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?

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.

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).

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.

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?

When a movie is deemed fit for the "Criterion Treatment," you just know you're in for something special. It doesn't matter if your cinematic tastes run from Kurosawa and Lean to Gilliam and Soderbergh (or even *cough* Michael Bay) -- if a film you really adore is earmarked for inclusion in The Criterion Collection, you better start saving your pennies. Because while Criterion releases generally cost a little bit more than your average "new release loss-leader," the simple fact is that you're paying for true quality. (My personal Criterion collection includes Armageddon, Brazil, The Life Aquatic, Robocop, The Royal Tenenbaums, and a supremely excellent anthology of Beastie Boys videos.)

So what is it that's inspired this sudden outpouring of affection for an outfit that just about every DVD geek already adores? Well, on June 6th you'll be able to get Criterion's mega-packed special edition of Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused, which, for my money, is the single finest comedy ever made about the teenage experience. (Yes, seriously. It's right up there with American Graffiti, The Breakfast Club, and Heathers.) And according to this appropriately jubilant review of the new D&C DVD, it looks like the fans will soon have something awesome to jam in their pipes and collectively smoke.

You know how, just the other day, I was talking about how projects seem to come in pairs? And how the latest example of the phenomenon was the two projects about exactly the same period and relationship in Napoleon's life? Well, just a few days later, Screen Daily's got another story for us about dueling projects (though, in this case, the director of the newest entry insists there is no fighting going on whatsoever).

The subject in question this time is Chet Baker. Already the focus of two movies in various stages of production, the jazz icon is also going to be the subject of a new project from Richard Linklater -- at least that's what the director is telling people at Cannes. According to Linklater, his film, planned as an independent project, with be "a small jazz movie" rather than a sweeping biopic. Instead of examining Baker's entire career, Linklater's film -- entitled Chesney -- "will look at one day in the life of the jazz legend before he was famous." Hmm. I'm not much of a Linklater fan, but this sounds like a vaguely intriguing idea, sort of akin to Christopher Münch's The Hours and Times, a wonderful little film about an imagined weekend shared by John Lennon and Brian Epstein. Of course, it could also being a totally uninteresting movie about a good-looking kid who plays trumpet -- we'll just have to wait and see.

When Eric Schlosser's nonfiction book Fast Food Nation was released, Schlosser's journalistic skills and passionate-yet-well-structured arguments made it a best-seller; perhaps it stung a bit when Morgan Spurlock's Super Size Me made it to theaters hot on the heels of Fast Food Nation -- stealing a certain amount of Schlosser's thunder and owing a very strong debt to Schlosser's work. Fast-forward a few years and Fast Food Nation gets to come to the big screen -- not as a documentary, but instead as fiction. Directed by Richard Linklater and co-written by Linklater and Schlosser, Fast Food Nation follows a group of characters -- workers, suppliers, executives, patrons -- through the fast-food economy. The stories and characters occasionally intersect and often diverge; as some at Cannes said at Fast Food Nation's debut, think of it as Traffic with meat.

Finally, a Help Us Advertise Our Movie contest that doesn't totally suck!

RES, Microsoft, Warner Brothers, and Jumpcut are co-sponsoring a contest to remix the trailer of Richard Linklater's A Scanner Darkly, due in theaters (finally) July 7. The remix site offers the current trailer for download, and asks entrants to create a variation that runs between one and three minutes, using both the downloaded footage and any new footage created specifically for the contest. What makes it cool, however, are the prizes. Instead of the "We might use your poster in a few small towns if we really like it and you'll feel important" rewards that tend to come with these fan-participation contests, the winner of this one gets some pretty awesome stuff: In addition to a trip to the US premiere (including airfare and hotel, thanks very much), the lucky remixer also takes home "a Microsoft Windows 64-bit powered professional video editing workstation with Adobe Production Studio Premium" (while I'm not entirely sure what that is, it sounds very flashy and posh to me). There are also some runner-up prizes on offer, as well as an audience award for a trailer chosen by website visitors.

If you're interested, go download the goods; all entries must be uploaded by June 7.

Not only will Fox Searchlight release their movie version of Fast Food Nation (about the workings of a fast food chained called Mickey's) later this year, but that book's author, Eric Schlosser, is also soon to release Chew on This: Everything You Didn't Want to Know about Fast Food, a similarly themed (but you probably guessed that) book aimed at teachers and students. McDonald's however, isn't running scared. Oh no. Instead, they're exchanging war-like internal memos, and promising a "full-scale media campaign" in responses to the upcoming media assault. Among the tactics reportedly being considered are a "truth squad" (Maybe they'll carry around a giant, inflatable fry.), a "campaign to tell the real story" ("Massive amounts of fat are good for you!" "Animals totally love factory farms!") and, most tantalizingly, efforts to "discredit the message and the messenger." Oooooh. I can't wait for that one -- do you think Happy Meals boxes will start featuring pictures of Richard Linklater's face with a big, red "X" through it?

No release date has been set for Fast Food Nation, dammit, but it's expected out some time in 2006.