The Remake Watch: 'Big Valley' edition

It's almost impossible to scroll through showbiz news on the Web, or, God forbid, pick up a copy of Variety without reading the news of yet another remake or update or reboot of some old movie or TV show. (I just wrote the other day about New Line's "new" version of its 1980s "Nightmare on Elm Street" horror series.)

It's gotten to the point where it's almost too generous to say that Hollywood has run out of new ideas. In point of fact, Hollywood seems actively uninterested in -- and allergic to -- new ideas. As a number of screenwriters have told me in recent months, studio executives appear to genuinely prefer old, easily recognized (and to use their parlance) "brandable" ideas to anything that might vaguely smack of freshness or unfamiliarity. 

Hence "The Remake Watch," which will allow us to dissect the latest announcement of some cobwebby film or TV show that you never imagined in your wildest dreams that anyone would possibly want to ever revive:

The Story: Variety is reporting that the 1960s TV western "The Big Valley" is being remade as an indie feature by filmmakers Daniel Adams and Kate Edelman Johnson -- or as Variety put it: " 'The Big Valley' is headed to a much bigger screen." The film, being bankrolled by a pair of independent financing entities, is slated to start in April in New Mexico and Michigan, with Adams directing.

What The Story Tells You: Johnson, who is presumably a producer on the project, is the daughter of Louis Edelman, the co-creator of the original TV series, which ran from 1964 to 1969 on ABC, and launched the careers of Lee Majors and Linda Evans.

What the Story Doesn't Tell You: The director's most recent film, "The Golden Boys," had such a limited release last year that it made only $183,841 at the box office. His previous film, 1997's "The Mouse," did not have a theatrical release.

What You Can Read Between the Lines: In a throwaway sentence, Variety notes that "roles have not yet been cast." Translation: It must've been an awfully slow news day in trade-land, since without any stars on board, this movie is still a long way from actually happening.

Odds Of Ever Playing In a Multiplex Near You: 12%. If you're over 50, you might remember seeing "The Big Valley" as a kid, but old westerns are pretty low on the must-see pecking order, so it's certainly not an A-list title. That's especially true in an era where studio distributors view Westerns as having even less commercial potential than wrestling movies. Unless Adams and Johnson miraculously land a couple of big stars, this project -- if made -- seems destined to appear at a video store near you.

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PREVIOUSLY: WELCOME TO HOLLYWOOD'S LATEST "NIGHTMARE":

Don Murphy's production company isn't called Angry Films just for kicks. The veteran producer is almost as famous in showbiz circles for his feuds and heated e-mail outbursts as he is for his film work -- he once got into a much-publicized restaurant brawl with Quentin Tarantino that earned the two filmmakers almost as much media attention as if they had gotten into a tussle with Mike Tyson. Murphy seems to thrive on being prickly. When he returned my call today, he said, almost immediately, "I can't remember ... didn't he have some kind of blow-up the last time we talked? Or was that with some other journalist?"

But Murphy is also a good producer, having been involved with everything from the megahit "Transformers" franchise to smaller but more interesting movies like "Shoot 'Em Up" and  "From Hell." The two sides of the man recently collided -- as the Hollywood Reporter first reported -- when Murphy teamed with producer John Wells to option the film rights to a novel by James Robert Smith called "The Flock," about a collection of highly intelligent prehistoric birds in the Florida Everglades that don't take well to a Disney-style real estate developer trying to turn their natural habitat into a new theme park.

It's how Murphy found the book that makes for the best part of the story. As he tells it, he was reading a blog by his pal Eddie Campbell, who was the artist on Alan Moore's "From Hell" graphic novel, which was made into a film by Murphy and the Hughes Brothers. "At some point, over the course of a week, Eddie did a post where he took scenes from the graphic novel and compared them to scenes from the movie," Murphy recalls. "And I was reading the comments one day when some guy named James Smith weighed in, lashing into the movie and how bad it was. So of course, I posted on the blog, saying basically, 'Who the hell are you?' "

Murphy discovered that Smith was a novelist. "I thought, 'Oh, this should be a doozy. Probably some [jerk] who publishes his books in his own basement.' " Hoping to revel in how bad Smith's writing was, Murphy bought "The Flock" on Amazon and took it with him on vacation. Much to his surprise, he found it totally compelling. "So when I was in a meeting with John Wells, looking for something we could do together, I got him interested in the book and we optioned it and are trying to make it into a movie."

They've already hired a screenwriter, Travis Milloy, who's working out a take on the story. Murphy says he talked to Smith after he optioned the book, telling him, in classically blunt Murphy fashion: "I only found out about your book because you were being such an [expletive] on the blog." But as Murphy told me: "You never know where good ideas are going to come from. When people slag you, they're usually [jerks], but sometimes you're in for a surprise. In this case, I bumped into a really talented guy." 

Everyone knows that there's often less than six degrees of separation among most celebrities in Hollywood, but if you ever wanted to stump your film-buff friends with a great trivia question, just try this one on for size: What do writer-director Frank Darabont ("The Shawshank Redemption"), Johnny Depp, Peter Jackson, Iggy Pop, writer-director Brian Helgeland ("L.A. Confidential"), Hollywood novelist Bruce Wagner, director Chuck Russell ("The Mask") and producer Michael De Luca have in common?

They all, at one time or another, worked on one of the films in the "Nightmare on Elm Street" series, the low-budget 1980s horror franchise that transformed New Line Cinema from an obscure store-front film distributor into the movie industry's leading independent film studio. Having successfully relaunched two other classic franchises -- "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" and "Friday the 13th" -- New Line, now an in-house production company at Warner Bros., is amid rebooting its seminal "Nightmare" series with a new film that just finished shooting in Chicago last Friday.

Using the same title as the original Wes Craven film, it is a revamped, souped-up version of the old series, with Jackie Earle Haley replacing Robert Englund as Freddy Krueger, the menacing, disfigured and claw-gloved figure who had the power to stalk and kill his victims from within their own dreams. The film, slated for release in the first half of 2010, also marks another collaboration between New Line and Michael Bay's Platinum Dunes production firm, which also partnered with New Line on the successful updating of "Chainsaw Massacre" and "Friday the 13th."

The new film comes with its own set of built-in risks and challenges. The original "Nightmare" series, which was launched in 1984 and ended up -- if you count all the sequels and spin-offs -- spawning at least eight movies, was a low-budget, low-risk enterprise. All of the original films in the series cost under $8 million to make, with perhaps the most lucrative being 1987's "Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors," which cost $5 million and made nearly $45 million at the box office.

But much has changed in the horror movie landscape in the last two decades. The movies have become both more sophisticated, certainly in terms of visual effects, as well as more graphic in terms of "Saw"-like brutality and mayhem. For most of today's young horror moviegoers, the "Nightmare" series is something of a barely noticeable video store relic. So why does New Line believe it can make lightning strike twice? And what exactly did all those famous folks I mentioned before do for the franchise? Keep reading:

Aaron Sorkin is best known in Hollywood as a screenwriter and TV producer supreme, having put his high-style signature on everything from “The West Wing” and “Sports Night” to “Charlie Wilson’s War.” But now, as Variety first reported Thursday, Sorkin has a new role—he’s the closer on “Moneyball,” the much-ballyhooed baseball movie at Sony Pictures that the studio shut down just days before shooting was scheduled to begin late last month.

The movie, which had Brad Pitt slated to star as Billy Beane, the maverick general manager of the Oakland A’s who was the focus of Michael Lewis’ bestselling “Moneyball” book, had its plug pulled after director Steven Soderbergh turned in a last-minute script revision that the studio felt took the film in a radically different, not to mention wildly uncommercial, new direction. But the news that Sorkin has appeared in the bullpen—get used to it, we’re going to employ a lot of baseball lingo here—sends a clear message that Sony is determined to keep the movie alive. The studio has also brought in producer Scott Rudin, who will serve as an executive producer on the project, which already has two producers, Michael De Luca and Rachael Horovitz.

Although I managed to get Amy Pascal to explain her decision to stop production in a post earlier this month, no one at Sony is talking about this new wrinkle, since the studio clearly believes the troubled project has already received far too much media attention. The same goes for Rudin and Sorkin, though Sorkin did acknowledge, via e-mail, that he is “the pinch hitter who’s been called in to start the late-inning rally.”

So why would Sony hire Sorkin when the studio already had a perfectly good shooting script, penned by the Oscar-winning writer Steve Zaillian? The most likely reason: The studio wanted to send a message to Brad Pitt that it was still absolutely, incontestably behind the picture. If Pitt were to walk away from the project, it could deal a fatal blow to the picture, which is already considered something of a commercial risk, since baseball movies have zero appeal outside of the U.S., meaning that the movie would have to make its investment back solely on the strength of its domestic box-office performance. Pitt is considered indispensable, since the studio has always known it had an extremely short list of A-list stars who could  be both believable and bankable as the real-life Beane, a charismatic, fortysomething ballplayer turned crafty but cerebral baseball theoretician. When it comes to potential stars, the drop-off after Pitt is steep.

The best way to keep a movie star on the hook with a project is to surround him with enviable, top-flight talent who exude an aura of class and respectability. Hence, the arrival of Sorkin, who isn’t just a gifted writer, but having worked in theater and TV as well as film, brings along an aura of writerly glamour and sophistication to any project. Ditto for Rudin, who has been the producer of a string of classy films, most notably “No Country for Old Men,” the 2007 Coen brothers film that won a best picture Oscar. As executive producer, Rudin brings a level of gravitas to the project, allowing everyone involved—starting with Pitt—to feel that this film could be a player at award season as well as with the masses at the multiplexes.

While Rudin is a canny judge of material, having stockpiled many of the best new novels available, his strength in recent years has also been as a marketing maven, being especially adept at positioning films and helping sculpt their images as critical successes. So it's expected that he would assume the role of the film's godfather, acting as a trouble-shooter, advisor and hand-holder whenever needed, especially during the post-production process.

The true test of the film's viability will be what happens after Sorkin turns in his new draft sometime in August. His script will have to satisfy three key parties: the Sony production brass, Pitt and any potential A-list filmmaker who would be stepping in as Soderbergh's replacement. Sony already believes in the material and it's easy to imagine a host of top filmmakers who'd be eager to work with a major movie star. The real closer will ultimately be Pitt, who has director approval on all his films, but even more important  will be judging the script, not just on its intrinsic value, but by how many top filmmakers it brings to the table.

Studio chiefs greenlight movies, deciding which ones end up in the starting lineup and which ones are relegated to the bench. But when it comes to the complicated process of keeping "Moneyball" alive, the ultimate umpire will be Pitt, who will make the biggest call about whether this film, having made it around third base, ends up being safe at home.

PREVIOUSLY: WHY SONY'S GM BALKED AT GREENLIGHTING MONEYBALL:

Photo of Aaron Sorkin (at left, with Thomas Schlamme)  by the Los Angeles Times

Photo of Brad Pitt by Christophe Karaba / EPA

For most of the 1960s, Hollywood was the last place you'd go to find the pulse of the pop culture. Movie attendance had reached all-time lows. The studios were crumbling -- most film lots were either up for sale, being rented out or looked like decaying junkyards. The movies were so archaic and out of touch with the times that for a three-year period in the mid-1960s, the Oscars for best picture (supposedly marking the best movies Hollywood could offer) went to a string of cobwebby costume musicals and dramas: "My Fair Lady," "The Sound of Music" and "A Man for All Seasons."

The real excitement was over on the Sunset Strip, where an exciting new generation of bands -- the Byrds, the Doors, Love, the Buffalo Springfield and the Mamas and the Papas, just to name a few -- were popping up on practically every block. 

But in 1969, everything started to change. In that year, between April and December, an amazing swell of groundbreaking films opened in Los Angeles and eventually across the rest of the country. They included "Easy Rider," "Midnight Cowboy," "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," "The Wild Bunch," "Bob &  Carol & Ted & Alice," "Medium Cool," "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?," "Take the Money and Run" and "Goodbye Columbus."  A host of young unknowns became stars overnight, notably Jack Nicholson, Peter Fonda, Robert Redford, Jon Voight, Ali MacGraw, Dyan Cannon and Elliott Gould.

Ten years ago, I spent a few weeks digging through the archives and interviewing a host of stars and filmmakers -- some of whom are now deceased -- to try to capture some of the spirit of the times. As the summer goes on, I'll periodically revisit some of the highlights of what these mavericks and rebels had to say about their efforts to topple the old, established order.

If any one incident captured the Young Turks' attitude toward their elders, it would be "Easy Rider" director Dennis Hopper's encounter with the venerable George Cukor at a swank Beverly Hills dinner party. Unhappy with what he perceived as Cukor's dismissive attitude toward his much-celebrated new film, Hopper poked a finger in Cukor's chest and snarled, "We're gonna bury you. You're finished."

So here, in their own words, are some memories from the people who helped change the face of the movie business. Today we hear about the outrageous goings-on during the making of "Bob & Carol & Ted &  Alice," Paul Mazursky's 1969 film that offered a breezy, satirical look at the new sexual mores of the time:

When I spent an afternoon talking with Michael Mann about "Public Enemies" last month -- you can see the whole story here -- I asked him, half-jokingly, if he had a technical advisor that helped him with the details of John Dillinger's bank robberies.

Mann is a famously intense stickler for detail. When he shot "Ali," for example, he filmed the scenes of the young champion at home at the boxer's actual house in Miami. In "Public Enemies," Mann shot as many scenes as possible in the spots where they occurred, including the legendary shootout at the Little Bohemia Lodge in southern Wisconsin, which the filmmaker says looks virtually unchanged, the walls still plastered with yellowing Chicago American newspaper headlines from the Dillinger era.

"I couldn't believe it," Mann told me. "It's exactly the way it was back then. We had Johnny Depp in John Dillinger's real bedroom, lying on the same bed, walking past the same toilet, escaping in exactly the same way Dillinger had. It wasn't just out of same slavish commitment to authenticity. It was just that -- you couldn't dream up anything better than that."

