The more I read about the upcoming film Me and Orson Welles, I can't help but wonder what the real deal would have said about this whole project. Would he be amused? Offended? Would he agree with the casting of Christian McKay? So many questions.

We'll never know what he'd think, but we do know who will play Joseph Cotten in the upcoming biopic. The Hollywood Reporter has posted that the role will be filled by James Tupper. The actor got his start in the uber-record-breaking and awe-inspiring Joe Dirt, and these days, he is Jack Slattery in Men in Trees. In the film, Tupper plays opposite Efron's character in Welles' 1937 Broadway version of Julius Caesar. (Cotten is also the man whose second film role was in Citizen Kane, as Kane's best friend, Jedediah Leland.) I think it's a pretty decent match. How about you?

Richard Linklater has already begun shooting the film in the Isle of Man, London, with further production taking place in New York.

For girls of a certain age, the very notion of Zac Efron is enough to send them into peals of ecstasy. Personally, I just don't get it. The Hollywood Reporter announced that Efron (star of High School Musical), has signed to star in the big-screen version of Robert Kaplow's coming-of-age novel, Me and Orson Welles. Efron will play Richard, a 17 year old boy "who, while strolling the streets of New York, happens upon the yet-to-open Mercury Theatre and is noticed by its mercurial founder, Orson Welles. The man lands a bit part in Julius Caesar, the production that catapulted Welles to the top, and spends the next week learning about life and love." Joining Efron in the cast is Christian McKay as Welles and Ben Chaplin as the famed British stage actor George Coulouris.

Richard Linklater is signed to direct from a Vince and Holly Gent Palmo script. The Palmos are long-time collaborators with Linklater; Holly started as a production coordinator on Dazed and Confused, and Vince has worked with Linklater on most of his films. Now that the filmmaker is involved, it could raise Efron's profile as an actor to something a little more challenging than High School Musical 3? 4? How many of those movies are there anyway? Not to mention, regardless of what you may have thought of The Newton Boys, it seems like Linklater would be able to handle another period piece (this one is set in 1937). The story is considered half romance and half history of the Golden Age of Broadway, and could definitely be Efron's shot at being taken a little more seriously as an actor -- as opposed to just a cover boy for "Non-Threatening Boys Magazine." Efron is currently shooting the teen comedy Seventeen, but then he will be off to start work on Welles in mid-February and March.

You never know when the next Richard Linklater is going to pop up -- someone new who releases a simple, yet endearing indie flick. Perhaps it will be with new indie filmmaker David Mitchell. C & G News reports that the 33-year-old filmmaker is gearing up to make his feature debut with The Myth of the American Sleepover in Detroit this summer. The picture, which he started writing 4-5 years ago, "follows four characters as they navigate through metro Detroit during the final night on the final weekend of summer." Sound a little like Dazed and Confused? The new filmmaker goes on to describe it as "really a coming to age story. It's kind of along the lines of American Graffiti."

Although Mitchell lives in Los Angeles, he's heading back to Detroit for production: "We could have filmed elsewhere, but I really didn't want to do that. I really wanted it to have the feel of the neighborhoods and way it looks there. I have an emotional connection to it." This means that local Detroiters will have their shot at being cast in the movie. The production is looking for locals between the ages of 14 and 21, both male and female, for feature and supporting roles. Since this is an uber-indie feature, it's a no-pay labor of love, one that will reap cash for the players if the film does well. If you're interested, there's casting call info in the C & G story.

Now, assuming that Mitchell hasn't fallen victim to the ladies in sexy underwear sleepover cliche, I'm pretty keen to see what he makes of this. How about you?

Eating has become more and more difficult in the 21st century. Food isn't always the wondrous, romantic thing depicted in most movies. Recently we have learned about MSG, GMOs, polyunsaturated fats, trans-fats and the presence of the horrid "high fructose corn syrup" in just about everything. (It's in bread. Bread!) Sales of organic foods have increased drastically, and everyone has become an ingredient-reader and an amateur foodie. Now multiply this by about fifteen and you've got Thanksgiving dinner. Who's a vegetarian? Who's a vegan? Who's on the Atkins diet? Does putting the stuffing inside the turkey actually make it poisonous? Were those slivered almonds made on machinery that also processed peanuts? Who's allergic? What's the difference between yams and sweet potatoes? To get yourself prepared, I've assembled a chronological list of food cautionary tales, or hard culinary lessons learned.

