Jeffrey Wright as Muddy Waters and Columbus Short as Little Walter. By Eric Liebowitz/Sony BMG Films.In my feature about the making of Cadillac Records, director and screenwriter Darnell Martin’s film about the founders and stars of Chicago’s Chess Records, drummer and record producer Steve Jordan tells me that, as the film’s music director, he had to put together a group of musicians who “really know the genre inside out—live it, breathe it—so that when you’re playing with them, they’re not just imitating, they’re swinging.” And that meant that with the exception of Jordan and former Canned Heat bassist and Tom Waits session regular Larry “The Mole” Taylor, who comprised the core rhythm section for the recording sessions—“If you don’t have the Mole, you don’t have the real deal,” Jordan told me—different musicians were called upon to channel specific Chess artists and even eras.

For example, Fabulous Thunderbird front man and blues harp virtuoso Kim Wilson was hired because, in Jordan’s opinion, he comes closest to rocking Little Walter’s sound; Chicago pianist Barrelhouse Chuck (real name: Charles Goering) was brought on board because he is fluent in the rollicking keyboard styles of Otis Spann and Johnnie Johnson, respectively the pianists for Muddy Waters’s and Chuck Berry’s original bands.

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From left: Screenwriter Peter Morgan, Producer Brian Grazer, Director Ron Howard, and President and CEO of The Paley Center for Media, Pat Mitchell. Photo by Michael Priest Photography.

On Tuesday night, New York’s Paley Center hosted a screening of Frost/Nixon, followed by a panel discussion with director Ron Howard, producer Brian Grazer, and screenwriter Peter Morgan.

The movie is based on Morgan’s play of the same name about the drama behind British TV host David Frost’s famed series of interviews of Richard Nixon. The film documents the efforts of Frost (Michael Sheen) to nab the first interview with Nixon (Frank Langella) following his resignation as President, and—once he landed it—to elicit an admission of responsibility for Watergate. It wound up serving as the trial that Nixon never had. For Frost, the interviews were an opportunity to restore his flagging career and to redefine himself as a journalist; Nixon saw them as a chance to redeem himself in the eyes of the American public.

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A great continent deserves a great movie. How do the two Australias stack up?

AUSTRALIA (the country) AUSTRALIA  (the movie)
Former penal colony	Current penal colony (for 165 minutes)
Bears shame of “stolen generation”	Bears shame of stolen story lines
Contains six states	Contains six endings
Aborigines use “dreamtime” to survive	Audiences use “dreamtime” to survive
Features gushing waterfalls and the  flat plains of Central Adelaide	Features gushing waterfalls and the flat plains of Nicole Kidman’s forehead
Villain trying to monopolize the news business	Villain trying to monopolize the cattle business
Hat tip to Shark Bay	Hat tip to Michael Bay
Needs more koala bears	Needs more koala bears
Boasts great actors like Russell Crowe, Guy Pierce, Cate Blanchett	Boasts the guy who plays Wolverine and “Faramir” from Lord of the Rings
Survived the bombing of Darwin	Survived the bombing of Luhrmann
A little bit gay	More than a little bit gay

READ MORE
• Irked by Australia, Canada Commissions Its Own Epic Movie
• Rebecca Guinness on Australia’s New York premiere
• Oscar Watch: Vanity Fair’s early picks for best picture.

The tragic story of Theresa Duncan and Jeremy Blake, the inseparable East Village artists who killed themselves last year believing they were being persecuted, will be the subject of a screenplay by American Pscyho author Bret Easton Ellis, Page Six magazine has announced. Ithika Films, which is producing the movie along with Lionsgate, has bought the writes to our own Nancy Jo Sales’s investigation, a profile of undying love and devastating paranoia.

“It’s a kind of modern Romeo and Juliet story, set in the East Village, with the addition of anti-Bush conspiracy theories and Scientologists,” says Sales. “They continue to be the subject of fascination precisely because no one knows exactly why they did it. We only know that they were deeply in love, which makes their suicides all the more mysterious. Because of their great talent and beauty, they’ve become a sort of cult couple. There couldn’t be a more perfect writer for this story than Bret Easton Ellis because he is such a great chronicler of the modern macabre.”