Having grown up in Chicago, Mann knows the city's fertile history of criminal behavior backward and forward. But Mann wanted to imagine what it was like inside a bank robber's psyche, figuring that bank robbing was such a timeless endeavor that even a criminal from today would have a pretty good sense of what the experience felt like 70 years ago. As it turned out, Mann knew a guy who knew a guy named Jerry Scalise, a member of the Chicago Crew, a loosely affiliated crime syndicate that has been involved in all sorts of illegal activity in the Second City dating back to the days of Al Capone.

"Jerry is an armed robber -- he once stole the Marlborough Diamond, which was as big as a grapefruit," Mann explains. "He's a real Chicago guy. He comes from the Near Northwest side, what they call 'The Patch.' We met through mutual friends and you won't find a more articulate, well-read guy, especially when it comes to what Dillinger was thinking about when he was pulling all these heists."

So what did Mann learn from him about the criminal mind-set?  "I asked him all kinds of questions. What's the high point of setting up a score? How do you go in strong? I'd say to Jerry, 'If you're planning a score, what's the most tense time? The most anxious moment? How do you feel if you're out in the street and see trouble? Or if something goes wrong and you're the lobby man? What does it feel like when you're going inside, knowing the money is there waiting for you?' "

To hear Mann tell it, the adrenaline high is pretty serious. "After you make a big score, you feel like a king. There's no high like it, walking out, feeling all that money, like it's already in your pocket. People who do it successfully never find anything to replace it. I guess that fits their behavior pattern, since they want to score, and then score again, yet they're never self-aware enough to recognize the pathology of it all. But that's what Jerry was able to help me understand, that the whole thing is such a thrill that you just want to have that feeling, right here, right now. You certainly don't ever think about tomorrow."

PREVIOUSLY:  MICHAEL MANN: THE INSIDE SCOOP ON 'PUBLIC ENEMIES':

Photo of Johnny Depp in "Public Enemies" by Peter Mountain / Universal Studios

In a move that would finally mean full employment for every great British character actor over the age of 50 in a single franchise, Bill Nighy is telling the British press that he's finally gotten a gig in the long-running "Harry Potter" film series. As reported on Empire magazine's website, Nighy is apparently set to play Minister of Magic Rufus Scrimgeour in the upcoming "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows," which is due out in two parts, starting in November 2010.

In the world of cheeky, insouciant character actors, no one is more wonderful than Nighy, who has enlivened every movie he's ever been in, whether he's playing Davy Jones in "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest," a brilliant, dissolute newspaper editor in the original "State of Play" British miniseries or flouncing around as a thinly veiled drug-addled Rod Stewart-esque character in Richard Curtis' "Love Actually." Nighy would be a perfect fit for Scrimgeour, who's described in the book as looking like an old lion with bushy eyebrows, tawny hair, yellow eyes and wire-rimmed specs. 

True to form, when asked if he was a big Potter fan, Nighy admitted that he hadn't actually -- ahem -- read any of the books yet.    

Photo of Bill Nighy by Lawrence K. Ho / Los Angeles Times

As anyone who's seen "Public Enemies" can tell you, Johnny Depp looks great in a mustache. It worked for George Clooney too. Matt Damon? Not so much. Check out the new trailer for "The Informant!," his upcoming comedy about being an over-eager agribusiness whistle blower:

It's never an easy decision when a studio head has to pull the plug on a big movie, as Amy Pascal did last week when she shut down "Moneyball," a $58-million Steven Soderbergh film that was set to star Brad Pitt as Billy Beane, the maverick general manager of the Oakland A's who almost singlehandedly reinvented the way baseball scouts and develops young talent.

The movie, based on the bestselling book by Michael Lewis, wasn't just in pre-production. It was literally five days away from filming when Soderbergh turned in a new version of the script that Pascal and her Sony team found unacceptable. The decision was so abrupt that the film's producer, Michael DeLuca, got the call about it while on his honeymoon in Paris. As a courtesy to the talent, Pascal gave them an opportunity to try and set the film up elsewhere, but no other studio has shown any interest. So the movie remains at Sony, but will it ever get made? Will Pitt stick with the project? And what exactly went wrong?

Although stories about the film's abrupt demise have appeared everywhere -- with Variety getting the original scoop -- Pascal hasn't talked about the decision until now. To hear her tell it, Soderbergh delivered a script that was inventive but a radical departure from the film Sony thought he was going to make. It was, put simply, more of a dramatic re-creation than a feature film.

"I've wanted to work with Steven forever, because he's simply a great filmmaker," Pascal told me today. "But the draft he turned in wasn't at all what we'd signed up for. He wanted to make a dramatic reenactment of events with real people playing themselves. I'd still work with Steven in a minute, but in terms of this project, he wanted to do the film in a different way than we did."

Soderbergh's last-minute revisions represented a huge change from the shooting script I read when I was working on a story about the film during its pre-production. The script, written by Oscar winner Steve Zaillian, was a baseball movie, but it was loaded with great comic moments and dazzling dialogue that captured the frenetic energy of Beane, a strikingly good-looking former phenom who washed out after a brief stint in the majors, only to resurface as a general manager who operated more like "Entourage's" Ari Gold than the buttoned-down insiders who normally run big-league teams. Beane was a born hustler, always wheeling and dealing, staying one step ahead of his rivals as he scouted unlikely unknown minor leaguers to replace the high-priced free agents a small-market team like the Oakland A's couldn't afford.

Soderbergh wouldn't talk to me about all this, but it seems clear that he became obsessed with authenticity, replacing many of Zaillian's inspired scripted set-pieces with actual interviews with the real people who were involved in the events. The Soderbergh aesthetic, according to one source close to the film, was simple: If it didn't happen in real life, it wasn't going to be in the movie. That might make for an intriguing art film, but it clearly was no longer a film that any studio would spend $58 million to make, especially with baseball films having virtually no appeal outside of the U.S.

"Steven wanted to tell the story through these interviews with the real people, as they commented on Beane," Pascal explains. "But there are lots of ways to tell a true story. We were just more comfortable with what we thought was a wonderful draft from Steve Zaillian."

What did Soderbergh do that managed to get Sony to pull the plug on a go movie? Keep reading:

As the Hollywood Reporter reports today, 20th Century Fox has put the brakes on "Unstoppable," the studio's Denzel Washington and Chris Pine-starring thriller that was supposed to start production this fall. The reason: Fox is worried about the film's costs. This may simply be Fox's way of pressuring the stars -- and filmmaker Tony Scott -- into making budgetary concessions. But it hit a big nerve in the talent community, coming after the quick hook Sony Pictures gave "Moneyball" last week, despite the presence of Brad Pitt in the lead role.

What's going on? As my colleague Claudia Eller has astutely pointed out, this summer has been something of a bloodbath for movie-star-driven films. The summer's biggest duds have been films that were carried -- make that supposed to be carried -- by movie stars. Despite the presence of Will Ferrell, "Land of the Lost" is a huge flop, perhaps the year's biggest money-loser. Eddie Murphy was the drawing card for "Imagine That," which bombed at the box office. The presence of Washington and John Travolta did nothing to steer moviegoers into seeing "The Taking of Pelham 123," which surely has played a role in Fox's concerns over bankrolling another Washington-starring thriller.

The lesson? You don't really need movie stars to play in the summer movie sandbox. The summer is becoming a magnet for high-concept comedies ("The Hangover") special-effects extravaganzas ("Star Trek" and "Transformers") and well-crafted computer animation ("Up") that work just fine without any help from expensive star talent.

I suspect this is simply the beginning of a new trend that will only put a bigger squeeze on high-cost talent, who have already been in the process of retooling their back-end money deals as studios have become increasingly wary of doling out millions to stars before they break even on their investments. But here's the real interesting question: What are the movie-star projects due out in the second half of the year that are the biggest commercial question marks? 

Here's a list of the films that could prompt anxious studio executives to pop fistfuls of Prozac over the next six months. Keep reading:

Don Murphy takes revenge on vocal critic by buying his book

Don Murphy's production company isn't called Angry Films just for kicks. The veteran producer is almost as famous in showbiz circles for his feuds and heated e-mail outbursts as he is for his film work -- he once got into a much-publicized restaurant brawl with Quentin Tarantino that earned the two filmmakers almost as much media attention as if they had gotten into a tussle with Mike Tyson. Murphy seems to thrive on being prickly. When he returned my call today, he said, almost immediately, "I can't remember ... didn't he have some kind of blow-up the last time we talked? Or was that with some other journalist?"

But Murphy is also a good producer, having been involved with everything from the megahit "Transformers" franchise to smaller but more interesting movies like "Shoot 'Em Up" and  "From Hell." The two sides of the man recently collided -- as the Hollywood Reporter first reported -- when Murphy teamed with producer John Wells to option the film rights to a novel by James Robert Smith called "The Flock," about a collection of highly intelligent prehistoric birds in the Florida Everglades that don't take well to a Disney-style real estate developer trying to turn their natural habitat into a new theme park.

It's how Murphy found the book that makes for the best part of the story. As he tells it, he was reading a blog by his pal Eddie Campbell, who was the artist on Alan Moore's "From Hell" graphic novel, which was made into a film by Murphy and the Hughes Brothers. "At some point, over the course of a week, Eddie did a post where he took scenes from the graphic novel and compared them to scenes from the movie," Murphy recalls. "And I was reading the comments one day when some guy named James Smith weighed in, lashing into the movie and how bad it was. So of course, I posted on the blog, saying basically, 'Who the hell are you?' "

Murphy discovered that Smith was a novelist. "I thought, 'Oh, this should be a doozy. Probably some [jerk] who publishes his books in his own basement.' " Hoping to revel in how bad Smith's writing was, Murphy bought "The Flock" on Amazon and took it with him on vacation. Much to his surprise, he found it totally compelling. "So when I was in a meeting with John Wells, looking for something we could do together, I got him interested in the book and we optioned it and are trying to make it into a movie."

They've already hired a screenwriter, Travis Milloy, who's working out a take on the story. Murphy says he talked to Smith after he optioned the book, telling him, in classically blunt Murphy fashion: "I only found out about your book because you were being such an [expletive] on the blog." But as Murphy told me: "You never know where good ideas are going to come from. When people slag you, they're usually [jerks], but sometimes you're in for a surprise. In this case, I bumped into a really talented guy." 

Everyone knows that there's often less than six degrees of separation among most celebrities in Hollywood, but if you ever wanted to stump your film-buff friends with a great trivia question, just try this one on for size: What do writer-director Frank Darabont ("The Shawshank Redemption"), Johnny Depp, Peter Jackson, Iggy Pop, writer-director Brian Helgeland ("L.A. Confidential"), Hollywood novelist Bruce Wagner, director Chuck Russell ("The Mask") and producer Michael De Luca have in common?

They all, at one time or another, worked on one of the films in the "Nightmare on Elm Street" series, the low-budget 1980s horror franchise that transformed New Line Cinema from an obscure store-front film distributor into the movie industry's leading independent film studio. Having successfully relaunched two other classic franchises -- "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" and "Friday the 13th" -- New Line, now an in-house production company at Warner Bros., is amid rebooting its seminal "Nightmare" series with a new film that just finished shooting in Chicago last Friday.

Using the same title as the original Wes Craven film, it is a revamped, souped-up version of the old series, with Jackie Earle Haley replacing Robert Englund as Freddy Krueger, the menacing, disfigured and claw-gloved figure who had the power to stalk and kill his victims from within their own dreams. The film, slated for release in the first half of 2010, also marks another collaboration between New Line and Michael Bay's Platinum Dunes production firm, which also partnered with New Line on the successful updating of "Chainsaw Massacre" and "Friday the 13th."

The new film comes with its own set of built-in risks and challenges. The original "Nightmare" series, which was launched in 1984 and ended up -- if you count all the sequels and spin-offs -- spawning at least eight movies, was a low-budget, low-risk enterprise. All of the original films in the series cost under $8 million to make, with perhaps the most lucrative being 1987's "Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors," which cost $5 million and made nearly $45 million at the box office.

But much has changed in the horror movie landscape in the last two decades. The movies have become both more sophisticated, certainly in terms of visual effects, as well as more graphic in terms of "Saw"-like brutality and mayhem. For most of today's young horror moviegoers, the "Nightmare" series is something of a barely noticeable video store relic. So why does New Line believe it can make lightning strike twice? And what exactly did all those famous folks I mentioned before do for the franchise? Keep reading:

Aaron Sorkin is best known in Hollywood as a screenwriter and TV producer supreme, having put his high-style signature on everything from “The West Wing” and “Sports Night” to “Charlie Wilson’s War.” But now, as Variety first reported Thursday, Sorkin has a new role—he’s the closer on “Moneyball,” the much-ballyhooed baseball movie at Sony Pictures that the studio shut down just days before shooting was scheduled to begin late last month.

The movie, which had Brad Pitt slated to star as Billy Beane, the maverick general manager of the Oakland A’s who was the focus of Michael Lewis’ bestselling “Moneyball” book, had its plug pulled after director Steven Soderbergh turned in a last-minute script revision that the studio felt took the film in a radically different, not to mention wildly uncommercial, new direction. But the news that Sorkin has appeared in the bullpen—get used to it, we’re going to employ a lot of baseball lingo here—sends a clear message that Sony is determined to keep the movie alive. The studio has also brought in producer Scott Rudin, who will serve as an executive producer on the project, which already has two producers, Michael De Luca and Rachael Horovitz.

Although I managed to get Amy Pascal to explain her decision to stop production in a post earlier this month, no one at Sony is talking about this new wrinkle, since the studio clearly believes the troubled project has already received far too much media attention. The same goes for Rudin and Sorkin, though Sorkin did acknowledge, via e-mail, that he is “the pinch hitter who’s been called in to start the late-inning rally.”

