The Hollywood Reporter‘s Tatiana Siegel is announcing that Katt Williams, a stand-up comic (“The Pimp Chronicles”) and Norbit costar, will write and star in Marshalls, a DreamWorks comedy about “the first black marshals of the Old West.” Beloved envelope-pusher Eddie Murphy will produce and co-star. The two obvious recalls, of course, are (a) Murphy’s famous 48 HRS./Reggie Hammond line from 25 years ago — “I’m your worst fucking nightmare, a nigger with a badge!” and (b) Blazing Saddles again, perhaps with more edge and almost certainly with something other than jaunty Mel Brooks-like tone, for reasons of pride if nothing else.

“I saw Zodiac over the weekend and couldn’t agree more. Really liked it, I mean. Of course I’m a big Fincher fan, but I’m also now a Mark Ruffalo fan. Out of curiosity I checked his IMDB page and I didn’t see anything noteworthy other than a couple of ‘also starring’ roles in Collateral, Spotless Mind and All the King’s Men. Have I missed the boat on this guy completely? Because the other stuff is all chickflick crap.

“Also, do you know if there is a PDF of the Vanderbilt script with the 12-page closing dialogue [delivered by Jake Gyllenhaal’s character]? In your review you said the film doesn’t have a conventional ‘catch the killer finale’ but the moment where Allen and Graysmith meet eye-to-eye in the hardware store is a genius ending, because it lets you read into it what the two people are thinking and draw your own conclusion without the complete reveal.

“I think the lack of the complete reveal is the best part of the whole thing. Sorry if I’m incoherent; I’m just trying to think of the last time when I had three movies out that I feel I would be talking about for years to come.” — a loyal reader and harbinger of hip under-40 guy sentiment who works at Morgan Stanley back east.

Blood Diamond special effects supervisor Jeff Okun responded today to yesterday’s followup piece about Jennifer Connelly‘s fake CG teardop, and I answered him line for line. Here’s how it went…

Okun: Jeff — First, thank you very much.

Wells: You’re welcome, and thanks again for writing yourself.

Okun: I greatly appreciate your sense of honesty…

Wells: Thanks.

Okun: but do I sense a bit of outrage in your feelings about CG?

Wells: Perhaps a bit.

Okun: All this over a supposed tear?

Wells: Not the Connelly tear itself (although it contains a certain point of offense, for me) but where the next guys will be taking this whole thing a year or five or ten from now…ad infinitum.

Okun: I would like to ask you: what about Fred Astaire dancing with…a vacuum cleaner!

Wells: That was fine, for what it was. I actually love the idea of reconstituting and reanimating dead actors….if it can be done seamlessly. Cary Grant costarring with Lindsay Lohan? I’m there.

Okun: What about Oliver Reed appearing in Gladiator to finish his scenes after he had passed on!

Wells: That was remarkable. I was genuinely impressed.

Okun: And let’s not forget Nancy Marchand doing likewise on the Soprano’s after her death!

Wells: I could spot that, actually. You could see the work. It’s not good at all if you can see the digital brush strokes.

Okun: What about Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart getting 30 years removed from their faces in X-Men 3?

Wells: That didn’t look right either. The aged parts of their faces merely looked erased and painted.

Okun: What about all the face lifts, eye jobs, wrinkle removals, abs replacement, wobbly arm, replacements, triple chin fixes, performance stealing from one scene to another and split screen trickery, etc. that goes on in loads of movies and TV shows?

Wells: Actor’s faces are routinely improved — i.e., made to look younger, smoother, better — in “loads” of movies and TV shows? For vanity’s sake…”loads”? News to me.

Okun: Hey! What about the airbrushing of models in magazines and billboards?

Wells: Women are usually less sexy and arousing when airbrushed. Almost always.

Okun: Talk about your sense of trust and belief! How much harm do you think that has done to the human race?

Wells: Some harm, for sure. Perhaps a lot. There’s a biological, organic, textural truth to our faces, bodies, lives…existences. Our souls, in a sense. Werner Herzog, a towering, majesterial presence in my eyes…a near-God…convinced me last year about the lack-of-trust issue….we don’t trust our eyes any longer. Seeing is not believing. Even when it looks good (like the amazing work in Children of Men, in which you can hardly ever spot the CG…maybe once or twice, at most), we’re not sure it’s real. We’ve essentially given up on that trust.

It’s not that we haven’t always had backdrops and painted scenery and fake beards and old-fashioned matte work (like the ancient Rome cityscapes in Spartacus and Ben-Hur), but images today, it seems, are being fucked with so consistently and relentlessly — CG hammers, saws and screws are constantly tinkering and hacking away — that it’s like an oppressive din. A din and a fog, almost…fog in through the window and infiltrating the great cinematic house…resulting in a lessening of clarity. It’s gotten so that live theatre, for me, is delivering a much greater high because the obvious restraints & biological honesty of the form.

Okun: What I am trying to point out is, while I do agree with you to a point (CG = Bad when misused)…

Wells: Bad when it comes to supplementing emotional aspects of performances certainly. And certainly bad when obvious.

Okun: ….there are much worse instances that should be talked about than this tear issue.