“In a world … where men worship flannel … and even hookers don’t put out on the first date … one man learned the difference … between love and loonies … ”

Not to be outdone by its colonial cousin Australia, lately immortalized on-screen by Oscar-nominated director Baz Luhrmann, the proud Commonwealth Commonwealth Realm of Canada has commissioned its own eponymous sweeping epic, this one starring national treasures Dan Aykroyd and Alanis Morissette as two lovers separated by language, ideology, and the great Molson-Labatt debate.

Click here to see the whole poster!

Executive-produced by Lorne Michaels, the 300-minute tentpole will be helmed by Canadian-Armenian director Atom Egoyan, whose 1994 heavy-breather Exotica remains the only film about sex ever to emerge from the Great White North (the triple-X-rated ouevres of Peter North and Brandon Iron excluded). The music will be composed by Christophe Beck, whose score for Steve Martin’s The Pink Panther won favorable comparisons in Chatelaine magazine and Toronto’s Globe and Mail to Henry Mancini’s original.

Rounding out the cast will be Donald Sutherland, as a retired member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police whose border-side empire of duty-free shops becomes an underground railroad for draft-dodging Americans; Celine Dion, as a militant Québécois separatist who cuts ties with Morissette after she takes up with Aykroyd’s Ottawan bureaucrat; and Mike Myers, in full Dr. Evil mode, as a poutine-munching French-Canadian terror-cell leader plotting to kill the Queen of England during a royal visit to the Chateau Frontenac.

Martin Short makes a brief but arresting flashback-scene cameo as Raymond Paley, Canada’s first known skiing fatality, and Anne Murray and Gordon Lightfoot sing the film’s stirring theme song, “Where the Rivers Run Gold,” commemorating Canada’s little-known but highly consequential Battle for Yellowsnow.

Developing!

"Within the next five to seven years, I expect all movies out of Hollywood to be in 3-D," Jeffrey Katzenberg, CEO of DreamWorks Animation, said just yesterday at a conference on 3-D in Singapore. His prediction may or may not come true, but a lot of other people in Hollywood, including James Cameron, Robert Zemeckis, and Pixar's John Lasseter, are betting that 3-D will soon become a staple part of the movie-going diet, thanks in large part to improved digital 3-D production and projection technologies.

Next year, a dozen or more pictures are scheduled to be released in 3-D, including Cameron's Avatar and Zemeckis's A Christmas Carol (with Jim Carrey in multiple roles). DreamWorks Animation and Pixar have said that all their
future films will be in 3-D; Walt Disney Pictures has made a similar commitment for its cartoons (though it also has an old-fashioned 2-D hand-drawn film in the pipeline). Whether there will be enough 3-D-equipped theaters to accommodate all these movies is an open question, especially given recent economic news. (3-D conversions are expensive.) But leading the hopeful way is Disney's Bolt, a cartoon released today in both 3-D and 2-D versions.

What's indisputable is that digital technology has allowed filmmakers more control when it comes to using and manipulating depth than their forbears had during the 3-D crazes of the 50s and 80s. A couple of months ago, I had
the opportunity to visit Disney's animation studio and talk to Clark Spencer, one of the producers of Bolt, and Robert Neuman, the film's stereoscopic supervisor, about the aesthetics of 3-D.

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Twilight (Summit)

Generally negative reviews aren't going to change the fact that Twilight—the much-hyped (our bad!) adaptation of Stephenie Meyer’s teen vampire novel series—is going to be one of the biggest movies of the year, based on an informal measure of advanced sales, ticket-booth queue lengths, decibel levels and pitch frequencies at promotional events, and the number of riots started over the film’s stars Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson. The film is likely to make well over $60 million in its opening weekend, which would surpass Sex and the City’s three-day take over the summer. The real winner here is the film’s modest production company, Summit, which inherited the project after Paramount threw it into turnaround, arguing it was going to be a stinker. That it certainly is, but that won’t stop Paramount from kicking…er…biting itself when they see the numbers.

Bolt (Disney)

This is the second feature Disney’s animation division has put out since Pixar’s John Lasseter came to run it, in 2006. It’s no Wall-E, but Lasseter’s hands-on guidance—he fired the original director, Chris Sanders, over creative differences—has led to a far better movie than Disney’s previous outing, Meet the Robinsons. Not only is its story of a disillisioned canine film star (John Travolta) a more emotionally compelling one, it’s also helped by a more thought-out use of 3-D technology (put to use in 979 locations). The participation of Miley Cyrus will help steer at least a few tweens away from Twilight. (Insiders expect a $35 million weekend take.) But the breakout star of this film, as you’ll agree if you watch the trailer, is a certain star-struck hamster named Rhino (voiced by storyboard artist Mark Walton) who is semi-permanently encased in a plexiglass sphere. We’re predicting he’ll star in his own movie in the next year or so. Suggested title? Spin-off.