So why would Sony hire Sorkin when the studio already had a perfectly good shooting script, penned by the Oscar-winning writer Steve Zaillian? The most likely reason: The studio wanted to send a message to Brad Pitt that it was still absolutely, incontestably behind the picture. If Pitt were to walk away from the project, it could deal a fatal blow to the picture, which is already considered something of a commercial risk, since baseball movies have zero appeal outside of the U.S., meaning that the movie would have to make its investment back solely on the strength of its domestic box-office performance. Pitt is considered indispensable, since the studio has always known it had an extremely short list of A-list stars who could  be both believable and bankable as the real-life Beane, a charismatic, fortysomething ballplayer turned crafty but cerebral baseball theoretician. When it comes to potential stars, the drop-off after Pitt is steep.

The best way to keep a movie star on the hook with a project is to surround him with enviable, top-flight talent who exude an aura of class and respectability. Hence, the arrival of Sorkin, who isn’t just a gifted writer, but having worked in theater and TV as well as film, brings along an aura of writerly glamour and sophistication to any project. Ditto for Rudin, who has been the producer of a string of classy films, most notably “No Country for Old Men,” the 2007 Coen brothers film that won a best picture Oscar. As executive producer, Rudin brings a level of gravitas to the project, allowing everyone involved—starting with Pitt—to feel that this film could be a player at award season as well as with the masses at the multiplexes.

While Rudin is a canny judge of material, having stockpiled many of the best new novels available, his strength in recent years has also been as a marketing maven, being especially adept at positioning films and helping sculpt their images as critical successes. So it's expected that he would assume the role of the film's godfather, acting as a trouble-shooter, advisor and hand-holder whenever needed, especially during the post-production process.

The true test of the film's viability will be what happens after Sorkin turns in his new draft sometime in August. His script will have to satisfy three key parties: the Sony production brass, Pitt and any potential A-list filmmaker who would be stepping in as Soderbergh's replacement. Sony already believes in the material and it's easy to imagine a host of top filmmakers who'd be eager to work with a major movie star. The real closer will ultimately be Pitt, who has director approval on all his films, but even more important  will be judging the script, not just on its intrinsic value, but by how many top filmmakers it brings to the table.

Studio chiefs greenlight movies, deciding which ones end up in the starting lineup and which ones are relegated to the bench. But when it comes to the complicated process of keeping "Moneyball" alive, the ultimate umpire will be Pitt, who will make the biggest call about whether this film, having made it around third base, ends up being safe at home.

PREVIOUSLY: WHY SONY'S GM BALKED AT GREENLIGHTING MONEYBALL:

Photo of Aaron Sorkin (at left, with Thomas Schlamme)  by the Los Angeles Times

Photo of Brad Pitt by Christophe Karaba / EPA

For most of the 1960s, Hollywood was the last place you'd go to find the pulse of the pop culture. Movie attendance had reached all-time lows. The studios were crumbling -- most film lots were either up for sale, being rented out or looked like decaying junkyards. The movies were so archaic and out of touch with the times that for a three-year period in the mid-1960s, the Oscars for best picture (supposedly marking the best movies Hollywood could offer) went to a string of cobwebby costume musicals and dramas: "My Fair Lady," "The Sound of Music" and "A Man for All Seasons."

The real excitement was over on the Sunset Strip, where an exciting new generation of bands -- the Byrds, the Doors, Love, the Buffalo Springfield and the Mamas and the Papas, just to name a few -- were popping up on practically every block. 

But in 1969, everything started to change. In that year, between April and December, an amazing swell of groundbreaking films opened in Los Angeles and eventually across the rest of the country. They included "Easy Rider," "Midnight Cowboy," "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," "The Wild Bunch," "Bob &  Carol & Ted & Alice," "Medium Cool," "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?," "Take the Money and Run" and "Goodbye Columbus."  A host of young unknowns became stars overnight, notably Jack Nicholson, Peter Fonda, Robert Redford, Jon Voight, Ali MacGraw, Dyan Cannon and Elliott Gould.

Ten years ago, I spent a few weeks digging through the archives and interviewing a host of stars and filmmakers -- some of whom are now deceased -- to try to capture some of the spirit of the times. As the summer goes on, I'll periodically revisit some of the highlights of what these mavericks and rebels had to say about their efforts to topple the old, established order.

If any one incident captured the Young Turks' attitude toward their elders, it would be "Easy Rider" director Dennis Hopper's encounter with the venerable George Cukor at a swank Beverly Hills dinner party. Unhappy with what he perceived as Cukor's dismissive attitude toward his much-celebrated new film, Hopper poked a finger in Cukor's chest and snarled, "We're gonna bury you. You're finished."

So here, in their own words, are some memories from the people who helped change the face of the movie business. Today we hear about the outrageous goings-on during the making of "Bob & Carol & Ted &  Alice," Paul Mazursky's 1969 film that offered a breezy, satirical look at the new sexual mores of the time:

When I spent an afternoon talking with Michael Mann about "Public Enemies" last month -- you can see the whole story here -- I asked him, half-jokingly, if he had a technical advisor that helped him with the details of John Dillinger's bank robberies.

Mann is a famously intense stickler for detail. When he shot "Ali," for example, he filmed the scenes of the young champion at home at the boxer's actual house in Miami. In "Public Enemies," Mann shot as many scenes as possible in the spots where they occurred, including the legendary shootout at the Little Bohemia Lodge in southern Wisconsin, which the filmmaker says looks virtually unchanged, the walls still plastered with yellowing Chicago American newspaper headlines from the Dillinger era.

"I couldn't believe it," Mann told me. "It's exactly the way it was back then. We had Johnny Depp in John Dillinger's real bedroom, lying on the same bed, walking past the same toilet, escaping in exactly the same way Dillinger had. It wasn't just out of same slavish commitment to authenticity. It was just that -- you couldn't dream up anything better than that."

Having grown up in Chicago, Mann knows the city's fertile history of criminal behavior backward and forward. But Mann wanted to imagine what it was like inside a bank robber's psyche, figuring that bank robbing was such a timeless endeavor that even a criminal from today would have a pretty good sense of what the experience felt like 70 years ago. As it turned out, Mann knew a guy who knew a guy named Jerry Scalise, a member of the Chicago Crew, a loosely affiliated crime syndicate that has been involved in all sorts of illegal activity in the Second City dating back to the days of Al Capone.

"Jerry is an armed robber -- he once stole the Marlborough Diamond, which was as big as a grapefruit," Mann explains. "He's a real Chicago guy. He comes from the Near Northwest side, what they call 'The Patch.' We met through mutual friends and you won't find a more articulate, well-read guy, especially when it comes to what Dillinger was thinking about when he was pulling all these heists."

So what did Mann learn from him about the criminal mind-set?  "I asked him all kinds of questions. What's the high point of setting up a score? How do you go in strong? I'd say to Jerry, 'If you're planning a score, what's the most tense time? The most anxious moment? How do you feel if you're out in the street and see trouble? Or if something goes wrong and you're the lobby man? What does it feel like when you're going inside, knowing the money is there waiting for you?' "

To hear Mann tell it, the adrenaline high is pretty serious. "After you make a big score, you feel like a king. There's no high like it, walking out, feeling all that money, like it's already in your pocket. People who do it successfully never find anything to replace it. I guess that fits their behavior pattern, since they want to score, and then score again, yet they're never self-aware enough to recognize the pathology of it all. But that's what Jerry was able to help me understand, that the whole thing is such a thrill that you just want to have that feeling, right here, right now. You certainly don't ever think about tomorrow."

PREVIOUSLY:  MICHAEL MANN: THE INSIDE SCOOP ON 'PUBLIC ENEMIES':

Photo of Johnny Depp in "Public Enemies" by Peter Mountain / Universal Studios

In a move that would finally mean full employment for every great British character actor over the age of 50 in a single franchise, Bill Nighy is telling the British press that he's finally gotten a gig in the long-running "Harry Potter" film series. As reported on Empire magazine's website, Nighy is apparently set to play Minister of Magic Rufus Scrimgeour in the upcoming "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows," which is due out in two parts, starting in November 2010.

In the world of cheeky, insouciant character actors, no one is more wonderful than Nighy, who has enlivened every movie he's ever been in, whether he's playing Davy Jones in "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest," a brilliant, dissolute newspaper editor in the original "State of Play" British miniseries or flouncing around as a thinly veiled drug-addled Rod Stewart-esque character in Richard Curtis' "Love Actually." Nighy would be a perfect fit for Scrimgeour, who's described in the book as looking like an old lion with bushy eyebrows, tawny hair, yellow eyes and wire-rimmed specs. 

True to form, when asked if he was a big Potter fan, Nighy admitted that he hadn't actually -- ahem -- read any of the books yet.    

Photo of Bill Nighy by Lawrence K. Ho / Los Angeles Times

As anyone who's seen "Public Enemies" can tell you, Johnny Depp looks great in a mustache. It worked for George Clooney too. Matt Damon? Not so much. Check out the new trailer for "The Informant!," his upcoming comedy about being an over-eager agribusiness whistle blower:

It's never an easy decision when a studio head has to pull the plug on a big movie, as Amy Pascal did last week when she shut down "Moneyball," a $58-million Steven Soderbergh film that was set to star Brad Pitt as Billy Beane, the maverick general manager of the Oakland A's who almost singlehandedly reinvented the way baseball scouts and develops young talent.

The movie, based on the bestselling book by Michael Lewis, wasn't just in pre-production. It was literally five days away from filming when Soderbergh turned in a new version of the script that Pascal and her Sony team found unacceptable. The decision was so abrupt that the film's producer, Michael DeLuca, got the call about it while on his honeymoon in Paris. As a courtesy to the talent, Pascal gave them an opportunity to try and set the film up elsewhere, but no other studio has shown any interest. So the movie remains at Sony, but will it ever get made? Will Pitt stick with the project? And what exactly went wrong?

Although stories about the film's abrupt demise have appeared everywhere -- with Variety getting the original scoop -- Pascal hasn't talked about the decision until now. To hear her tell it, Soderbergh delivered a script that was inventive but a radical departure from the film Sony thought he was going to make. It was, put simply, more of a dramatic re-creation than a feature film.

"I've wanted to work with Steven forever, because he's simply a great filmmaker," Pascal told me today. "But the draft he turned in wasn't at all what we'd signed up for. He wanted to make a dramatic reenactment of events with real people playing themselves. I'd still work with Steven in a minute, but in terms of this project, he wanted to do the film in a different way than we did."

Soderbergh's last-minute revisions represented a huge change from the shooting script I read when I was working on a story about the film during its pre-production. The script, written by Oscar winner Steve Zaillian, was a baseball movie, but it was loaded with great comic moments and dazzling dialogue that captured the frenetic energy of Beane, a strikingly good-looking former phenom who washed out after a brief stint in the majors, only to resurface as a general manager who operated more like "Entourage's" Ari Gold than the buttoned-down insiders who normally run big-league teams. Beane was a born hustler, always wheeling and dealing, staying one step ahead of his rivals as he scouted unlikely unknown minor leaguers to replace the high-priced free agents a small-market team like the Oakland A's couldn't afford.

Soderbergh wouldn't talk to me about all this, but it seems clear that he became obsessed with authenticity, replacing many of Zaillian's inspired scripted set-pieces with actual interviews with the real people who were involved in the events. The Soderbergh aesthetic, according to one source close to the film, was simple: If it didn't happen in real life, it wasn't going to be in the movie. That might make for an intriguing art film, but it clearly was no longer a film that any studio would spend $58 million to make, especially with baseball films having virtually no appeal outside of the U.S.

"Steven wanted to tell the story through these interviews with the real people, as they commented on Beane," Pascal explains. "But there are lots of ways to tell a true story. We were just more comfortable with what we thought was a wonderful draft from Steve Zaillian."

What did Soderbergh do that managed to get Sony to pull the plug on a go movie? Keep reading:

As the Hollywood Reporter reports today, 20th Century Fox has put the brakes on "Unstoppable," the studio's Denzel Washington and Chris Pine-starring thriller that was supposed to start production this fall. The reason: Fox is worried about the film's costs. This may simply be Fox's way of pressuring the stars -- and filmmaker Tony Scott -- into making budgetary concessions. But it hit a big nerve in the talent community, coming after the quick hook Sony Pictures gave "Moneyball" last week, despite the presence of Brad Pitt in the lead role.

What's going on? As my colleague Claudia Eller has astutely pointed out, this summer has been something of a bloodbath for movie-star-driven films. The summer's biggest duds have been films that were carried -- make that supposed to be carried -- by movie stars. Despite the presence of Will Ferrell, "Land of the Lost" is a huge flop, perhaps the year's biggest money-loser. Eddie Murphy was the drawing card for "Imagine That," which bombed at the box office. The presence of Washington and John Travolta did nothing to steer moviegoers into seeing "The Taking of Pelham 123," which surely has played a role in Fox's concerns over bankrolling another Washington-starring thriller.

The lesson? You don't really need movie stars to play in the summer movie sandbox. The summer is becoming a magnet for high-concept comedies ("The Hangover") special-effects extravaganzas ("Star Trek" and "Transformers") and well-crafted computer animation ("Up") that work just fine without any help from expensive star talent.

I suspect this is simply the beginning of a new trend that will only put a bigger squeeze on high-cost talent, who have already been in the process of retooling their back-end money deals as studios have become increasingly wary of doling out millions to stars before they break even on their investments. But here's the real interesting question: What are the movie-star projects due out in the second half of the year that are the biggest commercial question marks? 

Here's a list of the films that could prompt anxious studio executives to pop fistfuls of Prozac over the next six months. Keep reading:

Welcome to Hollywood's latest 'Nightmare'

Everyone knows that there's often less than six degrees of separation among most celebrities in Hollywood, but if you ever wanted to stump your film-buff friends with a great trivia question, just try this one on for size: What do writer-director Frank Darabont ("The Shawshank Redemption"), Johnny Depp, Peter Jackson, Iggy Pop, writer-director Brian Helgeland ("L.A. Confidential"), Hollywood novelist Bruce Wagner, director Chuck Russell ("The Mask") and producer Michael De Luca have in common?