Wells: Such as…?

Okun: And more importantly, the phrasing of your piece, the juxtapositioning of sentences implies that I was a wanton & willing bad-man in a quest to add a phoney tear to Jennifer Connelly to change her performance on a whim. And further that Ed Zwick was complicit as well, which is just not the case.

Wells: Again, all I did was quote from, summarize and compress what I thought I read in the Times Online piece. I tried to re-clarify that in yesterday’s follow-up.

Okun: In a ironic sense, the manner in which you constructed your non writing/reporting is doing the same thing as what you say CG is doing to the movies: you are ruining “any sense of audience trust or belief”

in the written word and the reporter or writer.

Wells: I really don’t see that at all.

Okun: You have somehow managed to give a false impression of what was said and done in spite of the fact that you didn’t write/report anything yourself.

Wells: I’m still giving a false impression after yesterday’s follow-up? I really don’t get what it is I’ve failed to understand or pass along.

Okun: Jeff, you are a good writer. I have read you. I have admired your work. But don’t you find this ironic?

Wells: Since I don’t understand what it is I’ve specifically failed to grasp or pass along, no.

Okun: Again, thank you.

Wells: Be well.

N.Y. Times contributor Terrence Rafferty on the sometimes unholy alliances between French Nouvelle Vague-ers and Hollywood filmmakers, the latest being Chris Rock‘s re-jiggering of Eric Rohmer‘s Chloe in the Afternoon in his new film, I Think I Love My Wife (which I riffed on a few ago).

“For film critic and historian Joe Leydon, the cross-pollination of Hollywood and YouTube is only natural. He calls the clips on YouTube “the cinematic equivalent of garage band recordings…just as there will be elements of garage bands that will be incorporated into mainstream music, there will also be garage bands signed to recording contracts with major labels,” says Leydon. “I’m sure that some of the people who will be releasing summer comedies in 2008 are making little comedy shorts for display right now on YouTube.” — from Dave Roos‘ “The Jackass Generation,”in issue # 67 of MovieMaker magazine.

Another great ’70s crime movie is coming on Warner Home Video DVD, and on the very same day (May 22nd) as the release of WHV’s Prince of the City two-disc set — Ulu Grosbard‘s Straight Time (1978), in which Dustin Hoffman gives one of his most bitingly real performances.

He plays a hard-core felon, Max Dembo, just released from a six-year stretch in the slam, whose difficulties with a goading, mind-fucking parole officer (M. Emmet Walsh) and his fraternizing with two ex-con pals (Harry M. Stanton, Gary Busey) eventually nudge him back to a life of crime. Theresa Russell is first-rate as the average, solemn-faced girl whom Dembo hooks up with.

The taut, hard-edged screenplay was by Jeffrey Boam, Alvin Sargent and Eddie Bunker, based on Bunker’s novel No Beast So Fierce. I’m reading that Michael Mann also contributed to the screenplay but was uncredited upon the film’s release. No Beast So Fierce allegedly served as a source of reference for Robert De Niro‘s Neil McCauley character in Mann’s Heat.

Kevin Smith has announced that “we’ve finally secured funding for the sixth film in the Jersey Trilogy, tentatively titled ‘Derogatory Term For Slacker Twentysomethings: Funny Word After Colon.’

“We’re currently tinkering with the tag line — I suggested ‘just because they do something doesn’t mean they have to do something,’ but corporate’s pushing for ‘punchy, two-sentence sarcastic comment…balls.’ After fighting all this time just for permission to do the project I’m inclined to let them win the battle, but we’ll see what the future brings.”

I personally prefer the generic title. I wouldn’t hesitate to pay to see a movie called Derogatory Term For Slacker Twentysomethings: Funny Word After Colon. I wouldn’t care about reviews…i would just go.

I’ve heard from a Canadian source that Zack Snyder‘s 300 may have made as much as $29 million yesterday. That obviously means a weekend total that could be as high as $65 million or even $70 million. This is obviously much, much higher than anyone expected. (The last estimate I heard was roughly $40 million.) Wild Hogs came in second with $8 million, the guy says.

I don’t hold with Tom Tapp‘s putdown of Peter Biskind‘s “The Story of The Sopranos” piece in the new Vanity Fair. Sometimes words of praise are entirely just and fitting. I worship this show — it can’t be spoken of too highly — and everything Biskind says about it is spot-on. My words exactly.

Sopranos departed (l. to r.): David Proval, Vincent Pastore, Annabella Sciorra, Joe Pantoliano, Drea de Matteo, Steve Buscemi

I particularly agree with his flat declaration that The Sopranos “is one of the masterpieces of American popular culture, on par with the first two Godfathers, Mean Streets and Goodfellas [as well as] Fellini’s 8 1/2, Visconti’s The Leopardand Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz.” The Sopranos saga has been unfolding since early ’99 — hard to believe it’s been eight years. My heart is breaking that it’s all coming to an end.

My nostalgia is so pervasive I’m willing to forgive and forget that season #4 felt like a bit of a wank. Wait…do I mean #3? It was one of those two.

Here’s a video record of he Annie Liebowitz cover shoot.