Soylent Green (1973)
Is there anyone out there who doesn't yet know the secret component of everyone's favorite future foodstuff? If not, watching this film, directed by Richard Fleischer, will make you want to read the ingredients more often.

The Phantom of Liberty (1974)
The key scene in Luis Bunuel's film takes place at a dinner party. Guests gather around the table, pull down their pants and sit on toilets. They talk, rifle through magazines and otherwise engage in casual conversation. One guest rises, politely excuses himself and shyly asks for the dining room. Once inside, he shuts the door and begins eating. That's really funny, and in the joke, Bunuel asks why we perform one bodily function with great dignity in public and another with shame in private. As humans, our beliefs and behavior are utterly arbitrary. Try not to think about that at the dinner table.

Richard Linklater, one of the indie world's favorite directors of the last couple decades, released two films in 2006, both unusual in some way. A Scanner Darkly used rotoscoping to turn a live-action film into surreal animation, while Fast Food Nation took a nonfiction book and turned it into a fictional story. Fans wondered: What's next on his agenda?

Well, we have an answer! Linklater must like trying new things, because this time it's a documentary -- his first time in that genre except for a short (Live from Shiva's Dance Floor) that he made a few years ago. This one, called Inning by Inning: A Coach's Progress, is a profile of University of Texas baseball coach Augie Garrido, the winningest coach in NCAA history.

Garrido granted Linklater unprecedented access to practices, games, and team meetings, not to mention access to himself and the players. And Garrido is no stranger to the ways of filmmaking, either. The 68-year-old coach has been friends with Kevin Costner since the days when the actor attended Cal State Fullerton, where Garrido was then coaching (and winning). Costner even recruited Garrido to play a Yankees manager in his film For Love of the Game.

Linklater screened a rough cut of Inning by Inning for Austin Film Society members last Thursday -- a fitting venue, considering he co-founded the organization and is its artistic director. No word yet on when the film will be finished and released, but the subject is a natural fit for Linklater, who loves University of Texas and baseball. If it's good, maybe it can count as an apology for Bad News Bears.

Before Sunset is probably one of the best examples of a good sequel. Actually, scratch that. A great sequel. It's incredibly rare that you can go into a film expecting goodness, and be completely blown away. I liked Before Sunrise; I watched it any time I was itching to be a conversational voyeur. But I didn't love it. Then Sunset came out, and I don't think six months can go by without me itching to pop it back into my DVD player. When I first saw the film in the theater, I heard the loudest noises from the audience ever. There were groans, ughs, awhs and even some "no!" exclamations coming from every direction. We all want to know what happens as the light dims and Nina Simone croons on.

While it is no secret that the trio of Richard Linklater, Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy would like to keep revisiting the couple every ten or so years, it seems that we're missing out on a sequel that would've shared the aftermath of Jesse and Celine's walk through Paris. Hawke told MTV News: "If the film had been totally ignored, we probably already would have made a third one. Rick said to me the other day, 'It's that whole thing of people coming up to you at dinner parties and saying [they] know what happened to [Jesse and Celine]. You don't want to deal with it.'" Thanks, guys. You make a great film that we all can't help but love, and that's why we're not getting a third? It seems that this sequel wouldn't have been a feature, but a sort of fan goodie to wrap some things up: "We had an idea but [it's] not going to happen, a pretty good outline of what the next one was going to be. But we would need to be in production right now, because we wanted to pick up right where we left off. Rick wanted to do a short film that was just two weeks later. Time goes by so fast."

The bittersweet edge to this project is just how much we don't see. These characters have a million stories to tell -- from Jesse's relationship with his wife and child to Celine's work and relationships -- but maybe it's better to not know it all. Maybe part of the magic is letting things amplify over the years. But that being said -- please, guys, don't have it be another 'we havent seen each other for years' situation. We've had the 'missed opportunity.' Now we need the relationship actuality.

