This snap, of course, shows the filming of Inglourious Basterds costar Melanie Laurent as she runs from the clutches of Christoph Waltz at the end of the famous French farmhouse house. if you know this scene you know she runs across the field barefoot. (Director Quentin Tarantino included an insert shot of her dirty bare feet.) You’ll notice in this shot, of course, that she’s wearing Nikes. My heart sank when I spotted this. I felt almost betrayed.

Tarantino, clearly, is no Eric von Stroheim-styled realist. If I’d been the director I would have told Laurent the following: “Closeups, inserts, master shots…you’re supposed to be running barefoot across a field and that’s the reality of the scene. I don’t care how good an actress you are or if no one ever suspects you aren’t barefoot in the closeup shots. I just don’t want you wearing fucking Nikes during a World War II film…period. Wearing them betrays the reality of the character, the period…it’s the same thing as being stoned before I call ‘action!'”

Hollywood legend has it that Von Stroheim insisted that actresses in an historical film he was directing had to wear authentic underwear from the period. The audience could have never known this, but von Stroheim knew. And on some level he felt it mattered in terms of the reality being portrayed. That’s the mark of a true madman.

Because he believes he’s the real-life model for Jeremy Renner‘s Sgt. James in The Hurt Locker, and because he could use the scratch, Sergeant Jeffrey S. Sarver yesterday filed a major-bucks lawsuit against the Hurt Locker team — director Kathryn Bigelow, writer-producer Mark Boal, Summit Entertainment and Nicolas Chartier‘s Voltage Pictures.

Sarver’s attorney Geoffrey Fieger, who’s also looking for dough, wrote in a prepared statement: “Plaintiff, Master Sgt. Jeffrey S. Sarver, is, in fact, the film’s main character ‘Will James’ or ‘Blaster One’ [which was Master Sgt. Sarver’s call signal during his tours of duty in Iraq].”

A Wrap summary states that “the suit alleges that Boal, was allowed, as part of an armed services press program, to be embedded in Master Sgt. Sarver’s unit. It further alleges that ‘virtually all of the situations portrayed in the film were, in fact, occurrences involving Master Sgt. Sarver that were observed and documented by Screenwriter Boal. Master Sgt. Sarver also coined the phrase ‘Hurt Locker’ for Boal.”

“Summit issued this statement on Tuesday: ‘We have no doubt that Master Sergeant Sarver served his country with honor and commitment risking his life for a greater good, but we distributed the film based on a fictional screenplay written by Mark Boal.'”

An AP story about the suit quotes Sarver as saying “he was never offered a role in the making of the movie. “I could have helped out a little bit,” Sarver said at today’s news conference in Southfield, Michigan. “But they chose not to (involve me).”

“Fieger said greed was the reason Sarver wasn’t permitted to participate in the film or be recognized for his role as the inspiration for the main character. Now, he said: ‘They’re gonna owe him a whole lot of money and recognition.’

“[I’m feeling] just a little bit hurt, a little bit felt left out,” Sarver said. “Just hoping that Mr. Fieger can make things right.”

Vanity Fair‘s Evgenia Peretz has a nicely written profile of Michael Douglas, star of Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps (as well as a Toronto Film Festival fizzler called Solitary Man). The theme is about fatherhood, and how Douglas — a lousy dad in some respects when he was younger, which apparently had an unfortunate impact on his 31 year-old son Cameron — is determined not to screw it again with his new brood.

North American rights to Woody Allen‘s You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger have been acquired by Sony Pictures Classics. A fall release is planned, but this seems to indicate that the London-shot film — which stars Antonio Banderas, Josh Brolin, Anthony Hopkins, Freida Pinto and Naomi Watts — will premiere at the Cannes Film Festival. A little man in my chest is telling me that Allen’s untitled next film, which will roll in Paris this summer with Owen Wilson, Marion Cotillard and Carla Bruni co-starring, has a certain apartness or special-tude. No reason, just a gut thing, etc.

So now there will be two Abraham Lincoln movies — Robert Redford‘s The Conspirator and Tim Burton‘s just-announced Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter — before Steven Spielberg gets off his sorry sagging ass and pulls the trigger on his years-delayed, Tony Kushner-scripted Lincoln project, which once upon a time (i.e., five years ago) was seen as a golden opportunity for Liam Neeson to portray the nation’s 16th president.

Burton would be teaming with Timur Bekmambetov, the Russian-born, animal-level director of Wanted — i.e., one of the stupidest and most absurdly illogical high-octane thrillers ever made — on an adaptation of Seth Grahame-Smith‘s novel “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter,” which portrays the Great Emancipator as “an ax-throwing, highly trained vampire assassin,” to borrow from a sentence in a Variety story.

The Burton-Bekmambetov flick sounds cool, but I’m more interested in an Honest Abe Lincoln/vampire-killing video game. I’m fairly certain that John Ford and Raymond Massey would feel the same way if they were with us. This story needs a quote from Doris Kearns Goodwin.

Even people with no lives to speak of need to see a dentist every so often. I’ll bring the laptop and aircard along and see what happens.