Paul Giamatti is a man on a mission. The acclaimed star of such critically lauded and (occasionally) award-winning films as Sideways and American Splendor is fighting for his next project, trying to save it from the dustbin of Hollywood history. What sort of cinematic masterpiece has commanded the loyalty and unwavering support of one of the greatest thespians of his generation?

Bubba Nosferatu: Curse of the She Vampires.

To the uninitiated, it might seem like Giamatti is just having us on, playing an April Fool’s joke a few months too soon. But rest assured, he’s completely serious. Bubba Nosferatu is the long-anticipated sequel to Bubba Ho-Tep, the 2002 underground classic from camp auteur Don Coscarelli (The Beastmaster, Phantasm, etc). Bubba Ho-Tep, which was a surprise hit at film festivals and midnight screenings for many years, tells the story of an elderly Elvis Presley (played by cult icon Bruce Campbell, from Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead) who teams up with an African American John F. Kennedy (his skin was dyed black in an elaborate conspiracy) to battle a cowboy mummy terrorizing their nursing home.

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From left, Roger Stolle and Jeff Konkel with harmonica player Terry Bean, of Pontotoc, Mississippi. Courtesy of Broke & Hungry Records

In the spring of 2008, two blues producers, Roger Stolle and Jeff Konkel, piled into a Dodge conversion van and drove through the Delta region of northwestern Mississippi, capturing an art form very nearly on the brink of extinction: the pre-war (World War II, that is) style of country blues originally made famous by—among others—Charlie Patton and Robert Johnson. The result is M for Mississippi, a DVD-only production shot over the course of one week, and available here.

Stolle, the owner of the Cat Head arts and music store in Clarksdale, Mississippi, and Konkel, owner the Broke & Hungry blues label in St. Louis [http://www.brokeandhungryrecords.com], performed a mission not dissimilar to what Ry Cooder set out to achieve when he recorded and filmed the musicians of the Buena Vista Social Club, beginning in 1996. These blues musicians, like their Cuban counterparts, are now mostly in their seventies and eighties and on the verge of passing away.

Vanity Fair spoke with Stolle and Konkel on the release of M for Mississippi about the complicated logistics required for such an undertaking, what constitutes an authentic juke joint, and where the blues, perhaps the most quintessential of all American art forms, might be headed in a digital, 21st century world.

VF Daily: One of the interesting things about this movie is how well you captured the essence of real-life juke joints. I think many people nowadays think of a juke joint as being House of Blues or B.B. King’s club in Times Square.

Roger Stolle: I think that’s true. I think the term “juke” has just been abused. People started calling a regular old club a juke joint. But if you look at these real joints, these rag-tag places, it’s totally different. You get the crowds that talk back to the acts. You have lighting that’s very dim. There’s a real atmosphere.

Sometimes you see the spotlight behind the artist, shining in the audience’s faces, and sometimes there’s no real stage, just a patch of carpet, and when you look around, you can’t help but think, How is it possible that a fire marshal didn’t get involved here? But I’m grateful for that, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. The audience really becomes a part of what’s going on. They are not just the observer; they’re the participants.

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Quelling the fears that the digital effects required to make Brad Pitt age in reverse in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button could be distracting—and thus throw sand in director David Fincher’s Oscar machine—fellow off-the-wall director Spike Jonze says the CGI old-man baby Pitt from the first half of the movie didn't even strike him as remotely off-putting. He tells Ain't it Cool News:

Fincher totally invented his own technique, and it's insane. I'm always a little skeptical whenever you hear there's a CG character [in a film], but I never even noticed it. It's just this totally compelling, really charming character, you know, because he's like a little boy inside an old man's body, and the performance is amazing.

Much of Jonze’s admiration stems from his own grueling experience in artificial aging, notably in the 2007 film Jackass 2.5, which he produced. In the NSFW clip below, Jonze explains the challenges he faced in his transformation.

The Benjamin Button trailer after the jump.

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