Living in Austin makes it challenging to create a year-end Top Ten list. I feel like I ought to have until February to finalize the list, because a lot of acclaimed movies from 2006 won't be released in this town until early next year. Plus, I am still catching up on movies that did get an Austin release before the end of the year -- for example, I didn't get to see The Queen until Wednesday night. I know I've missed some very good movies that might show up on a later list (I am dying to see Sleeping Dogs Lie, for example). And on the flip side, I've seen some excellent movies this year that were technically released in 2005, like The Squid and the Whale, but didn't arrive in Austin until 2006. Throwing film festivals into the mix means that I've seen some wonderful films that won't be released until 2007, or that have no distributor yet and may not see theatrical release at all. It's strange how "2006" can seem like such a fluid term when you're a film critic who lives outside of New York/Los Angeles.

So this Top Ten list is charmingly inconsistent as to release dates. Let's not worry about that. The list is in alphabetical order, although I will mention which movie was my particular favorite ...

When Independent Digital Entertainment (InDigEnt) was founded in 1999, DV filmmaking was still fairly new, although not unknown or unused. The problem was that it wasn't yet recognized and respected enough to be taken seriously in the film market. This was three years before George Lucas delivered the DV-shot Attack of the Clones and changed many minds about the capability of digital cinematography. Today, a great percentage of indie and Hollywood features are made digitally, and InDigEnt may be somewhat obsolete. It comes as no surprise, then, that co-founder Gary Winick has announced the production company will be put to rest come 2007.

Winick, who directed the upcoming Charlotte's Web, got the idea for InDigEnt from the Dogma 95 movement and started the company with John Sloss as a way for indie filmmakers to finance small, cheap projects. Many of the movies produced by InDigEnt aren't too appealing to the eye, but a few of them were great showcases for actors, such as Aaron Stanford, who broke out by appearing in Winick's Tadpole, and Patricia Clarkson, who received an Oscar nod for Pieces of April. But while the company started off well, gaining notice for decent pics like Tadpole, Pieces of April, Personal Velocity: Three Portraits and Richard Linklater's Tape, it eventually fell to near-obscurity with forgettable titles, such as Kill the Poor, Puccini for Beginners and Steve Buscemi's Lonesome Jim (which I still say is hilarious, if not substantial).

The Texas Hall of Fame awards ceremony always takes place on the night SXSW begins, and honors Texans who have contributed significantly to the film industry in some capacity. The evening has a reputation for being much more fun than the usual dry awards presentations. From 2002-2005, the evening's emcee was former Texas Governor Ann Richards, who added her trademark wit and humor to the proceedings. Richards was a longtime supporter and advocate of Texas film. In addition, she narrated a rollicking documentary about a favorite Texas food, Barbecue: A Texas Love Story, that played SXSW in 2004. In 2006, Richards had to back out of the ceremony due to illness. As you probably are aware, she died in September of esophageal cancer. The show may never be quite the same.

Austin Film Society (AFS) has decided to dedicate the 2007 award ceremony to its most memorable emcee, and the theme of next year's ceremony will be "A Tribute to Ann Richards." Journalist Liz Smith, a longtime friend of Richards, will host the event next March. The Texas Hall of Fame didn't have to go far to pick some of its recipients for 2007, either: Richard Linklater, who founded AFS, and producer Elizabeth Avellan of Troublemaker Studios (you know, the movies directed by her estranged husband Robert Rodriguez). Other Hall of Fame honorees will include Betty Buckley and Bill Paxton (both from Fort Worth). Lily Tomlin and actress/playwright Anna Deavare Smith are also expected to attend. For those of us who can't be there, AFS has kindly posted a video made at the 2006 ceremony, in which various attendees send their best wishes to Richards.