I briefly visited last night’s soiree for Village Voice columnist Michael Musto at 230 Fifth. The main idea was to celebrate Musto’s 25th anniversary as a Voice columnist (“La Dolce Musto“); it was also a friends-of-Michael, Mardi-Gras-like gathering with all manner of exotic attitude and flamboyance, including a good 40 or 50 tranny-glammy cross-dressers. Joan Rivers did the opening intro; Murray Hill emcee’d. Performers included Dirty Martini, Bridgett Everett, Tommy Femia and Vodka Stinger.

Village Voice columnist Michael Musto greeting guests as stage show began.

Joan Rivers — those cheek implants! — introducing Musto.

North-facing view from penthouse of 230 Fifth Avenue.

Update: I still say an enterprising L.A. journalist needs to hang with Oscar-shunned Hurt Locker producer Nicholas Chartier on Oscar night, even though the particulars were revealed last night by Nikki Finke. Chartier and his family will be “guests of honor at a Venice viewing party that is being put together by WME Global chief Graham Taylor and Blue Valentine producer Lynnette Howell.” A filmmaker friend confides that “if the Academy allows it I may give [Chartier] my tickets.” Except that would kinda kill the Venice party thing.

This isn’t meant as a criticism of Paul Greengrass‘s Green Zone (Universal, 3.12) so I need to put this carefully. Anyone familiar with Greengrass’s two Bourne thrillers will hardly be surprised to hear that this fast-paced Iraq War drama, set in 2003, is visually defined by the aesthetic known as “Paul Greengrass shaky-cam.”

Green Zone directort Paul Greengrass (l.), star Matt Damon during filming.

It’s also referred to as crazy-cam, hyper-cam, whirly-cam, jaggedy-cam, whooshy-cam, jackhammer-cam. I loved it in the last Bourne flick, but it bothered me in the second one. (I was primarily bothered by the overly-accelerated cutting.) But I was surprised when I passed this information on to a director friend, and he instantly declared it “passe…a visual fad that has run its course.”

I’m not agreeing or disagreeing with this view. I’m not at all persuaded that PGSC is over. But I was prompted to think back and recall other cinematographic fads have definitely left the room.

I think that the herky-jerky skip-frame cam that was used for the action sequences in Saving Private Ryan and Gladiator is gone for good. I suspect also that the arty bleachy-cam color used for 21 Grams and…I forget which other films but I’m speaking of color that has been bleached to the point of being almost less colorful than monochrome — that aesthetic, I think, is probably not going to return anytime soon. (Or am I wrong?) The high-contrast monochrome bleach look used for Darren Aronovsky‘s Pi is probably history also.

“Paul Greengrass shaky cam” is a very precise and distinct thing. It’s about a bullet-train editing speed and a mad whip-pan wildassery. It was used in the second and third Bourne films, but not in Greengrass’s United 93, which was fast and frenetic but comparatively toned down. Barry Ackroyd‘s cinematography for The Hurt Locker may have seemed similar, but it was a lot steadier in stretches, and not quite as accelerated.

I can reveal that when I realized that Green Zone was another shakycam adventure, I said to myself, “Oh…this again.” This isn’t a slam, mind. I’m just saying that PGSC has become a known quantity.

It appears that this year’s Oscar telecast producers, Bill Mechanic and Adam Shankman, have a blockage regarding Sacha Baron-Cohen. On 2.18 Shankman revealed during an NPR “Fresh Air” interview that a proposal for Baron-Cohen to host the Oscars was “too much of a wild card” to gain Academy approval. And now New York/”Vulture”‘s Claude Brodesser-Akner is reporting that an Avatar-spoofing skit that would have co-starred Baron Cohen and Ben Stiller has been dropped.

The reported reason is that Mechanic feared that the sketch might have pissed off James Cameron, with whom Mechanic dealt with during the making of Titanic, and who apparently has a reputation for being thin-skinned.

“An insider familiar with the Oscar telecast tells Vulture that an Avatar sketch planned by Baron Cohen and Stiller was nixed yesterday by Mechanic, who worried that Cameron would be so offended by it that he might even walk out of the Oscar broadcast on live TV.

“Baron Cohen planned to appear onstage as a blue-skinned female Na’vi, with Stiller translating ‘her’ interplanetary speech. As the skit went on, though, it would become clear that Stiller wasn’t translating properly, because Cohen would grow ever more upset. At its climax, an infuriated Baron Cohen would pull open ‘her’ evening gown to reveal that s/he was pregnant, knocked up with Cameron’s love child, and would go on to confront her baby daddy as if s/he were on Jerry Springer.

“‘Let’s just say that Cameron isn’t known to be, shall we say, self-deprecating,’ a source explains about the decision to cut the sketch.

“Baron Cohen’s spokesman Matt Labov told Brodesser-Akner that ‘I hate to use the term, because it’s so ubiquitous, but there were creative differences. Nothing acrimonious, but both sides felt that since they couldn’t agree, [Cohen] might as well remain in London.'”

I don’t know if this Rube Goldberg music video for “This Too Shall Pass,” a track from OK Go‘s “Of The Blue Colour of the Sky,” was shot entirely without CG, but I’m willing to believe it was. It runs 3 minutes and 50 seconds without a cut — exhilarating! Director James Frost could land a feature-directing gig from this. The contraptions were built/engineered by Syyn Labs.

This music video is good I didn’t hear the song. Not a phrase or bridge or chorus…nothing.