Meanwhile, back in Los Angeles, Tara Reid, Tichina Arnold and Toni Basil were among the celebrity presenters at the 16th Annual Music Video Production Association Awards at the Orpheum Theater Wednesday night. A highlight was the Lifetime Achievement Award presentation to helmer Wayne Isham (pictured), whose extensive body of work has included music videos for Metallica, Bon Jovi, Sheryl Crow and many others. The audience was on its feet cheering through most of his remarks.

“This art form has changed the world,” Isham asserted, to wild applause. The music video production industry has long been a breeding ground for feature directors, and it is not uncommon for these helmers to stay involved in the genre. Case in point, two winners this year were Michel Gondry and Mark Pellington. Gondry’s “Cellphone’s Dead” for Beck was named alternative video of the year, and Pellington’s “How to Save a Life” for The Fray topped the category for adult contemporary video of the year. Pellington co-directed the upcoming “U2 3D” stereoscopic 3-D film, which will screen in Cannes Saturday night/Sunday morning at 12:30 a.m. He is also set to “Henry Poole Is Here,” which Lakeshore is offering for sale in Cannes. Pellington also recently directed a music video, “Soulmates,” for Natasha Bedingfield. Gondy’s next feature, “Be Kind Rewind,” is in post. Music video helmer Chris Milk was named director of the year at the MVPA Awards and may be joining the list of crossover directors. “I’m looking for a feature film script,” Milk said. “I’m looking for something inspiring enough to devote the next few years of my life to.”\ Milk, who is repped by WMA, won the director of the year award for a body of work that included Kanye West’s “Touch the Sky,” U2 and Green Day’s “The Saints are Coming,” and Gnarls Barkley’s “Gone Daddy Gone.” (Carolyn Giardina)

Pixar chief John Lasseter started out his career at Disney, but saw a digital future that the studio did not share. Now he’s trying to fix the studio’s out-of-date animation division—without throwing out 2-D drawing with the bathwater.

[Photo by Monica Almedia, NYT]

That Little Round-Headed Boy lays out some priceless classic delightful Billy Wilder dialogue as part of a Wilder blogathon. (Cameron Crowe’s Conversations with Wilder is a must-own.) This sequence from Ninotchka is one of my favorite flirtations in all of cinema:

NINOTCHKA (1939)

Ninotchka: Why do you want to carry my bags?
Porter: That is my business.
Ninotchka: That’s no business. That’s social injustice.
Porter: That depends on the tip.

Ninotchka: The last mass trials were a great success. There are going to be fewer but better Russians.

Leon: A Russian! I love Russians! Comrade, I’ve been fascinated by your five-year plan for the last fifteen years.

Iranoff: We can say whatever we want. We can shout! We can complain! Look: The service in this hotel is terrible! See? Nobody comes, nobody pays any attention! That’s freedom.
Buljanoff: That’s bad management.

Ninotchka: Must you flirt?
Leon: Well, I don’t have to, but I find it natural.
Ninotchka: Suppress it.

Leon: A radio’s a little box that you buy on the installment plan, and before you tune it in, they tell you there’s a new model out.

Leon: What kind of a girl are you, anyway?
Ninotchka: Just what you see. A tiny cog in the great wheel of evolution.
Leon: You’re the most adorable cog I’ve ever seen.

When I was filling out another top 100 AFI ballot after ten years, I found all sorts of movies falling off the list as dated or not holding up. Even the masters Hitchcock, Hawks, Ford and Welles are products of their own eras. Not so four directors who stand the test of time, who seem contemporary: Buster Keaton (even if he is silent), Billy Wilder, Frank Capra and John Huston.

David Fincher and James Ellroy talk about obsessives and crime in this LAT story about Zodiac:

Fincher has made a movie about a cadre of men haunted by the serial killer Zodiac and whose lives are punctured, contorted and shaped by that hunt. Zodiac was a killer who terrorized the San Francisco area in 1968 and 1969, mowing down lovers in secluded lovers’ lanes and getting high off taunting the media and the police with bizarre cryptograms that he sent to the newspapers. He then disappeared — and was never caught — although the film details the investigation by two cops, Bill Armstrong and Dave Toschi (Anthony Edwards and Mark Ruffalo, respectively); a boozing, self-destructive journalist, Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr.); and a shy cartoonist, Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal), who comes closest to solving the deaths.