They all, at one time or another, worked on one of the films in the "Nightmare on Elm Street" series, the low-budget 1980s horror franchise that transformed New Line Cinema from an obscure store-front film distributor into the movie industry's leading independent film studio. Having successfully relaunched two other classic franchises -- "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" and "Friday the 13th" -- New Line, now an in-house production company at Warner Bros., is amid rebooting its seminal "Nightmare" series with a new film that just finished shooting in Chicago last Friday.

Using the same title as the original Wes Craven film, it is a revamped, souped-up version of the old series, with Jackie Earle Haley replacing Robert Englund as Freddy Krueger, the menacing, disfigured and claw-gloved figure who had the power to stalk and kill his victims from within their own dreams. The film, slated for release in the first half of 2010, also marks another collaboration between New Line and Michael Bay's Platinum Dunes production firm, which also partnered with New Line on the successful updating of "Chainsaw Massacre" and "Friday the 13th."

The new film comes with its own set of built-in risks and challenges. The original "Nightmare" series, which was launched in 1984 and ended up -- if you count all the sequels and spin-offs -- spawning at least eight movies, was a low-budget, low-risk enterprise. All of the original films in the series cost under $8 million to make, with perhaps the most lucrative being 1987's "Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors," which cost $5 million and made nearly $45 million at the box office.

But much has changed in the horror movie landscape in the last two decades. The movies have become both more sophisticated, certainly in terms of visual effects, as well as more graphic in terms of "Saw"-like brutality and mayhem. For most of today's young horror moviegoers, the "Nightmare" series is something of a barely noticeable video store relic. So why does New Line believe it can make lightning strike twice? And what exactly did all those famous folks I mentioned before do for the franchise? Keep reading:

Aaron Sorkin is best known in Hollywood as a screenwriter and TV producer supreme, having put his high-style signature on everything from “The West Wing” and “Sports Night” to “Charlie Wilson’s War.” But now, as Variety first reported Thursday, Sorkin has a new role—he’s the closer on “Moneyball,” the much-ballyhooed baseball movie at Sony Pictures that the studio shut down just days before shooting was scheduled to begin late last month.

The movie, which had Brad Pitt slated to star as Billy Beane, the maverick general manager of the Oakland A’s who was the focus of Michael Lewis’ bestselling “Moneyball” book, had its plug pulled after director Steven Soderbergh turned in a last-minute script revision that the studio felt took the film in a radically different, not to mention wildly uncommercial, new direction. But the news that Sorkin has appeared in the bullpen—get used to it, we’re going to employ a lot of baseball lingo here—sends a clear message that Sony is determined to keep the movie alive. The studio has also brought in producer Scott Rudin, who will serve as an executive producer on the project, which already has two producers, Michael De Luca and Rachael Horovitz.

Although I managed to get Amy Pascal to explain her decision to stop production in a post earlier this month, no one at Sony is talking about this new wrinkle, since the studio clearly believes the troubled project has already received far too much media attention. The same goes for Rudin and Sorkin, though Sorkin did acknowledge, via e-mail, that he is “the pinch hitter who’s been called in to start the late-inning rally.”

So why would Sony hire Sorkin when the studio already had a perfectly good shooting script, penned by the Oscar-winning writer Steve Zaillian? The most likely reason: The studio wanted to send a message to Brad Pitt that it was still absolutely, incontestably behind the picture. If Pitt were to walk away from the project, it could deal a fatal blow to the picture, which is already considered something of a commercial risk, since baseball movies have zero appeal outside of the U.S., meaning that the movie would have to make its investment back solely on the strength of its domestic box-office performance. Pitt is considered indispensable, since the studio has always known it had an extremely short list of A-list stars who could  be both believable and bankable as the real-life Beane, a charismatic, fortysomething ballplayer turned crafty but cerebral baseball theoretician. When it comes to potential stars, the drop-off after Pitt is steep.

The best way to keep a movie star on the hook with a project is to surround him with enviable, top-flight talent who exude an aura of class and respectability. Hence, the arrival of Sorkin, who isn’t just a gifted writer, but having worked in theater and TV as well as film, brings along an aura of writerly glamour and sophistication to any project. Ditto for Rudin, who has been the producer of a string of classy films, most notably “No Country for Old Men,” the 2007 Coen brothers film that won a best picture Oscar. As executive producer, Rudin brings a level of gravitas to the project, allowing everyone involved—starting with Pitt—to feel that this film could be a player at award season as well as with the masses at the multiplexes.

While Rudin is a canny judge of material, having stockpiled many of the best new novels available, his strength in recent years has also been as a marketing maven, being especially adept at positioning films and helping sculpt their images as critical successes. So it's expected that he would assume the role of the film's godfather, acting as a trouble-shooter, advisor and hand-holder whenever needed, especially during the post-production process.

The true test of the film's viability will be what happens after Sorkin turns in his new draft sometime in August. His script will have to satisfy three key parties: the Sony production brass, Pitt and any potential A-list filmmaker who would be stepping in as Soderbergh's replacement. Sony already believes in the material and it's easy to imagine a host of top filmmakers who'd be eager to work with a major movie star. The real closer will ultimately be Pitt, who has director approval on all his films, but even more important  will be judging the script, not just on its intrinsic value, but by how many top filmmakers it brings to the table.

Studio chiefs greenlight movies, deciding which ones end up in the starting lineup and which ones are relegated to the bench. But when it comes to the complicated process of keeping "Moneyball" alive, the ultimate umpire will be Pitt, who will make the biggest call about whether this film, having made it around third base, ends up being safe at home.

PREVIOUSLY: WHY SONY'S GM BALKED AT GREENLIGHTING MONEYBALL:

Photo of Aaron Sorkin (at left, with Thomas Schlamme)  by the Los Angeles Times

Photo of Brad Pitt by Christophe Karaba / EPA

For most of the 1960s, Hollywood was the last place you'd go to find the pulse of the pop culture. Movie attendance had reached all-time lows. The studios were crumbling -- most film lots were either up for sale, being rented out or looked like decaying junkyards. The movies were so archaic and out of touch with the times that for a three-year period in the mid-1960s, the Oscars for best picture (supposedly marking the best movies Hollywood could offer) went to a string of cobwebby costume musicals and dramas: "My Fair Lady," "The Sound of Music" and "A Man for All Seasons."

The real excitement was over on the Sunset Strip, where an exciting new generation of bands -- the Byrds, the Doors, Love, the Buffalo Springfield and the Mamas and the Papas, just to name a few -- were popping up on practically every block. 

But in 1969, everything started to change. In that year, between April and December, an amazing swell of groundbreaking films opened in Los Angeles and eventually across the rest of the country. They included "Easy Rider," "Midnight Cowboy," "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," "The Wild Bunch," "Bob &  Carol & Ted & Alice," "Medium Cool," "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?," "Take the Money and Run" and "Goodbye Columbus."  A host of young unknowns became stars overnight, notably Jack Nicholson, Peter Fonda, Robert Redford, Jon Voight, Ali MacGraw, Dyan Cannon and Elliott Gould.

Ten years ago, I spent a few weeks digging through the archives and interviewing a host of stars and filmmakers -- some of whom are now deceased -- to try to capture some of the spirit of the times. As the summer goes on, I'll periodically revisit some of the highlights of what these mavericks and rebels had to say about their efforts to topple the old, established order.

If any one incident captured the Young Turks' attitude toward their elders, it would be "Easy Rider" director Dennis Hopper's encounter with the venerable George Cukor at a swank Beverly Hills dinner party. Unhappy with what he perceived as Cukor's dismissive attitude toward his much-celebrated new film, Hopper poked a finger in Cukor's chest and snarled, "We're gonna bury you. You're finished."

So here, in their own words, are some memories from the people who helped change the face of the movie business. Today we hear about the outrageous goings-on during the making of "Bob & Carol & Ted &  Alice," Paul Mazursky's 1969 film that offered a breezy, satirical look at the new sexual mores of the time:

When I spent an afternoon talking with Michael Mann about "Public Enemies" last month -- you can see the whole story here -- I asked him, half-jokingly, if he had a technical advisor that helped him with the details of John Dillinger's bank robberies.

Mann is a famously intense stickler for detail. When he shot "Ali," for example, he filmed the scenes of the young champion at home at the boxer's actual house in Miami. In "Public Enemies," Mann shot as many scenes as possible in the spots where they occurred, including the legendary shootout at the Little Bohemia Lodge in southern Wisconsin, which the filmmaker says looks virtually unchanged, the walls still plastered with yellowing Chicago American newspaper headlines from the Dillinger era.

"I couldn't believe it," Mann told me. "It's exactly the way it was back then. We had Johnny Depp in John Dillinger's real bedroom, lying on the same bed, walking past the same toilet, escaping in exactly the same way Dillinger had. It wasn't just out of same slavish commitment to authenticity. It was just that -- you couldn't dream up anything better than that."

Having grown up in Chicago, Mann knows the city's fertile history of criminal behavior backward and forward. But Mann wanted to imagine what it was like inside a bank robber's psyche, figuring that bank robbing was such a timeless endeavor that even a criminal from today would have a pretty good sense of what the experience felt like 70 years ago. As it turned out, Mann knew a guy who knew a guy named Jerry Scalise, a member of the Chicago Crew, a loosely affiliated crime syndicate that has been involved in all sorts of illegal activity in the Second City dating back to the days of Al Capone.

"Jerry is an armed robber -- he once stole the Marlborough Diamond, which was as big as a grapefruit," Mann explains. "He's a real Chicago guy. He comes from the Near Northwest side, what they call 'The Patch.' We met through mutual friends and you won't find a more articulate, well-read guy, especially when it comes to what Dillinger was thinking about when he was pulling all these heists."

So what did Mann learn from him about the criminal mind-set?  "I asked him all kinds of questions. What's the high point of setting up a score? How do you go in strong? I'd say to Jerry, 'If you're planning a score, what's the most tense time? The most anxious moment? How do you feel if you're out in the street and see trouble? Or if something goes wrong and you're the lobby man? What does it feel like when you're going inside, knowing the money is there waiting for you?' "

To hear Mann tell it, the adrenaline high is pretty serious. "After you make a big score, you feel like a king. There's no high like it, walking out, feeling all that money, like it's already in your pocket. People who do it successfully never find anything to replace it. I guess that fits their behavior pattern, since they want to score, and then score again, yet they're never self-aware enough to recognize the pathology of it all. But that's what Jerry was able to help me understand, that the whole thing is such a thrill that you just want to have that feeling, right here, right now. You certainly don't ever think about tomorrow."

PREVIOUSLY:  MICHAEL MANN: THE INSIDE SCOOP ON 'PUBLIC ENEMIES':

Photo of Johnny Depp in "Public Enemies" by Peter Mountain / Universal Studios

In a move that would finally mean full employment for every great British character actor over the age of 50 in a single franchise, Bill Nighy is telling the British press that he's finally gotten a gig in the long-running "Harry Potter" film series. As reported on Empire magazine's website, Nighy is apparently set to play Minister of Magic Rufus Scrimgeour in the upcoming "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows," which is due out in two parts, starting in November 2010.

In the world of cheeky, insouciant character actors, no one is more wonderful than Nighy, who has enlivened every movie he's ever been in, whether he's playing Davy Jones in "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest," a brilliant, dissolute newspaper editor in the original "State of Play" British miniseries or flouncing around as a thinly veiled drug-addled Rod Stewart-esque character in Richard Curtis' "Love Actually." Nighy would be a perfect fit for Scrimgeour, who's described in the book as looking like an old lion with bushy eyebrows, tawny hair, yellow eyes and wire-rimmed specs. 

True to form, when asked if he was a big Potter fan, Nighy admitted that he hadn't actually -- ahem -- read any of the books yet.    

Photo of Bill Nighy by Lawrence K. Ho / Los Angeles Times

As anyone who's seen "Public Enemies" can tell you, Johnny Depp looks great in a mustache. It worked for George Clooney too. Matt Damon? Not so much. Check out the new trailer for "The Informant!," his upcoming comedy about being an over-eager agribusiness whistle blower:

It's never an easy decision when a studio head has to pull the plug on a big movie, as Amy Pascal did last week when she shut down "Moneyball," a $58-million Steven Soderbergh film that was set to star Brad Pitt as Billy Beane, the maverick general manager of the Oakland A's who almost singlehandedly reinvented the way baseball scouts and develops young talent.

The movie, based on the bestselling book by Michael Lewis, wasn't just in pre-production. It was literally five days away from filming when Soderbergh turned in a new version of the script that Pascal and her Sony team found unacceptable. The decision was so abrupt that the film's producer, Michael DeLuca, got the call about it while on his honeymoon in Paris. As a courtesy to the talent, Pascal gave them an opportunity to try and set the film up elsewhere, but no other studio has shown any interest. So the movie remains at Sony, but will it ever get made? Will Pitt stick with the project? And what exactly went wrong?

Although stories about the film's abrupt demise have appeared everywhere -- with Variety getting the original scoop -- Pascal hasn't talked about the decision until now. To hear her tell it, Soderbergh delivered a script that was inventive but a radical departure from the film Sony thought he was going to make. It was, put simply, more of a dramatic re-creation than a feature film.

"I've wanted to work with Steven forever, because he's simply a great filmmaker," Pascal told me today. "But the draft he turned in wasn't at all what we'd signed up for. He wanted to make a dramatic reenactment of events with real people playing themselves. I'd still work with Steven in a minute, but in terms of this project, he wanted to do the film in a different way than we did."