I have an incredible weakness for Richard Linklater. No, scratch that. I have an incredible weakness for his films that revolve around dialogue. The man will try anything. Although I don't think anyone would have thought he would remake Bad News Bears, he did. He's had some mainstream successes, and some that never quite hit a bigger audience. However, he's always got a vision that usually thrives when he gets to speak through a film. Before Sunset had very little to it, but it was a powerful movie all because of the dialogue. Maybe it's his interests in discussion that have led him to discuss his current work.

In the midst of rotoscoping and fast food, Linklater has been working on another film since 2001, which he plans to complete over a 12-year span, wrapping up in 2013. The film, currently called both 12-Year-Movie and Boyhood, will follow the life of a young boy as he grows into a college freshman. However, it's not a documentary, although shot in that style, but a fictional account with one hell of a loyal cast. Ellar Salmon, the boy, is joined by Ethan Hawke (what a surprise!) and Patricia Arquette, who I assume are the divorced parents who are trying to raise their kid.

The Link has definitely decided to throw our expectations -- just when it seemed that he was starting to be repetitive with a Sunrise sequel and second take at rotoscoping. It's an epic idea, which could be monumentally good or bad. I am leaning towards the former, since he had no problem weaving seemingly-random bits together in Slacker when he was just getting started. Will trying to make a feature-length film out of twelve years of footage be any different?

When Robert Altman died Monday night he left behind a good deal of pre-production work on what was to be his next film, a fictionalized remake of the 1997 documentary Hands on a Hard Body. Scheduled to begin shooting next year, the new film has a screenplay, co-written by Stephen Harrigan, and a distributor, Picturehouse, but now is without a director.

Those familiar with the story presented in Hands on a Hard Body -- twenty-four contestants try to win a new truck in a contest that has each attempting to be the last to remain holding onto said vehicle -- should be in agreement that it would have been perfectly dramatized by Altman. And possibly by nobody else. Picturehouse head Bob Berney is now debating whether to go ahead with the production with a new director at the helm or to let the project die with the late, great filmmaker, knowing that it just won't be as good without him.

The first idea that comes to mind for the substitution option is to have Paul Thomas Anderson take over. He is nearing completion on his latest, the oil-tycoon-family drama, There Will Be Blood, so he may be able to fit this into his schedule, and also he recently worked alongside Altman on A Prairie Home Companion, so he is likely the most qualified to continue the project relatively close to Altman's vision. A second choice, and less appealing one, would be to have Richard Linklater have a shot, since he seems to have no new film in the works, he has done a fair job of handling the multiple-character, multiple-storyline style, he just adapted a non-fiction book as a fictional narrative, and he should feel at home working with the Texas-set film. A final idea would be to have S.R. Bindler, who directed the original doc and has since moved into shooting fiction films, redo his own film.

How do you take a book that's non-fiction and make a fictional movie about it? Real-life stories are made into movies all the time, of course: Erin Brockovich, The Insider, All the President's Men -- all took real events and made them into films. But Fast Food Nation, the book, is not a story about a person. It's a painstakingly researched documentation of the history of the fast food industry and California car culture, and their collective impact on the way entire industries are run, the way people eat, and the way their food is produced. How to translate the vast amount of information Eric Schlosser presented in his book nearly a decade ago into a cohesive fictional film? The answer: It's not easy.

Schlosser's book, which started out as an article for Rolling Stone as a behind-the-scenes look at fast food, covered everything from suburban sprawl and changes in the meat industry destroying the American rancher; the meat-packing industry morphing from a crappy, but well-paid job with union benefits, into a crappy, poorly paid job with no benefits, mostly occupied now by illegal immigrants; teens becoming an underpaid and easily exploited workforce; and the rise of an entire industry marketing to children. The heart and soul of Schlosser's book is the focus on the plight of illegal immigrants -- a topic dear to his heart, as he previously spent a year following immigrant migrant farm workers for an article for The Atlantic on illegal immigration and its relationship with the produce industry. Schlosser's passion for this facet of the fast food industry comes across clearly in the book, and in the film adaptation, it's the segment imbued with the most passion as well.

Corporate interests have been protected, thank God, from the threat of an actual issue being presented in the form of a message at Willie Nelson's Farm Aid this coming Saturday. Richard Linklater's Fast Food Nation will not be shown, because the film does not fit in among performances by Dave Matthews, John Mellencamp, Neil Young and Jerry Lee Lewis.

