graphic novel, Watchmen.

The official countdown has begun toward the opening a year from now on March 6, 2009. Snyder has wrapped principal photography on the mystery superhero adventure set in 1985 and now begins the long post-production process. Here is the official website.

Here are photos of the cast of characters--excluding Billy Crudup (The Good Shepherd) as Jon Osterman, aka Dr. Manhattan:

Malin Akerman (The Heartbreak Kid) as Laurie Juspeczyk aka Silk Spectre.

Matthew Goode (Match Point) as Adrian Veidt, aka Ozymandias.

Jackie Earle Haley (Little Children) as Walter Kovacs, aka Rorschach.

Jeffrey Dean Morgan (TV’s Grey’s Anatomy) as Edward Blake, aka the Comedian.

Patrick Wilson (Little Children) as Dan Dreiberg, aka Nite Owl.

[Graphic courtesy New York Magazine]

As reported, Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell are playing different aspects of Heath Ledger's character in Terry Gilliam's The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, which has resumed filming in Vancouver. Here's the website.

The China Film Group, which wields an unusual amount of clout over who can do what and where moviewise in China, is going public. The more I learn about this mysterious organization, the more I want to know.

One person who seems to understand its workings is producer Bill Kong, who is featured in my column on how Hollywood is taking big-budget productions to China, including Rob Cohen's The Mummy: The Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, starring Brendan Fraser, Jet Li and Michelle Yeoh; and Rob Minkoff's The Forbidden Kingdom, starring Li and Jackie Chan. It took four Asian countries to finance John Woo's $80-million Red Cliff, starring Tony Leung.

Here's The Forbidden Kingdom trailer. The movie opens April 18.

Empire Magazine posts some exclusive photos of Edward Norton and Bill Hurt in Marvel's new and presumably improved The Incredible Hulk, which Norton rewrote. The movie opens June 13.

[Hat Tip: Premiere.com]

Here are cinematography enthusiast Kris Tapley's rave pics for the ten best shots in movies last year.

Tempting as it may be to turn the familiar board game Monopoly into a studio franchise, some properties translate into movie form better than others. Let me conjure up one such example: Clue. Here's Variety's story about Universal's Hasbro deal.

There's no way the clip that has been going around the internet purporting to be from Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers' Where the Wild Things Are is from the actual movie. It's too rough. That's why WB pulled it. Just look at it! It appears to be a screen-test. Hmmm. Interesting that Jonze is going the animatronic puppet route. UPDATE: Jonze clarifies for Harry Knowles:

“that was a very early test with the sole purpose of just getting some footage to Ben our vfx (visual effects) supervisor to see if our vfx plan for the faces would work. The clip doesn’t look or feel anything like the movie, the Wild Thing suit is a very early cringy prototype, and the boy is a friend of ours Griffin who we had used in a Yeah Yeah Yeahs video we shot a few weeks before. We love him, but he is not in the actually film...Oh and that is not a wolf suit, its a lamb suit we bought on the internet. Talk to you later...“

AICN confirms that Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell will be stepping in to do homages to Heath Ledger in Terry Gilliam's The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus.

John Woo's bid to deliver his own epic period adventure on a Kurosawa-scale is the $75-million Red Cliff, his first Asia-shot film since 1992's Hardboiled. Set in the Three Kingdoms period of Chinese history, the epic was filmed over four months in mainland China.

This trailer took my breath away. My only regret: that Chow Yun-Fat, fresh from working on a Jerry Bruckheimer-scale Pirates of the Caribbean sequel, couldn't work things out with his former director. (Woo and producer Terence Chang weren't willing to meet his sky high perk demands.) Tony Leung, Takeshi Kaneshiro and Zhang Gengyi star in this pan-Asian production which has backers from Korea, Japan, China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. Woo filmed two two-hour films to be released separately in Asia in July and December 2008, with a two and a half hour cut going out in the rest of the world. (I wonder what will show in Cannes?) Summit is selling international rights at Berlin.

The Orphanage handled the VFX.

Check out Woo's trademark white dove.

Tis the season for previews of 2008.

Here's this weekend's annual LAT sneak preview of 2008.

Reelz Channel.

Jeff Sneider.

The Vanity Fair cover story on Indy 4, plus follow-up blog.

[Vanity Fair photo by Annie Leibovitz.]