Soderbergh's last-minute revisions represented a huge change from the shooting script I read when I was working on a story about the film during its pre-production. The script, written by Oscar winner Steve Zaillian, was a baseball movie, but it was loaded with great comic moments and dazzling dialogue that captured the frenetic energy of Beane, a strikingly good-looking former phenom who washed out after a brief stint in the majors, only to resurface as a general manager who operated more like "Entourage's" Ari Gold than the buttoned-down insiders who normally run big-league teams. Beane was a born hustler, always wheeling and dealing, staying one step ahead of his rivals as he scouted unlikely unknown minor leaguers to replace the high-priced free agents a small-market team like the Oakland A's couldn't afford.

Soderbergh wouldn't talk to me about all this, but it seems clear that he became obsessed with authenticity, replacing many of Zaillian's inspired scripted set-pieces with actual interviews with the real people who were involved in the events. The Soderbergh aesthetic, according to one source close to the film, was simple: If it didn't happen in real life, it wasn't going to be in the movie. That might make for an intriguing art film, but it clearly was no longer a film that any studio would spend $58 million to make, especially with baseball films having virtually no appeal outside of the U.S.

"Steven wanted to tell the story through these interviews with the real people, as they commented on Beane," Pascal explains. "But there are lots of ways to tell a true story. We were just more comfortable with what we thought was a wonderful draft from Steve Zaillian."

What did Soderbergh do that managed to get Sony to pull the plug on a go movie? Keep reading:

As the Hollywood Reporter reports today, 20th Century Fox has put the brakes on "Unstoppable," the studio's Denzel Washington and Chris Pine-starring thriller that was supposed to start production this fall. The reason: Fox is worried about the film's costs. This may simply be Fox's way of pressuring the stars -- and filmmaker Tony Scott -- into making budgetary concessions. But it hit a big nerve in the talent community, coming after the quick hook Sony Pictures gave "Moneyball" last week, despite the presence of Brad Pitt in the lead role.

What's going on? As my colleague Claudia Eller has astutely pointed out, this summer has been something of a bloodbath for movie-star-driven films. The summer's biggest duds have been films that were carried -- make that supposed to be carried -- by movie stars. Despite the presence of Will Ferrell, "Land of the Lost" is a huge flop, perhaps the year's biggest money-loser. Eddie Murphy was the drawing card for "Imagine That," which bombed at the box office. The presence of Washington and John Travolta did nothing to steer moviegoers into seeing "The Taking of Pelham 123," which surely has played a role in Fox's concerns over bankrolling another Washington-starring thriller.

The lesson? You don't really need movie stars to play in the summer movie sandbox. The summer is becoming a magnet for high-concept comedies ("The Hangover") special-effects extravaganzas ("Star Trek" and "Transformers") and well-crafted computer animation ("Up") that work just fine without any help from expensive star talent.

I suspect this is simply the beginning of a new trend that will only put a bigger squeeze on high-cost talent, who have already been in the process of retooling their back-end money deals as studios have become increasingly wary of doling out millions to stars before they break even on their investments. But here's the real interesting question: What are the movie-star projects due out in the second half of the year that are the biggest commercial question marks? 

Here's a list of the films that could prompt anxious studio executives to pop fistfuls of Prozac over the next six months. Keep reading:

Aaron Sorkin's new role in 'Moneyball': The closer

Aaron Sorkin is best known in Hollywood as a screenwriter and TV producer supreme, having put his high-style signature on everything from “The West Wing” and “Sports Night” to “Charlie Wilson’s War.” But now, as Variety first reported Thursday, Sorkin has a new role—he’s the closer on “Moneyball,” the much-ballyhooed baseball movie at Sony Pictures that the studio shut down just days before shooting was scheduled to begin late last month.

The movie, which had Brad Pitt slated to star as Billy Beane, the maverick general manager of the Oakland A’s who was the focus of Michael Lewis’ bestselling “Moneyball” book, had its plug pulled after director Steven Soderbergh turned in a last-minute script revision that the studio felt took the film in a radically different, not to mention wildly uncommercial, new direction. But the news that Sorkin has appeared in the bullpen—get used to it, we’re going to employ a lot of baseball lingo here—sends a clear message that Sony is determined to keep the movie alive. The studio has also brought in producer Scott Rudin, who will serve as an executive producer on the project, which already has two producers, Michael De Luca and Rachael Horovitz.

Although I managed to get Amy Pascal to explain her decision to stop production in a post earlier this month, no one at Sony is talking about this new wrinkle, since the studio clearly believes the troubled project has already received far too much media attention. The same goes for Rudin and Sorkin, though Sorkin did acknowledge, via e-mail, that he is “the pinch hitter who’s been called in to start the late-inning rally.”

So why would Sony hire Sorkin when the studio already had a perfectly good shooting script, penned by the Oscar-winning writer Steve Zaillian? The most likely reason: The studio wanted to send a message to Brad Pitt that it was still absolutely, incontestably behind the picture. If Pitt were to walk away from the project, it could deal a fatal blow to the picture, which is already considered something of a commercial risk, since baseball movies have zero appeal outside of the U.S., meaning that the movie would have to make its investment back solely on the strength of its domestic box-office performance. Pitt is considered indispensable, since the studio has always known it had an extremely short list of A-list stars who could  be both believable and bankable as the real-life Beane, a charismatic, fortysomething ballplayer turned crafty but cerebral baseball theoretician. When it comes to potential stars, the drop-off after Pitt is steep.

The best way to keep a movie star on the hook with a project is to surround him with enviable, top-flight talent who exude an aura of class and respectability. Hence, the arrival of Sorkin, who isn’t just a gifted writer, but having worked in theater and TV as well as film, brings along an aura of writerly glamour and sophistication to any project. Ditto for Rudin, who has been the producer of a string of classy films, most notably “No Country for Old Men,” the 2007 Coen brothers film that won a best picture Oscar. As executive producer, Rudin brings a level of gravitas to the project, allowing everyone involved—starting with Pitt—to feel that this film could be a player at award season as well as with the masses at the multiplexes.

While Rudin is a canny judge of material, having stockpiled many of the best new novels available, his strength in recent years has also been as a marketing maven, being especially adept at positioning films and helping sculpt their images as critical successes. So it's expected that he would assume the role of the film's godfather, acting as a trouble-shooter, advisor and hand-holder whenever needed, especially during the post-production process.

The true test of the film's viability will be what happens after Sorkin turns in his new draft sometime in August. His script will have to satisfy three key parties: the Sony production brass, Pitt and any potential A-list filmmaker who would be stepping in as Soderbergh's replacement. Sony already believes in the material and it's easy to imagine a host of top filmmakers who'd be eager to work with a major movie star. The real closer will ultimately be Pitt, who has director approval on all his films, but even more important  will be judging the script, not just on its intrinsic value, but by how many top filmmakers it brings to the table.

Studio chiefs greenlight movies, deciding which ones end up in the starting lineup and which ones are relegated to the bench. But when it comes to the complicated process of keeping "Moneyball" alive, the ultimate umpire will be Pitt, who will make the biggest call about whether this film, having made it around third base, ends up being safe at home.

PREVIOUSLY: WHY SONY'S GM BALKED AT GREENLIGHTING MONEYBALL:

Photo of Aaron Sorkin (at left, with Thomas Schlamme)  by the Los Angeles Times

Photo of Brad Pitt by Christophe Karaba / EPA

For most of the 1960s, Hollywood was the last place you'd go to find the pulse of the pop culture. Movie attendance had reached all-time lows. The studios were crumbling -- most film lots were either up for sale, being rented out or looked like decaying junkyards. The movies were so archaic and out of touch with the times that for a three-year period in the mid-1960s, the Oscars for best picture (supposedly marking the best movies Hollywood could offer) went to a string of cobwebby costume musicals and dramas: "My Fair Lady," "The Sound of Music" and "A Man for All Seasons."

The real excitement was over on the Sunset Strip, where an exciting new generation of bands -- the Byrds, the Doors, Love, the Buffalo Springfield and the Mamas and the Papas, just to name a few -- were popping up on practically every block. 

But in 1969, everything started to change. In that year, between April and December, an amazing swell of groundbreaking films opened in Los Angeles and eventually across the rest of the country. They included "Easy Rider," "Midnight Cowboy," "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," "The Wild Bunch," "Bob &  Carol & Ted & Alice," "Medium Cool," "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?," "Take the Money and Run" and "Goodbye Columbus."  A host of young unknowns became stars overnight, notably Jack Nicholson, Peter Fonda, Robert Redford, Jon Voight, Ali MacGraw, Dyan Cannon and Elliott Gould.

Ten years ago, I spent a few weeks digging through the archives and interviewing a host of stars and filmmakers -- some of whom are now deceased -- to try to capture some of the spirit of the times. As the summer goes on, I'll periodically revisit some of the highlights of what these mavericks and rebels had to say about their efforts to topple the old, established order.

If any one incident captured the Young Turks' attitude toward their elders, it would be "Easy Rider" director Dennis Hopper's encounter with the venerable George Cukor at a swank Beverly Hills dinner party. Unhappy with what he perceived as Cukor's dismissive attitude toward his much-celebrated new film, Hopper poked a finger in Cukor's chest and snarled, "We're gonna bury you. You're finished."

So here, in their own words, are some memories from the people who helped change the face of the movie business. Today we hear about the outrageous goings-on during the making of "Bob & Carol & Ted &  Alice," Paul Mazursky's 1969 film that offered a breezy, satirical look at the new sexual mores of the time:

When I spent an afternoon talking with Michael Mann about "Public Enemies" last month -- you can see the whole story here -- I asked him, half-jokingly, if he had a technical advisor that helped him with the details of John Dillinger's bank robberies.

Mann is a famously intense stickler for detail. When he shot "Ali," for example, he filmed the scenes of the young champion at home at the boxer's actual house in Miami. In "Public Enemies," Mann shot as many scenes as possible in the spots where they occurred, including the legendary shootout at the Little Bohemia Lodge in southern Wisconsin, which the filmmaker says looks virtually unchanged, the walls still plastered with yellowing Chicago American newspaper headlines from the Dillinger era.

"I couldn't believe it," Mann told me. "It's exactly the way it was back then. We had Johnny Depp in John Dillinger's real bedroom, lying on the same bed, walking past the same toilet, escaping in exactly the same way Dillinger had. It wasn't just out of same slavish commitment to authenticity. It was just that -- you couldn't dream up anything better than that."

Having grown up in Chicago, Mann knows the city's fertile history of criminal behavior backward and forward. But Mann wanted to imagine what it was like inside a bank robber's psyche, figuring that bank robbing was such a timeless endeavor that even a criminal from today would have a pretty good sense of what the experience felt like 70 years ago. As it turned out, Mann knew a guy who knew a guy named Jerry Scalise, a member of the Chicago Crew, a loosely affiliated crime syndicate that has been involved in all sorts of illegal activity in the Second City dating back to the days of Al Capone.

"Jerry is an armed robber -- he once stole the Marlborough Diamond, which was as big as a grapefruit," Mann explains. "He's a real Chicago guy. He comes from the Near Northwest side, what they call 'The Patch.' We met through mutual friends and you won't find a more articulate, well-read guy, especially when it comes to what Dillinger was thinking about when he was pulling all these heists."

So what did Mann learn from him about the criminal mind-set?  "I asked him all kinds of questions. What's the high point of setting up a score? How do you go in strong? I'd say to Jerry, 'If you're planning a score, what's the most tense time? The most anxious moment? How do you feel if you're out in the street and see trouble? Or if something goes wrong and you're the lobby man? What does it feel like when you're going inside, knowing the money is there waiting for you?' "

To hear Mann tell it, the adrenaline high is pretty serious. "After you make a big score, you feel like a king. There's no high like it, walking out, feeling all that money, like it's already in your pocket. People who do it successfully never find anything to replace it. I guess that fits their behavior pattern, since they want to score, and then score again, yet they're never self-aware enough to recognize the pathology of it all. But that's what Jerry was able to help me understand, that the whole thing is such a thrill that you just want to have that feeling, right here, right now. You certainly don't ever think about tomorrow."

PREVIOUSLY:  MICHAEL MANN: THE INSIDE SCOOP ON 'PUBLIC ENEMIES':

Photo of Johnny Depp in "Public Enemies" by Peter Mountain / Universal Studios

In a move that would finally mean full employment for every great British character actor over the age of 50 in a single franchise, Bill Nighy is telling the British press that he's finally gotten a gig in the long-running "Harry Potter" film series. As reported on Empire magazine's website, Nighy is apparently set to play Minister of Magic Rufus Scrimgeour in the upcoming "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows," which is due out in two parts, starting in November 2010.

In the world of cheeky, insouciant character actors, no one is more wonderful than Nighy, who has enlivened every movie he's ever been in, whether he's playing Davy Jones in "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest," a brilliant, dissolute newspaper editor in the original "State of Play" British miniseries or flouncing around as a thinly veiled drug-addled Rod Stewart-esque character in Richard Curtis' "Love Actually." Nighy would be a perfect fit for Scrimgeour, who's described in the book as looking like an old lion with bushy eyebrows, tawny hair, yellow eyes and wire-rimmed specs. 

True to form, when asked if he was a big Potter fan, Nighy admitted that he hadn't actually -- ahem -- read any of the books yet.    

Photo of Bill Nighy by Lawrence K. Ho / Los Angeles Times

As anyone who's seen "Public Enemies" can tell you, Johnny Depp looks great in a mustache. It worked for George Clooney too. Matt Damon? Not so much. Check out the new trailer for "The Informant!," his upcoming comedy about being an over-eager agribusiness whistle blower:

It's never an easy decision when a studio head has to pull the plug on a big movie, as Amy Pascal did last week when she shut down "Moneyball," a $58-million Steven Soderbergh film that was set to star Brad Pitt as Billy Beane, the maverick general manager of the Oakland A's who almost singlehandedly reinvented the way baseball scouts and develops young talent.