Is Farm Aid's, uh, beef with the film an aesthetic one? Our own Mr. Rocchi found the movie incomplete-feeling, a somewhat unstructured work. Or could it be that a quick scroll down the Farm Aid page reveals that Chipotle is a sponsor, and Chipotle is 90% owned by McDonald's? I've been unable to track down any comment on the decision beyond an incompatibility of 'messages,' but this feels as lame to you as it does to me, right? I mean, family farmers care about the quality of beef and improving the consumer's perception of the American beef insdustry, right? (And I acknowledge that the point of Farm Aid is to bring aid to poor family farmers, so one has to respect the sponsors, but that doesn't mean this is a good decision. Blech.)

Lots of interesting news is starting to surface about a reunion between Richard Linklater, Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy for another installment in what could soon be referred to as a trilogy - a part three of the series containing Before Sunrise (1995) and Before Sunset (2004). Is it too soon? Are they married? What are they talking about? Kids? Suri Cruise? I'd be happy if Linklater, Hawke and Delpy committed to revisit Jesse and Celine in a fixed increment of years, a'la Michael Apted's 7-Up documentary series that's been tracking the lives of a class of British 7-year-olds through 42 years of their lives.

Let me see if I can describe the plot: Jesse and Celine discuss important personal issues in real time. As slim as that plot description sounds, I found both films in the Sunrise/Sunset series to be completely riveting. I know I'm not alone when I confess to falling in love with both of them as they fell in love with one another. My cold little heart raced faster and more optimistically than ever before when Jesse replied "I know," to Celine's "Baby, you're going to miss that plane." I mean, how could you not find that thrilling?

I read this other, slightly less awesome rumor that Delpy was directing her own romantic comedy, about a neurotic couple spending two hours roaming around Paris. Heck, if she writes and directs movies as well as she invents impromptu songs about one-night-stands, I'll happily support that. While we're discussing this, I shall put a question out: Do you prefer to watch Sunrise/Sunset back to back? Or, like me, do you prefer to wait it out a little bit between the two movies, so that your memory's a bit blurred and closer to the state Jesse and Celine are in when they reunite 10 years later? Or, if you've watched these movies as many times as I do, does waiting between watching the two no longer make sense, since you know pretty much every nuance by heart?

I live in Austin, Texas, where the autumn film festival season starts around the third week of September and doesn't let up until nearly November. Therefore, when the weather finally starts to cool off a bit, I tend to look forward to watching obscure and little-known films at Fantastic Fest, aGLIFF, and Austin Film Festival (plus maybe Cinematexas if I can squeeze it in). However, I can think of a few new releases due in theaters this fall that I can't wait to see:

• Tideland -- Ever since the Terry Gilliam movie debuted at Toronto last year -- no, even before that, when Jeff Bridges posted still photos he took on the set of the film to his personal site -- I have been dying to see Tideland. I don't care how many of you saw it already and thought it was stinky. I liked The Brothers Grimm, so obviously I'm not going to necessarily be in sync with the popular taste on Gilliam films. Also, I love Bridges when he's in cool stuff and not scary Hollywood product.
• Infamous (or whatever they're calling it this week) -- "The other Truman Capote movie" was shot in Austin a couple of years ago and I've been intrigued ever since. It's directed by Douglas McGrath, who adapted and directed one of my favorite Jane Austen adaptations, Emma, and also co-wrote the screenplay for one of the funnier Woody Allen film's of the past 10 years, Bullets Over Broadway.
• Fast Food Nation -- I saw an early trailer and a clip from this film when Richard Linklater spoke to a UT class I was auditing in the spring. I also visited a postproduction garage sale on the Austin Studios lot last year for a film called "Coyote" and found out it was the code name for Fast Food Nation. I'm very curious to see how Linklater transformed a nonfiction book (that kept me from bringing raw ground meat into my house for a year) into a narrative film.

For more of Cinematical's Fall Preview, see: Erik's Picks and Scott's Picks.