Nora and I were on the edge of our seats last night. The movie is not a conventional thriller; it plays like a character-based 70s movie, with spaces between the scenes. But the presence of the Zodiac killer, which Fincher remembers from his youth, is creepily palpable. The unsolved mystery obsesses these characters and drives the story for decades. The movie isn’t being hyped much by Paramount but early reviews are enthusiastic: here’s Glenn Kenny in Premiere. It’s tracking in the teens, so maybe it’ll do some modest business. It’s like the well-written journalist movies of the 70s, like All the President’s Men or Absence of Malice mixed with a film noir mystery like Chinatown. But it’s not a conventionally structured narrative with a happy ending payoff. It’s real. Utterly authentic—even if Fincher invisibly digitally paints the movie into gorgeous form.

And Mark Ruffalo gives a remarkable performance as the SF cop who inspired Bullitt and Dirty Harry. Here’s an excellent interview on CHUD. Here’s The Washington Post’s Bill Booth on Robert Graysmith, the SF cartoonist who wrote the Zodiac bestseller.

John Anderson has written a NYT story about the documentary Manufacturing Dissent, coming up at South By Southwest, which dissects Michael Moore’s brand of POV filmmaking.

It was a good day for Little Miss Sunshine and Half Nelson at Saturday’s Independent Spirit Awards. Little Miss Sunshine won four and Half Nelson won two awards. Here are ten things I learned at the big tent by the Santa Monica beach today:

1. Academy Awards producer Laura Ziskin will allow all five producers to come onstage to accept the Oscar, Fox Searchlight confirmed today. When Little Miss Sunshine won the best feature award Saturday afternoon, the three producers who had been given the green light by the Academy graciously allowed the two who weren’t, Ron Yerxa and Albert Berger, to say their thanks first. Michael Arndt also won for best first screenplay, Alan Arkin won for best supporting actor and Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton won for directing. “We were dead in the studio system,” said Dayton. “Thankfully people in the independent world stuck with us. We’re grateful to our five producers—”All five,” chimed in Faris—for sticking with us.”

2. Several people said they were relieved to hear that Little Miss Sunshine star Abigail Breslin wasn’t in the tent, because host Sarah Silverman, wearing a short school girl outfit, was fairly X-rated—she started out comparing the Indie Spirits to the Adult Film Awards and performed one skit about fucking her favorite bag of cheese. At the IFC Party afterwards at Shutters on the Beach, John Waters praised her: “She did a good job.” As far as I was concerned he got the biggest laugh of the night when he came out wearing a chain like Christina Ricci in Black Snake Moan and said, “never waste a good prop. I wouldn’t mind if Samuel L. Jackson chained me to a radiator.” (He presented best screenplay to Jason Reitman for Thank You For Smoking.)

3. I’m going to lose my office Oscar pool. The consensus seemed to be that The Lives of Others would beat Pan’s Labyrinth for Best Foreign Film. Everyone agrees that Pan should win art direction and makeup. On the Oscar ballot, the Best Score category doesn’t show the name of the composer. Babel could win, but if people remember that Argentinian composer Gustavo Santaolalla won last year for Brokeback Mountain, it could also go to Alexandre Desplat for The Queen. I went to a lunch on Friday at the French consulate for Desplat, an articulate man who also composed the excellent score for The Painted Veil. He’s moving on to score a studio fantasy, The Golden Compass.

4. Even Dreamgirls writer-director Bill Condon, who’s working on staging the three songs for Dreamgirls at the Oscars, is worried that they may have cancelled each other out. If everyone knew that the Beyonce Knowles song was Listen, they might vote for it, but it’s not clear on the Oscar ballot. Which means that all these people who’ve been telling me they voted for Melissa Etheridge for An Inconvenient Truth may have voted for the winner.

5. Michelle Williams has spunk! Nominated for a Best Actress Indie Spirit Award for the micro-budget Land of Plenty, Williams admitted that many people criticized her for flipping the bird from their vacation hotel balcony at the paparazzi who were harassing her and Heath Ledger. She said that she and Ledger tend to walk around with sulky scowls when the photogs lurk so that the pictures won’t get published. “They’re looking for photos that make us look like we’re living the happy life,” she said.

Also with her share of spunk is Williams’ fellow nominee, Amber Tamblyn (Stephanie Daley), who is clearly someone who stands up for herself. The two young women lost to veteran Frances McDormand for Friends with Money.