The movie, based on the bestselling book by Michael Lewis, wasn't just in pre-production. It was literally five days away from filming when Soderbergh turned in a new version of the script that Pascal and her Sony team found unacceptable. The decision was so abrupt that the film's producer, Michael DeLuca, got the call about it while on his honeymoon in Paris. As a courtesy to the talent, Pascal gave them an opportunity to try and set the film up elsewhere, but no other studio has shown any interest. So the movie remains at Sony, but will it ever get made? Will Pitt stick with the project? And what exactly went wrong?

Although stories about the film's abrupt demise have appeared everywhere -- with Variety getting the original scoop -- Pascal hasn't talked about the decision until now. To hear her tell it, Soderbergh delivered a script that was inventive but a radical departure from the film Sony thought he was going to make. It was, put simply, more of a dramatic re-creation than a feature film.

"I've wanted to work with Steven forever, because he's simply a great filmmaker," Pascal told me today. "But the draft he turned in wasn't at all what we'd signed up for. He wanted to make a dramatic reenactment of events with real people playing themselves. I'd still work with Steven in a minute, but in terms of this project, he wanted to do the film in a different way than we did."

Soderbergh's last-minute revisions represented a huge change from the shooting script I read when I was working on a story about the film during its pre-production. The script, written by Oscar winner Steve Zaillian, was a baseball movie, but it was loaded with great comic moments and dazzling dialogue that captured the frenetic energy of Beane, a strikingly good-looking former phenom who washed out after a brief stint in the majors, only to resurface as a general manager who operated more like "Entourage's" Ari Gold than the buttoned-down insiders who normally run big-league teams. Beane was a born hustler, always wheeling and dealing, staying one step ahead of his rivals as he scouted unlikely unknown minor leaguers to replace the high-priced free agents a small-market team like the Oakland A's couldn't afford.

Soderbergh wouldn't talk to me about all this, but it seems clear that he became obsessed with authenticity, replacing many of Zaillian's inspired scripted set-pieces with actual interviews with the real people who were involved in the events. The Soderbergh aesthetic, according to one source close to the film, was simple: If it didn't happen in real life, it wasn't going to be in the movie. That might make for an intriguing art film, but it clearly was no longer a film that any studio would spend $58 million to make, especially with baseball films having virtually no appeal outside of the U.S.

"Steven wanted to tell the story through these interviews with the real people, as they commented on Beane," Pascal explains. "But there are lots of ways to tell a true story. We were just more comfortable with what we thought was a wonderful draft from Steve Zaillian."

What did Soderbergh do that managed to get Sony to pull the plug on a go movie? Keep reading:

As the Hollywood Reporter reports today, 20th Century Fox has put the brakes on "Unstoppable," the studio's Denzel Washington and Chris Pine-starring thriller that was supposed to start production this fall. The reason: Fox is worried about the film's costs. This may simply be Fox's way of pressuring the stars -- and filmmaker Tony Scott -- into making budgetary concessions. But it hit a big nerve in the talent community, coming after the quick hook Sony Pictures gave "Moneyball" last week, despite the presence of Brad Pitt in the lead role.

What's going on? As my colleague Claudia Eller has astutely pointed out, this summer has been something of a bloodbath for movie-star-driven films. The summer's biggest duds have been films that were carried -- make that supposed to be carried -- by movie stars. Despite the presence of Will Ferrell, "Land of the Lost" is a huge flop, perhaps the year's biggest money-loser. Eddie Murphy was the drawing card for "Imagine That," which bombed at the box office. The presence of Washington and John Travolta did nothing to steer moviegoers into seeing "The Taking of Pelham 123," which surely has played a role in Fox's concerns over bankrolling another Washington-starring thriller.

The lesson? You don't really need movie stars to play in the summer movie sandbox. The summer is becoming a magnet for high-concept comedies ("The Hangover") special-effects extravaganzas ("Star Trek" and "Transformers") and well-crafted computer animation ("Up") that work just fine without any help from expensive star talent.

I suspect this is simply the beginning of a new trend that will only put a bigger squeeze on high-cost talent, who have already been in the process of retooling their back-end money deals as studios have become increasingly wary of doling out millions to stars before they break even on their investments. But here's the real interesting question: What are the movie-star projects due out in the second half of the year that are the biggest commercial question marks? 

Here's a list of the films that could prompt anxious studio executives to pop fistfuls of Prozac over the next six months. Keep reading:

Flashback Friday: 1969 in Hollywood

For most of the 1960s, Hollywood was the last place you'd go to find the pulse of the pop culture. Movie attendance had reached all-time lows. The studios were crumbling -- most film lots were either up for sale, being rented out or looked like decaying junkyards. The movies were so archaic and out of touch with the times that for a three-year period in the mid-1960s, the Oscars for best picture (supposedly marking the best movies Hollywood could offer) went to a string of cobwebby costume musicals and dramas: "My Fair Lady," "The Sound of Music" and "A Man for All Seasons."

The real excitement was over on the Sunset Strip, where an exciting new generation of bands -- the Byrds, the Doors, Love, the Buffalo Springfield and the Mamas and the Papas, just to name a few -- were popping up on practically every block. 

But in 1969, everything started to change. In that year, between April and December, an amazing swell of groundbreaking films opened in Los Angeles and eventually across the rest of the country. They included "Easy Rider," "Midnight Cowboy," "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," "The Wild Bunch," "Bob &  Carol & Ted & Alice," "Medium Cool," "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?," "Take the Money and Run" and "Goodbye Columbus."  A host of young unknowns became stars overnight, notably Jack Nicholson, Peter Fonda, Robert Redford, Jon Voight, Ali MacGraw, Dyan Cannon and Elliott Gould.

Ten years ago, I spent a few weeks digging through the archives and interviewing a host of stars and filmmakers -- some of whom are now deceased -- to try to capture some of the spirit of the times. As the summer goes on, I'll periodically revisit some of the highlights of what these mavericks and rebels had to say about their efforts to topple the old, established order.

If any one incident captured the Young Turks' attitude toward their elders, it would be "Easy Rider" director Dennis Hopper's encounter with the venerable George Cukor at a swank Beverly Hills dinner party. Unhappy with what he perceived as Cukor's dismissive attitude toward his much-celebrated new film, Hopper poked a finger in Cukor's chest and snarled, "We're gonna bury you. You're finished."

So here, in their own words, are some memories from the people who helped change the face of the movie business. Today we hear about the outrageous goings-on during the making of "Bob & Carol & Ted &  Alice," Paul Mazursky's 1969 film that offered a breezy, satirical look at the new sexual mores of the time:

When I spent an afternoon talking with Michael Mann about "Public Enemies" last month -- you can see the whole story here -- I asked him, half-jokingly, if he had a technical advisor that helped him with the details of John Dillinger's bank robberies.

Mann is a famously intense stickler for detail. When he shot "Ali," for example, he filmed the scenes of the young champion at home at the boxer's actual house in Miami. In "Public Enemies," Mann shot as many scenes as possible in the spots where they occurred, including the legendary shootout at the Little Bohemia Lodge in southern Wisconsin, which the filmmaker says looks virtually unchanged, the walls still plastered with yellowing Chicago American newspaper headlines from the Dillinger era.

"I couldn't believe it," Mann told me. "It's exactly the way it was back then. We had Johnny Depp in John Dillinger's real bedroom, lying on the same bed, walking past the same toilet, escaping in exactly the same way Dillinger had. It wasn't just out of same slavish commitment to authenticity. It was just that -- you couldn't dream up anything better than that."

Having grown up in Chicago, Mann knows the city's fertile history of criminal behavior backward and forward. But Mann wanted to imagine what it was like inside a bank robber's psyche, figuring that bank robbing was such a timeless endeavor that even a criminal from today would have a pretty good sense of what the experience felt like 70 years ago. As it turned out, Mann knew a guy who knew a guy named Jerry Scalise, a member of the Chicago Crew, a loosely affiliated crime syndicate that has been involved in all sorts of illegal activity in the Second City dating back to the days of Al Capone.

"Jerry is an armed robber -- he once stole the Marlborough Diamond, which was as big as a grapefruit," Mann explains. "He's a real Chicago guy. He comes from the Near Northwest side, what they call 'The Patch.' We met through mutual friends and you won't find a more articulate, well-read guy, especially when it comes to what Dillinger was thinking about when he was pulling all these heists."

So what did Mann learn from him about the criminal mind-set?  "I asked him all kinds of questions. What's the high point of setting up a score? How do you go in strong? I'd say to Jerry, 'If you're planning a score, what's the most tense time? The most anxious moment? How do you feel if you're out in the street and see trouble? Or if something goes wrong and you're the lobby man? What does it feel like when you're going inside, knowing the money is there waiting for you?' "

To hear Mann tell it, the adrenaline high is pretty serious. "After you make a big score, you feel like a king. There's no high like it, walking out, feeling all that money, like it's already in your pocket. People who do it successfully never find anything to replace it. I guess that fits their behavior pattern, since they want to score, and then score again, yet they're never self-aware enough to recognize the pathology of it all. But that's what Jerry was able to help me understand, that the whole thing is such a thrill that you just want to have that feeling, right here, right now. You certainly don't ever think about tomorrow."

PREVIOUSLY:  MICHAEL MANN: THE INSIDE SCOOP ON 'PUBLIC ENEMIES':

Photo of Johnny Depp in "Public Enemies" by Peter Mountain / Universal Studios

In a move that would finally mean full employment for every great British character actor over the age of 50 in a single franchise, Bill Nighy is telling the British press that he's finally gotten a gig in the long-running "Harry Potter" film series. As reported on Empire magazine's website, Nighy is apparently set to play Minister of Magic Rufus Scrimgeour in the upcoming "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows," which is due out in two parts, starting in November 2010.

In the world of cheeky, insouciant character actors, no one is more wonderful than Nighy, who has enlivened every movie he's ever been in, whether he's playing Davy Jones in "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest," a brilliant, dissolute newspaper editor in the original "State of Play" British miniseries or flouncing around as a thinly veiled drug-addled Rod Stewart-esque character in Richard Curtis' "Love Actually." Nighy would be a perfect fit for Scrimgeour, who's described in the book as looking like an old lion with bushy eyebrows, tawny hair, yellow eyes and wire-rimmed specs. 

True to form, when asked if he was a big Potter fan, Nighy admitted that he hadn't actually -- ahem -- read any of the books yet.    

Photo of Bill Nighy by Lawrence K. Ho / Los Angeles Times

As anyone who's seen "Public Enemies" can tell you, Johnny Depp looks great in a mustache. It worked for George Clooney too. Matt Damon? Not so much. Check out the new trailer for "The Informant!," his upcoming comedy about being an over-eager agribusiness whistle blower:

It's never an easy decision when a studio head has to pull the plug on a big movie, as Amy Pascal did last week when she shut down "Moneyball," a $58-million Steven Soderbergh film that was set to star Brad Pitt as Billy Beane, the maverick general manager of the Oakland A's who almost singlehandedly reinvented the way baseball scouts and develops young talent.

The movie, based on the bestselling book by Michael Lewis, wasn't just in pre-production. It was literally five days away from filming when Soderbergh turned in a new version of the script that Pascal and her Sony team found unacceptable. The decision was so abrupt that the film's producer, Michael DeLuca, got the call about it while on his honeymoon in Paris. As a courtesy to the talent, Pascal gave them an opportunity to try and set the film up elsewhere, but no other studio has shown any interest. So the movie remains at Sony, but will it ever get made? Will Pitt stick with the project? And what exactly went wrong?

Although stories about the film's abrupt demise have appeared everywhere -- with Variety getting the original scoop -- Pascal hasn't talked about the decision until now. To hear her tell it, Soderbergh delivered a script that was inventive but a radical departure from the film Sony thought he was going to make. It was, put simply, more of a dramatic re-creation than a feature film.

"I've wanted to work with Steven forever, because he's simply a great filmmaker," Pascal told me today. "But the draft he turned in wasn't at all what we'd signed up for. He wanted to make a dramatic reenactment of events with real people playing themselves. I'd still work with Steven in a minute, but in terms of this project, he wanted to do the film in a different way than we did."

Soderbergh's last-minute revisions represented a huge change from the shooting script I read when I was working on a story about the film during its pre-production. The script, written by Oscar winner Steve Zaillian, was a baseball movie, but it was loaded with great comic moments and dazzling dialogue that captured the frenetic energy of Beane, a strikingly good-looking former phenom who washed out after a brief stint in the majors, only to resurface as a general manager who operated more like "Entourage's" Ari Gold than the buttoned-down insiders who normally run big-league teams. Beane was a born hustler, always wheeling and dealing, staying one step ahead of his rivals as he scouted unlikely unknown minor leaguers to replace the high-priced free agents a small-market team like the Oakland A's couldn't afford.

Soderbergh wouldn't talk to me about all this, but it seems clear that he became obsessed with authenticity, replacing many of Zaillian's inspired scripted set-pieces with actual interviews with the real people who were involved in the events. The Soderbergh aesthetic, according to one source close to the film, was simple: If it didn't happen in real life, it wasn't going to be in the movie. That might make for an intriguing art film, but it clearly was no longer a film that any studio would spend $58 million to make, especially with baseball films having virtually no appeal outside of the U.S.

"Steven wanted to tell the story through these interviews with the real people, as they commented on Beane," Pascal explains. "But there are lots of ways to tell a true story. We were just more comfortable with what we thought was a wonderful draft from Steve Zaillian."

What did Soderbergh do that managed to get Sony to pull the plug on a go movie? Keep reading:

As the Hollywood Reporter reports today, 20th Century Fox has put the brakes on "Unstoppable," the studio's Denzel Washington and Chris Pine-starring thriller that was supposed to start production this fall. The reason: Fox is worried about the film's costs. This may simply be Fox's way of pressuring the stars -- and filmmaker Tony Scott -- into making budgetary concessions. But it hit a big nerve in the talent community, coming after the quick hook Sony Pictures gave "Moneyball" last week, despite the presence of Brad Pitt in the lead role.

What's going on? As my colleague Claudia Eller has astutely pointed out, this summer has been something of a bloodbath for movie-star-driven films. The summer's biggest duds have been films that were carried -- make that supposed to be carried -- by movie stars. Despite the presence of Will Ferrell, "Land of the Lost" is a huge flop, perhaps the year's biggest money-loser. Eddie Murphy was the drawing card for "Imagine That," which bombed at the box office. The presence of Washington and John Travolta did nothing to steer moviegoers into seeing "The Taking of Pelham 123," which surely has played a role in Fox's concerns over bankrolling another Washington-starring thriller.

The lesson? You don't really need movie stars to play in the summer movie sandbox. The summer is becoming a magnet for high-concept comedies ("The Hangover") special-effects extravaganzas ("Star Trek" and "Transformers") and well-crafted computer animation ("Up") that work just fine without any help from expensive star talent.

I suspect this is simply the beginning of a new trend that will only put a bigger squeeze on high-cost talent, who have already been in the process of retooling their back-end money deals as studios have become increasingly wary of doling out millions to stars before they break even on their investments. But here's the real interesting question: What are the movie-star projects due out in the second half of the year that are the biggest commercial question marks? 

Here's a list of the films that could prompt anxious studio executives to pop fistfuls of Prozac over the next six months. Keep reading:

How to get a job as Michael Mann's technical advisor: Be good at armed robbery!

When I spent an afternoon talking with Michael Mann about "Public Enemies" last month -- you can see the whole story here -- I asked him, half-jokingly, if he had a technical advisor that helped him with the details of John Dillinger's bank robberies.

Mann is a famously intense stickler for detail. When he shot "Ali," for example, he filmed the scenes of the young champion at home at the boxer's actual house in Miami. In "Public Enemies," Mann shot as many scenes as possible in the spots where they occurred, including the legendary shootout at the Little Bohemia Lodge in southern Wisconsin, which the filmmaker says looks virtually unchanged, the walls still plastered with yellowing Chicago American newspaper headlines from the Dillinger era.

"I couldn't believe it," Mann told me. "It's exactly the way it was back then. We had Johnny Depp in John Dillinger's real bedroom, lying on the same bed, walking past the same toilet, escaping in exactly the same way Dillinger had. It wasn't just out of same slavish commitment to authenticity. It was just that -- you couldn't dream up anything better than that."

Having grown up in Chicago, Mann knows the city's fertile history of criminal behavior backward and forward. But Mann wanted to imagine what it was like inside a bank robber's psyche, figuring that bank robbing was such a timeless endeavor that even a criminal from today would have a pretty good sense of what the experience felt like 70 years ago. As it turned out, Mann knew a guy who knew a guy named Jerry Scalise, a member of the Chicago Crew, a loosely affiliated crime syndicate that has been involved in all sorts of illegal activity in the Second City dating back to the days of Al Capone.

"Jerry is an armed robber -- he once stole the Marlborough Diamond, which was as big as a grapefruit," Mann explains. "He's a real Chicago guy. He comes from the Near Northwest side, what they call 'The Patch.' We met through mutual friends and you won't find a more articulate, well-read guy, especially when it comes to what Dillinger was thinking about when he was pulling all these heists."

So what did Mann learn from him about the criminal mind-set?  "I asked him all kinds of questions. What's the high point of setting up a score? How do you go in strong? I'd say to Jerry, 'If you're planning a score, what's the most tense time? The most anxious moment? How do you feel if you're out in the street and see trouble? Or if something goes wrong and you're the lobby man? What does it feel like when you're going inside, knowing the money is there waiting for you?' "

To hear Mann tell it, the adrenaline high is pretty serious. "After you make a big score, you feel like a king. There's no high like it, walking out, feeling all that money, like it's already in your pocket. People who do it successfully never find anything to replace it. I guess that fits their behavior pattern, since they want to score, and then score again, yet they're never self-aware enough to recognize the pathology of it all. But that's what Jerry was able to help me understand, that the whole thing is such a thrill that you just want to have that feeling, right here, right now. You certainly don't ever think about tomorrow."

PREVIOUSLY:  MICHAEL MANN: THE INSIDE SCOOP ON 'PUBLIC ENEMIES':

Photo of Johnny Depp in "Public Enemies" by Peter Mountain / Universal Studios

In a move that would finally mean full employment for every great British character actor over the age of 50 in a single franchise, Bill Nighy is telling the British press that he's finally gotten a gig in the long-running "Harry Potter" film series. As reported on Empire magazine's website, Nighy is apparently set to play Minister of Magic Rufus Scrimgeour in the upcoming "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows," which is due out in two parts, starting in November 2010.

In the world of cheeky, insouciant character actors, no one is more wonderful than Nighy, who has enlivened every movie he's ever been in, whether he's playing Davy Jones in "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest," a brilliant, dissolute newspaper editor in the original "State of Play" British miniseries or flouncing around as a thinly veiled drug-addled Rod Stewart-esque character in Richard Curtis' "Love Actually." Nighy would be a perfect fit for Scrimgeour, who's described in the book as looking like an old lion with bushy eyebrows, tawny hair, yellow eyes and wire-rimmed specs. 

True to form, when asked if he was a big Potter fan, Nighy admitted that he hadn't actually -- ahem -- read any of the books yet.    

Photo of Bill Nighy by Lawrence K. Ho / Los Angeles Times

As anyone who's seen "Public Enemies" can tell you, Johnny Depp looks great in a mustache. It worked for George Clooney too. Matt Damon? Not so much. Check out the new trailer for "The Informant!," his upcoming comedy about being an over-eager agribusiness whistle blower:

It's never an easy decision when a studio head has to pull the plug on a big movie, as Amy Pascal did last week when she shut down "Moneyball," a $58-million Steven Soderbergh film that was set to star Brad Pitt as Billy Beane, the maverick general manager of the Oakland A's who almost singlehandedly reinvented the way baseball scouts and develops young talent.

The movie, based on the bestselling book by Michael Lewis, wasn't just in pre-production. It was literally five days away from filming when Soderbergh turned in a new version of the script that Pascal and her Sony team found unacceptable. The decision was so abrupt that the film's producer, Michael DeLuca, got the call about it while on his honeymoon in Paris. As a courtesy to the talent, Pascal gave them an opportunity to try and set the film up elsewhere, but no other studio has shown any interest. So the movie remains at Sony, but will it ever get made? Will Pitt stick with the project? And what exactly went wrong?

Although stories about the film's abrupt demise have appeared everywhere -- with Variety getting the original scoop -- Pascal hasn't talked about the decision until now. To hear her tell it, Soderbergh delivered a script that was inventive but a radical departure from the film Sony thought he was going to make. It was, put simply, more of a dramatic re-creation than a feature film.

"I've wanted to work with Steven forever, because he's simply a great filmmaker," Pascal told me today. "But the draft he turned in wasn't at all what we'd signed up for. He wanted to make a dramatic reenactment of events with real people playing themselves. I'd still work with Steven in a minute, but in terms of this project, he wanted to do the film in a different way than we did."

Soderbergh's last-minute revisions represented a huge change from the shooting script I read when I was working on a story about the film during its pre-production. The script, written by Oscar winner Steve Zaillian, was a baseball movie, but it was loaded with great comic moments and dazzling dialogue that captured the frenetic energy of Beane, a strikingly good-looking former phenom who washed out after a brief stint in the majors, only to resurface as a general manager who operated more like "Entourage's" Ari Gold than the buttoned-down insiders who normally run big-league teams. Beane was a born hustler, always wheeling and dealing, staying one step ahead of his rivals as he scouted unlikely unknown minor leaguers to replace the high-priced free agents a small-market team like the Oakland A's couldn't afford.

Soderbergh wouldn't talk to me about all this, but it seems clear that he became obsessed with authenticity, replacing many of Zaillian's inspired scripted set-pieces with actual interviews with the real people who were involved in the events. The Soderbergh aesthetic, according to one source close to the film, was simple: If it didn't happen in real life, it wasn't going to be in the movie. That might make for an intriguing art film, but it clearly was no longer a film that any studio would spend $58 million to make, especially with baseball films having virtually no appeal outside of the U.S.

"Steven wanted to tell the story through these interviews with the real people, as they commented on Beane," Pascal explains. "But there are lots of ways to tell a true story. We were just more comfortable with what we thought was a wonderful draft from Steve Zaillian."

What did Soderbergh do that managed to get Sony to pull the plug on a go movie? Keep reading:

As the Hollywood Reporter reports today, 20th Century Fox has put the brakes on "Unstoppable," the studio's Denzel Washington and Chris Pine-starring thriller that was supposed to start production this fall. The reason: Fox is worried about the film's costs. This may simply be Fox's way of pressuring the stars -- and filmmaker Tony Scott -- into making budgetary concessions. But it hit a big nerve in the talent community, coming after the quick hook Sony Pictures gave "Moneyball" last week, despite the presence of Brad Pitt in the lead role.

What's going on? As my colleague Claudia Eller has astutely pointed out, this summer has been something of a bloodbath for movie-star-driven films. The summer's biggest duds have been films that were carried -- make that supposed to be carried -- by movie stars. Despite the presence of Will Ferrell, "Land of the Lost" is a huge flop, perhaps the year's biggest money-loser. Eddie Murphy was the drawing card for "Imagine That," which bombed at the box office. The presence of Washington and John Travolta did nothing to steer moviegoers into seeing "The Taking of Pelham 123," which surely has played a role in Fox's concerns over bankrolling another Washington-starring thriller.

The lesson? You don't really need movie stars to play in the summer movie sandbox. The summer is becoming a magnet for high-concept comedies ("The Hangover") special-effects extravaganzas ("Star Trek" and "Transformers") and well-crafted computer animation ("Up") that work just fine without any help from expensive star talent.

I suspect this is simply the beginning of a new trend that will only put a bigger squeeze on high-cost talent, who have already been in the process of retooling their back-end money deals as studios have become increasingly wary of doling out millions to stars before they break even on their investments. But here's the real interesting question: What are the movie-star projects due out in the second half of the year that are the biggest commercial question marks? 

Here's a list of the films that could prompt anxious studio executives to pop fistfuls of Prozac over the next six months. Keep reading:

Bill Nighy: 'Harry Potter's' new Minister of Magic?

In a move that would finally mean full employment for every great British character actor over the age of 50 in a single franchise, Bill Nighy is telling the British press that he's finally gotten a gig in the long-running "Harry Potter" film series. As reported on Empire magazine's website, Nighy is apparently set to play Minister of Magic Rufus Scrimgeour in the upcoming "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows," which is due out in two parts, starting in November 2010.

In the world of cheeky, insouciant character actors, no one is more wonderful than Nighy, who has enlivened every movie he's ever been in, whether he's playing Davy Jones in "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest," a brilliant, dissolute newspaper editor in the original "State of Play" British miniseries or flouncing around as a thinly veiled drug-addled Rod Stewart-esque character in Richard Curtis' "Love Actually." Nighy would be a perfect fit for Scrimgeour, who's described in the book as looking like an old lion with bushy eyebrows, tawny hair, yellow eyes and wire-rimmed specs. 

True to form, when asked if he was a big Potter fan, Nighy admitted that he hadn't actually -- ahem -- read any of the books yet.    

Photo of Bill Nighy by Lawrence K. Ho / Los Angeles Times

As anyone who's seen "Public Enemies" can tell you, Johnny Depp looks great in a mustache. It worked for George Clooney too. Matt Damon? Not so much. Check out the new trailer for "The Informant!," his upcoming comedy about being an over-eager agribusiness whistle blower:

It's never an easy decision when a studio head has to pull the plug on a big movie, as Amy Pascal did last week when she shut down "Moneyball," a $58-million Steven Soderbergh film that was set to star Brad Pitt as Billy Beane, the maverick general manager of the Oakland A's who almost singlehandedly reinvented the way baseball scouts and develops young talent.

The movie, based on the bestselling book by Michael Lewis, wasn't just in pre-production. It was literally five days away from filming when Soderbergh turned in a new version of the script that Pascal and her Sony team found unacceptable. The decision was so abrupt that the film's producer, Michael DeLuca, got the call about it while on his honeymoon in Paris. As a courtesy to the talent, Pascal gave them an opportunity to try and set the film up elsewhere, but no other studio has shown any interest. So the movie remains at Sony, but will it ever get made? Will Pitt stick with the project? And what exactly went wrong?

Although stories about the film's abrupt demise have appeared everywhere -- with Variety getting the original scoop -- Pascal hasn't talked about the decision until now. To hear her tell it, Soderbergh delivered a script that was inventive but a radical departure from the film Sony thought he was going to make. It was, put simply, more of a dramatic re-creation than a feature film.

"I've wanted to work with Steven forever, because he's simply a great filmmaker," Pascal told me today. "But the draft he turned in wasn't at all what we'd signed up for. He wanted to make a dramatic reenactment of events with real people playing themselves. I'd still work with Steven in a minute, but in terms of this project, he wanted to do the film in a different way than we did."

Soderbergh's last-minute revisions represented a huge change from the shooting script I read when I was working on a story about the film during its pre-production. The script, written by Oscar winner Steve Zaillian, was a baseball movie, but it was loaded with great comic moments and dazzling dialogue that captured the frenetic energy of Beane, a strikingly good-looking former phenom who washed out after a brief stint in the majors, only to resurface as a general manager who operated more like "Entourage's" Ari Gold than the buttoned-down insiders who normally run big-league teams. Beane was a born hustler, always wheeling and dealing, staying one step ahead of his rivals as he scouted unlikely unknown minor leaguers to replace the high-priced free agents a small-market team like the Oakland A's couldn't afford.