6. The LAT Calendar section is in a big fight with the Metro section, which ran a tough investigative piece Saturday by Paul Pringle, who does not cover the film beat, about Film Independent, which puts on the big Indie Spirits party every year. According to LAT critic Kenneth Turan, the story, which suggested that the organization doesn’t plow back enough of its revenues into programs and services, was not shown to the Calendar editors, who are furious. The story revealed that Film Independent president Dawn Hudson earns $265,000 a year, more than her counterparts at the American Film Institute and The American Cinematheque, which did set some tongues wagging inside the Spirits tent. However Hudson is a popular figure in the indie film community who has worked long and hard to support indie film. Sony Pictures Classics co-president Tom Bernard said that he thought someone with a right-wing agenda was going after indie cinema with this piece. The news story manipulated statistics and a nonprofit effectiveness measuring stick to strange effect.

For one thing, the carpet being walked today by doc filmmakers such as A.J. Schnack and stars Sally Kellerman and Nev Campbell, who were participating in a Robert Altman tribute, was blue, not red. The 600 plus outlets covering the event ranged from the KABC, Reelz, Canal Plus and the IFC Channel to the New York Daily News, Elle.com, The TV Guide Channel and BBC News. Was it a bad thing that indie films were being promoted around the world?

The people attending this event included “the best of the best of indie filmmakers in Hollywood,” said Silverman. “If a bomb went off,” she added, “there’d be nobody left to make a doc about it.” Many of the filmmakers during the awards show went out of their way to thank Film Independent for supporting indie film. “Many of us feel this Spirit Award is the highest honor in America today and never more than today,” said Little Miss Sunshine producer Ron Yerxa.

7. Jack Lechner, the lyricist for the song spoofs that were the highlight of the event, is slowly getting close to mounting a musical in New York. Minnie Driver performed a country take-off on Pan’s Labyrinth. Loretta Devine really scored with “Beauty Is Deceased,” about The Dead Girl. Taylor Dane kicked up her heels country style with “Screwed Up Family,” about Little Miss Sunshine, to the tune of “We Are Family.” Rosario Dawson delivered “The Crack-Head Teacher Man,” off Half Nelson.

8. David Lynch is just as strange as we think he is. To promote his digital micro-budget movie Inland Empire, Laura Dern reminded as she accepted Lynch’s Special Distinction Award from Dennis Hopper, Lynch set himself up on Hollywood Boulevard with a megaphone and a cow on a leash. Hopper described working on a Lynch movie as “surreal.” After a good take on Blue Velvet, Lynch would say: “Solid gold! Peachy keen! Let’s do one more!”

9. Robert Altman liked to torture his actors, but they loved him anyway. When he didn’t like a take, Robert Downey, Jr. recalled, he said, “Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly.” And when he was pleased, he said, “That was absolutely adequate, let’s move on.” Film Independent established a new ensemble acting award named after Altman.

10. As usual, German director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck cut to the chase when he advised up-and-coming filmmakers, while accepting his award for best foreign film for The Lives of Others, “Follow your own voice. Don’t make a film by committee. There’s a simple way to get that done: downscale the budget. When you work on a small budget the people you are working with are not in it for the money. They’re fine with being exploited as long as you’re exploiting yourself.”

Guillermo Navarro, accepting the best cinematography prize for Pan’s Labyrinth, praised director Guillermo del Toro for “being incredibly stubborn,” he said. “This movie was in the hands of the filmmakers, and that’s what made all the difference.”

Sam Peckinpah would have been 82 today, notes Greencine’s Dave Hudson, who reports that there’s a Peckinpah blogathon going on.

My most recent Sam Peckinpah story took place at the Academy nominees lunch where I was approached by Babel screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga. He said that he had seen my name in a book about Peckinpah. Arriaga said that many people, especially after he wrote the western The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, told him to check out Peckinpah’s movies, and he has been watching them one by one. I did the unit publicity on Peckinpah’s last movie, The Osterman Weekend, and got to know the great director at the end of his too-short life. He was magnetic, egotistical, gifted, brilliant but destructive. He had scary anger in him. The actors, including Rutger Hauer, Helen Shaver, Burt Lancaster and Dennis Hopper, all adored him. So did the crew, who were careful to stay on his good side. Because if you didn’t…

On my bookshelf are three excellent books that have been written about this ornery auteur: Garner Simmons’ Peckinpah: A Portrait in Montage, Paul Seydor’s Peckinpah: The Western Films, and David Weddle’s “If They Move…Kill ‘Em!” The Life and Times of Sam Peckinpah. These three men, along with DVD producer Nick Redman and screenwriter Jesse Graham, love to get together to share their encyclopedic knowledge of Peckinpah. They call themselves The Dog Brothers. I listened to them do the DVD commentary for The Wild Bunch. Great stuff.

My favorite Peckinpah movies:
1. The Wild Bunch
2. Ride the High Country
3. The Ballad of Cable Hogue
4. Cross of Iron
5. Straw Dogs

Hollywood Elsewhere has the list of 35 Cannes directors participating in the 60th anniversary short film omnibus this year:

The chosen all have a certain elite, Cannes- sanctified tasteful aura about them. They are Theo Angelopoulos, Olivier Assayas, Bille August, Jane Campion, Ethan & Joel Coen, David Cronenberg, Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne, Atom Egoyan, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, Takeshi Kitano; Andrei Konchalovsky, Ken Loach, Nanni Moretti, Roman Polanski, Walter Salle, Gus Van Sant, Lars Von Trier, Wim Wenders,Wong Kar Wai, Zhang Yimou, etc. You know…that crowd.

THR’s Charles Masters lines up the likely Cannes entrants.

UPDATE: Here’s the official release from Cannes with a statement from Gilles Jacob:

New York’s filmmaking community feted the late great Robert Altman Tuesday. THR’s Gregg Goldstein reports:

Sandcastle 5 producers Wren Arthur and Joshua Astrachan gave details of the film Altman was set to start filming Feb. 12, an adaptation of the endurance-test contest docu “Hands on a Hardbody.” Meryl Streep, Billy Bob Thornton, Jack Black, Jack White, Chris Rock, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Tomlin and Tommy Lee Jones were set to appear in the two-week shoot.

“In our last conversation, he was as clear and present as ever,” Arthur said in one of the event’s most touching speeches. “Bob walked off this planet with his boots on. He was the most inspiring person right up to the end.”

Set up for release at Picturehouse, “Hardbody” might be restarted with another director in a style paying tribute to Altman, Berney said after the ceremony.

Others offering reminisces were Altman’s sons Michael, Stephen, Robert and Matthew, along with Bob Balaban, Joan Tewkesbury, Alan Rudolph, E.L. Doctorow and Harry Belafonte. The latter revealed Altman’s one-time plans to make what would have likely been his most controversial film, “Cork,” tackling the subject of blackface and minstrel shows.

Tewkesbury and Robbins noted that the homage would have been the perfect Altman project. “It’s called ‘The Memorial,’ and we are making the film as we speak,” Robbins said. “There are cameras everywhere with subplots, subterfuge, whispered conversations and backstage preening. He’s going to find us out, and God will laugh.”

Added actor Bud Cort of the Kansas City, Mo., native: “Bob would love to be here. It’s not only his birthday, it’s also Fat Tuesday. He’d also see a chance to secure additional territories.”

But Cort, who Altman discovered and cast in his 1970 films “MASH” and “Brewster McCloud,” ended on a serious note by summing up what was lost three months ago. “There’s a hole in the acting community that I pray to God can be filled,” he said. “I don’t think it can. Prove me wrong.”

And here’s Stephen Schaefer :

Packed with Altman stars, celebrities and friends, his widow Kathryn, his four sons and buoyed by a jazz orchestra, it was the kind of celebration that more than one participant said felt like an Altman movie. There in the crowd were Paul Newman (“Buffalo Bill and the Indians”) and Joanne Woodward, Glenn Close and Patricia Neal (“Cookie”), Lauren Bacall (“Health”), Sally Kellerman (“M*A*S*H” and “Brewster McCloud”), Cynthia Nixon (“Tanner”). Alongside NBC’s Brian Williams, Jules Feiffer, Kurt Vonnegut, Susan Sarandon, Dominick Dunne, Richard Kind, Steve Buscemi, Sidney Lumet and Jonathan Demme.

The speakers included Bob Balaban (“Gosford Park”), Brewster himself, Bud Cort, Garry Trudeau, who wrote “Tanner,” the director Paul Thomas Anderson, “Ragtime” author E.L. Doctorow who never made that movie with Altman but ended up with a bit part in “Buffalo Bill,” Kevin Kline (“A Prairie Home Companion”), Julianne Moore (“Short Cuts”), Lily Tomlin (“Nashville”), Tim Robbins(“The Player”) and Harry Belafonte (“Kansas City”). The composer William Bolcom introduced an aria he wrote for the opera based on Altman’s “A Wedding” and Anne Ross performed the funky Depression-era song “One Meatball” because it had always made Altman laugh.

IFC Blog updates a number of upcoming director projects.

300 is one of those movies that is going to change the way movies are made. It will be a decade-defining blockbuster, I suspect. Who knew that Frank “Dark Knight” Miller would continue to have such an impact on pop culture? He and Robert Rodriguez turned his Sin City into a stunning digital graphic novel movie, and now Dawn of the Dead director Zack Snyder has translated Miller’s 300—about the Spartan’s Battle of Thermopylae—into a hugely entertaining movie starring the well-muscled Gerard Butler (with, from left, director Snyder and Rodrigo Santoro). Warner Bros. launched the stylized war picture out of competition Wednesday at the Berlinale; here’s Kirk Honeycutt’s review and Borys Kit’s Q & A with the filmmaker:

Filmmaker Zack Snyder is arriving in Berlin with “300,” a historical action movie about the Battle of Thermopylae based on the graphic novel by Frank Miller. Snyder is an award-winning commercial and video director who made his debut with the 2004 remake of “Dawn of the Dead,” which not only was a boxoffice hit but also was that rare horror movie to earn critical acclaim. “300″ is only Snyder’s second movie, but looking like a graphic novel come to life, it already is generating buzz for its unique style. Snyder discussed the film with The Hollywood Reporter film reporter Borys Kit.

The Hollywood Reporter: How did you get involved with “300″? Did you read the Frank Miller graphic novel?
Zach Snyder: I was familiar with the graphic novel, and a few years ago, I was in (producer) Gianni Nunnari’s office, and I saw it on his desk. And he was telling me, “We have this movie that Martin Scorsese is doing, and we have this movie …” and he said, “What are you interested in doing? What would be cool?” And I said, “That would be cool (pointing at graphic novel.) If you made ‘300′ into a movie, and specifically this shot of Leonidas getting whacked by a million arrows.” I said, “If you could make this shot real, then you’ve got, well, you’ve made something that I had never seen in a movie.”

THR: But at that point you had not even directed a movie.
Snyder: I had no track record. I was the guy who quit ‘S.W.A.T.’. That’s not a great thing to be in Hollywood.

THR: And then you made “Dawn of the Dead,” which was a hit, and then the project was finally set up at Warner Bros.
Snyder: (Warners president of production) Jeff Robinov had seen ‘Dawn of the Dead’ and for whatever reason thought it was something special. He wanted to make a movie with me. He helped shape the movie (”300″) and helped me understand that movie I wanted to make, but in the end, he wanted me to make my movie as cool as I could. And that’s hard in this town. The way the system is set up, to really cultivate a filmmaker and say, “You’re promising me you’ll make something different?” That’s a promise that every filmmaker makes, by the way. That was really cool, and I felt obligated to try to give him something else.

THR: How did you convince him that you’re making something different with “300″?
Snyder: I did a test shot. I remember we were talking, and he said, “Is there anything you could show me that would help me understand what this is?” I said, “Yeah, let me shoot something.” So I did a shot and basically it was a 360-degrees Steadicam shot of one Spartan fighting. I didn’t want to do a shot from the movie because it invites a whole series of questions like, “Is this what the actors are going to look like?” It opens up a whole can of worms. So I did an abstract action sequence, but it actually tells a story. It starts with the Warner Bros. shield, which gets stabbed, and the camera comes around and you see this Spartan fighting these Persian soldiers, kills them all, and a phalanx links up with him and we go back to reveal the entire Persian army. And they all shoot arrows. So it had the same style as the movie.

THR: How did you come up with that style?
Snyder: I had played around with it in commercials. Aesthetically, it’s what I like. What we did in the test shot, and we did this in the movie, is in the fighting. I wanted to see the actors fighting. If you look at the movie, in the beginning of Battle 1, there’s a lot of quick cutting. And in some ways I did that on purpose, to goad the audience into perceiving that that’s the way the battles were going to be photographed, in that sort of “Gladiator,” messy, you’re-not-quite-sure-what’s-happening style. And then suddenly, the movie breaks out and the language of the movie really becomes apparent when Gerry (Gerard Butler) is hacking everybody and the camera is floating. We shot that with three cameras, all right next to each other. The one center camera is flat, the wide lens camera is slightly bladed in, and the long lens is slightly bladed in. And all three were running at 150 frames. All three are basically shooting the same thing. They overlap. And in post, you end up with the ability to zoom between the different sizes and never cut. By having all three, I could choose where I wanted to be.

The LAT’s Sheigh Crabtree sends along this very cool link to a new video by Molly + Mariah, a “great 20-something all lady directing team,” she writes.