Soderbergh wouldn't talk to me about all this, but it seems clear that he became obsessed with authenticity, replacing many of Zaillian's inspired scripted set-pieces with actual interviews with the real people who were involved in the events. The Soderbergh aesthetic, according to one source close to the film, was simple: If it didn't happen in real life, it wasn't going to be in the movie. That might make for an intriguing art film, but it clearly was no longer a film that any studio would spend $58 million to make, especially with baseball films having virtually no appeal outside of the U.S.

"Steven wanted to tell the story through these interviews with the real people, as they commented on Beane," Pascal explains. "But there are lots of ways to tell a true story. We were just more comfortable with what we thought was a wonderful draft from Steve Zaillian."

What did Soderbergh do that managed to get Sony to pull the plug on a go movie? Keep reading:

As the Hollywood Reporter reports today, 20th Century Fox has put the brakes on "Unstoppable," the studio's Denzel Washington and Chris Pine-starring thriller that was supposed to start production this fall. The reason: Fox is worried about the film's costs. This may simply be Fox's way of pressuring the stars -- and filmmaker Tony Scott -- into making budgetary concessions. But it hit a big nerve in the talent community, coming after the quick hook Sony Pictures gave "Moneyball" last week, despite the presence of Brad Pitt in the lead role.

What's going on? As my colleague Claudia Eller has astutely pointed out, this summer has been something of a bloodbath for movie-star-driven films. The summer's biggest duds have been films that were carried -- make that supposed to be carried -- by movie stars. Despite the presence of Will Ferrell, "Land of the Lost" is a huge flop, perhaps the year's biggest money-loser. Eddie Murphy was the drawing card for "Imagine That," which bombed at the box office. The presence of Washington and John Travolta did nothing to steer moviegoers into seeing "The Taking of Pelham 123," which surely has played a role in Fox's concerns over bankrolling another Washington-starring thriller.

The lesson? You don't really need movie stars to play in the summer movie sandbox. The summer is becoming a magnet for high-concept comedies ("The Hangover") special-effects extravaganzas ("Star Trek" and "Transformers") and well-crafted computer animation ("Up") that work just fine without any help from expensive star talent.

I suspect this is simply the beginning of a new trend that will only put a bigger squeeze on high-cost talent, who have already been in the process of retooling their back-end money deals as studios have become increasingly wary of doling out millions to stars before they break even on their investments. But here's the real interesting question: What are the movie-star projects due out in the second half of the year that are the biggest commercial question marks? 

Here's a list of the films that could prompt anxious studio executives to pop fistfuls of Prozac over the next six months. Keep reading:

Matt Damon: What's up with the lip tickler?

As anyone who's seen "Public Enemies" can tell you, Johnny Depp looks great in a mustache. It worked for George Clooney too. Matt Damon? Not so much. Check out the new trailer for "The Informant!," his upcoming comedy about being an over-eager agribusiness whistle blower:

It's never an easy decision when a studio head has to pull the plug on a big movie, as Amy Pascal did last week when she shut down "Moneyball," a $58-million Steven Soderbergh film that was set to star Brad Pitt as Billy Beane, the maverick general manager of the Oakland A's who almost singlehandedly reinvented the way baseball scouts and develops young talent.

The movie, based on the bestselling book by Michael Lewis, wasn't just in pre-production. It was literally five days away from filming when Soderbergh turned in a new version of the script that Pascal and her Sony team found unacceptable. The decision was so abrupt that the film's producer, Michael DeLuca, got the call about it while on his honeymoon in Paris. As a courtesy to the talent, Pascal gave them an opportunity to try and set the film up elsewhere, but no other studio has shown any interest. So the movie remains at Sony, but will it ever get made? Will Pitt stick with the project? And what exactly went wrong?

Although stories about the film's abrupt demise have appeared everywhere -- with Variety getting the original scoop -- Pascal hasn't talked about the decision until now. To hear her tell it, Soderbergh delivered a script that was inventive but a radical departure from the film Sony thought he was going to make. It was, put simply, more of a dramatic re-creation than a feature film.

"I've wanted to work with Steven forever, because he's simply a great filmmaker," Pascal told me today. "But the draft he turned in wasn't at all what we'd signed up for. He wanted to make a dramatic reenactment of events with real people playing themselves. I'd still work with Steven in a minute, but in terms of this project, he wanted to do the film in a different way than we did."

Soderbergh's last-minute revisions represented a huge change from the shooting script I read when I was working on a story about the film during its pre-production. The script, written by Oscar winner Steve Zaillian, was a baseball movie, but it was loaded with great comic moments and dazzling dialogue that captured the frenetic energy of Beane, a strikingly good-looking former phenom who washed out after a brief stint in the majors, only to resurface as a general manager who operated more like "Entourage's" Ari Gold than the buttoned-down insiders who normally run big-league teams. Beane was a born hustler, always wheeling and dealing, staying one step ahead of his rivals as he scouted unlikely unknown minor leaguers to replace the high-priced free agents a small-market team like the Oakland A's couldn't afford.

Soderbergh wouldn't talk to me about all this, but it seems clear that he became obsessed with authenticity, replacing many of Zaillian's inspired scripted set-pieces with actual interviews with the real people who were involved in the events. The Soderbergh aesthetic, according to one source close to the film, was simple: If it didn't happen in real life, it wasn't going to be in the movie. That might make for an intriguing art film, but it clearly was no longer a film that any studio would spend $58 million to make, especially with baseball films having virtually no appeal outside of the U.S.

"Steven wanted to tell the story through these interviews with the real people, as they commented on Beane," Pascal explains. "But there are lots of ways to tell a true story. We were just more comfortable with what we thought was a wonderful draft from Steve Zaillian."

What did Soderbergh do that managed to get Sony to pull the plug on a go movie? Keep reading:

As the Hollywood Reporter reports today, 20th Century Fox has put the brakes on "Unstoppable," the studio's Denzel Washington and Chris Pine-starring thriller that was supposed to start production this fall. The reason: Fox is worried about the film's costs. This may simply be Fox's way of pressuring the stars -- and filmmaker Tony Scott -- into making budgetary concessions. But it hit a big nerve in the talent community, coming after the quick hook Sony Pictures gave "Moneyball" last week, despite the presence of Brad Pitt in the lead role.

What's going on? As my colleague Claudia Eller has astutely pointed out, this summer has been something of a bloodbath for movie-star-driven films. The summer's biggest duds have been films that were carried -- make that supposed to be carried -- by movie stars. Despite the presence of Will Ferrell, "Land of the Lost" is a huge flop, perhaps the year's biggest money-loser. Eddie Murphy was the drawing card for "Imagine That," which bombed at the box office. The presence of Washington and John Travolta did nothing to steer moviegoers into seeing "The Taking of Pelham 123," which surely has played a role in Fox's concerns over bankrolling another Washington-starring thriller.

The lesson? You don't really need movie stars to play in the summer movie sandbox. The summer is becoming a magnet for high-concept comedies ("The Hangover") special-effects extravaganzas ("Star Trek" and "Transformers") and well-crafted computer animation ("Up") that work just fine without any help from expensive star talent.

I suspect this is simply the beginning of a new trend that will only put a bigger squeeze on high-cost talent, who have already been in the process of retooling their back-end money deals as studios have become increasingly wary of doling out millions to stars before they break even on their investments. But here's the real interesting question: What are the movie-star projects due out in the second half of the year that are the biggest commercial question marks? 

Here's a list of the films that could prompt anxious studio executives to pop fistfuls of Prozac over the next six months. Keep reading:

Sony's Amy Pascal speaks out about 'Moneyball'

It's never an easy decision when a studio head has to pull the plug on a big movie, as Amy Pascal did last week when she shut down "Moneyball," a $58-million Steven Soderbergh film that was set to star Brad Pitt as Billy Beane, the maverick general manager of the Oakland A's who almost singlehandedly reinvented the way baseball scouts and develops young talent.

The movie, based on the bestselling book by Michael Lewis, wasn't just in pre-production. It was literally five days away from filming when Soderbergh turned in a new version of the script that Pascal and her Sony team found unacceptable. The decision was so abrupt that the film's producer, Michael DeLuca, got the call about it while on his honeymoon in Paris. As a courtesy to the talent, Pascal gave them an opportunity to try and set the film up elsewhere, but no other studio has shown any interest. So the movie remains at Sony, but will it ever get made? Will Pitt stick with the project? And what exactly went wrong?

Although stories about the film's abrupt demise have appeared everywhere -- with Variety getting the original scoop -- Pascal hasn't talked about the decision until now. To hear her tell it, Soderbergh delivered a script that was inventive but a radical departure from the film Sony thought he was going to make. It was, put simply, more of a dramatic re-creation than a feature film.

"I've wanted to work with Steven forever, because he's simply a great filmmaker," Pascal told me today. "But the draft he turned in wasn't at all what we'd signed up for. He wanted to make a dramatic reenactment of events with real people playing themselves. I'd still work with Steven in a minute, but in terms of this project, he wanted to do the film in a different way than we did."

Soderbergh's last-minute revisions represented a huge change from the shooting script I read when I was working on a story about the film during its pre-production. The script, written by Oscar winner Steve Zaillian, was a baseball movie, but it was loaded with great comic moments and dazzling dialogue that captured the frenetic energy of Beane, a strikingly good-looking former phenom who washed out after a brief stint in the majors, only to resurface as a general manager who operated more like "Entourage's" Ari Gold than the buttoned-down insiders who normally run big-league teams. Beane was a born hustler, always wheeling and dealing, staying one step ahead of his rivals as he scouted unlikely unknown minor leaguers to replace the high-priced free agents a small-market team like the Oakland A's couldn't afford.

Soderbergh wouldn't talk to me about all this, but it seems clear that he became obsessed with authenticity, replacing many of Zaillian's inspired scripted set-pieces with actual interviews with the real people who were involved in the events. The Soderbergh aesthetic, according to one source close to the film, was simple: If it didn't happen in real life, it wasn't going to be in the movie. That might make for an intriguing art film, but it clearly was no longer a film that any studio would spend $58 million to make, especially with baseball films having virtually no appeal outside of the U.S.

"Steven wanted to tell the story through these interviews with the real people, as they commented on Beane," Pascal explains. "But there are lots of ways to tell a true story. We were just more comfortable with what we thought was a wonderful draft from Steve Zaillian."

What did Soderbergh do that managed to get Sony to pull the plug on a go movie? Keep reading:

As the Hollywood Reporter reports today, 20th Century Fox has put the brakes on "Unstoppable," the studio's Denzel Washington and Chris Pine-starring thriller that was supposed to start production this fall. The reason: Fox is worried about the film's costs. This may simply be Fox's way of pressuring the stars -- and filmmaker Tony Scott -- into making budgetary concessions. But it hit a big nerve in the talent community, coming after the quick hook Sony Pictures gave "Moneyball" last week, despite the presence of Brad Pitt in the lead role.

What's going on? As my colleague Claudia Eller has astutely pointed out, this summer has been something of a bloodbath for movie-star-driven films. The summer's biggest duds have been films that were carried -- make that supposed to be carried -- by movie stars. Despite the presence of Will Ferrell, "Land of the Lost" is a huge flop, perhaps the year's biggest money-loser. Eddie Murphy was the drawing card for "Imagine That," which bombed at the box office. The presence of Washington and John Travolta did nothing to steer moviegoers into seeing "The Taking of Pelham 123," which surely has played a role in Fox's concerns over bankrolling another Washington-starring thriller.

The lesson? You don't really need movie stars to play in the summer movie sandbox. The summer is becoming a magnet for high-concept comedies ("The Hangover") special-effects extravaganzas ("Star Trek" and "Transformers") and well-crafted computer animation ("Up") that work just fine without any help from expensive star talent.

I suspect this is simply the beginning of a new trend that will only put a bigger squeeze on high-cost talent, who have already been in the process of retooling their back-end money deals as studios have become increasingly wary of doling out millions to stars before they break even on their investments. But here's the real interesting question: What are the movie-star projects due out in the second half of the year that are the biggest commercial question marks? 

Here's a list of the films that could prompt anxious studio executives to pop fistfuls of Prozac over the next six months. Keep reading:

'Unstoppable': Hollywood's movie-star movies keep biting the dust

As the Hollywood Reporter reports today, 20th Century Fox has put the brakes on "Unstoppable," the studio's Denzel Washington and Chris Pine-starring thriller that was supposed to start production this fall. The reason: Fox is worried about the film's costs. This may simply be Fox's way of pressuring the stars -- and filmmaker Tony Scott -- into making budgetary concessions. But it hit a big nerve in the talent community, coming after the quick hook Sony Pictures gave "Moneyball" last week, despite the presence of Brad Pitt in the lead role.

What's going on? As my colleague Claudia Eller has astutely pointed out, this summer has been something of a bloodbath for movie-star-driven films. The summer's biggest duds have been films that were carried -- make that supposed to be carried -- by movie stars. Despite the presence of Will Ferrell, "Land of the Lost" is a huge flop, perhaps the year's biggest money-loser. Eddie Murphy was the drawing card for "Imagine That," which bombed at the box office. The presence of Washington and John Travolta did nothing to steer moviegoers into seeing "The Taking of Pelham 123," which surely has played a role in Fox's concerns over bankrolling another Washington-starring thriller.

The lesson? You don't really need movie stars to play in the summer movie sandbox. The summer is becoming a magnet for high-concept comedies ("The Hangover") special-effects extravaganzas ("Star Trek" and "Transformers") and well-crafted computer animation ("Up") that work just fine without any help from expensive star talent.

I suspect this is simply the beginning of a new trend that will only put a bigger squeeze on high-cost talent, who have already been in the process of retooling their back-end money deals as studios have become increasingly wary of doling out millions to stars before they break even on their investments. But here's the real interesting question: What are the movie-star projects due out in the second half of the year that are the biggest commercial question marks? 

Here's a list of the films that could prompt anxious studio executives to pop fistfuls of Prozac over the next six months. Keep reading: