THR’s RiskyBizBlog reports that Robert Redford will direct The Conspirator, a film about Mary Surratt, said to be an accomplice of Lincoln assassin John Wilkes Booth. While this movie is a far cry from Steven Spielberg’s intended biopic about the President, nonetheless it is a bit surprising to hear about another major director taking on a project so close to Lincoln when Spielberg isn’t yet able to get his own financed.

You might have read about Surratt in Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase For Lincoln’s Killer, by James Swanson, but this isn’t an adaptation of that book. (There is another film project, by HBO and Walden Media, that might adapt that directly.) James Solomon wrote this script, and while the article doesn’t mention his sources, chances are the screenplay is drawn at least in part from Kate Clifford Lawson’s book The Assassin’s Accomplice: Mary Surratt and the Plot to Kill Abraham Lincoln. Previous to Lincoln’s assassination, Surratt’s son John had conspired to kidnap the President. Despite her protestation of innocence, Mary Surrat was arrested as a conspirator in Lincoln’s assassination and was sentenced to death; she is said to be the first woman executed by the United States Federal Government.

THR doesn’t mention who might play Mary Surratt, but says that James McAvoy (who’s having a good night, with another announcement) is high in the running for a lead male role in the film. He could play John Surrat, who was 21 at the time of the assassination, or one of the other men Mary Surrat was said to have provided arms to on the night of the killing. Even better, I’d love to see him as Booth.

Redford has also been set to direct Against All Enemies, based on Richard Clarke’s book about the recent Bush administration’s intelligence woes, but THR notes that project’s future is uncertain. Whichever goes first will be Redford’s follow-up to the truly awful Lions For Lambs, which at least had one of the better uses of Tom Cruise in recent memory.

I admire Volkswagen for their support of independent film over the past decade. If you attend a regional or big time film festival, you’re likely to see them listed as a sponsor on the big screen before each film. In the past, we’ve featured some of their “See Film Differently” television spots which featured film fanatics sharing their vastly different interpretations of classic movies (if you haven’t seen those, check them out now). VW has produced a new set of “See Film Differently” ads, directed by Seth Gordon, the filmmaker behind The King of Kong: A Fist Full of Quarters. These new spots showcase a group of people, each highly inspired by the movies, who testify about the power of film. You might have seen the one of Dudeism, which was virally circulating the interwebs last week. But after the jump we have all three. Dudeism: A way of life derived from watching The Big Lebowski. Pure Imagination: A young man under the spell of Willy Wonka.

Last month Sam Raimi hired Gary Ross to rewrite Rabbit Hole playwright David Lindsay-Abaire’s draft of Spider-Man 4, original draft penned by James Vanderbilt. Tonight it has been revealed that Sony has hired another screenwriter to take on the webbed Marvel superhero. But not for the fourth film… Sony has hired Vanderbilt to pen the next two films in the Spider-Man franchise, Spider-Man 5 and Spider-Man 6.

According to Variety, Sony Pictures Entertainment liked Vanderbilt’s ideas so much, that they’ve brought him back for two more films, which will feature an interconnected storyline. When James was hired to write the screenplay for the fourth film, the initial plan was to create a fifth story that could also be shot back-to-back. But the idea was scrapped after it became too much of an ordeal to get the entire original cast and creative team to return.

What’s really strange is that Sony still isn’t sure they’ll be back for the fifth and sixth films, and Vanderbilt has apparently been advised that his scripts could be used as the last two parts of the second Spider-Man trilogy or a blueprint for a complete franchise reboot. Either way, it doesn’t sound like the best way to enter into the story development process. Getting the principal members back for a fourth film seemed almost impossible, but the pieces somehow came together in the end. I would be surprised if Raimi and Maguire returned for two more.

Shooting two films back-to-back is the smartest thing Sony could possibly do, as the film’s sequels have been coming increasingly far apart, due mostly to convincing the cast and crew to return. Marvel is revolutionizing this idea by signing cast members to record multi-picture deals at the start. I wouldn’t be surprised if we see the first Superhero trilogy, to be shot back-to-back-to-back, greenlit in the next few years.

Spider-Man 4 is gearing to begin production early 2010, and has a scheduled release fate of May 6th 2011

We’ve known the main names in Rod Lurie’s remake of Sam Peckinpah’s shattering film Straw Dogs. James Marsden, Kate Bosworth and Alexander Skarsgard are toplining the film, which is in production in Louisiana right now. But yesterday Lurie mentioned two more names on Facebook: James Woods and Dominic Purcell. (Who needs the trades when directors can throw out their own casting news?) Does the presence of a great actor like James Woods change your mind about this odd remake?

It certainly raises a bit of interest for me, though we don’t know what roles Woods and Purcell have. Lurie’s status said only “Beginning stunt rehearsals today with James Woods and Dominic Purcell.” That suggests that both are taking place in the siege on Marsden and Bosworth’s home that will be the film’s latter section. For that matter, we don’t know how extensively Lurie has re-written the story, which was originally scripted by Peckinpah and David Goodman, based on the novel The Siege of Trencher’s Farm by Gordon Williams.

Peckinpah’s film told the story of David Sumner (Dustin Hoffman), a withdrawn mathematician, who moves with his young wife Amy (Susan George) to her childhood village of Cornwall. Trouble ensues when Amy flirts with the locals, one of whom violently rapes her. After other trouble, a group of local men besiege the Sumner home. The new version will differ significantly in several ways. Variety provided the following synopsis:

Marsden plays a Hollywood screenwriter who relocates with his wife to her hometown in Mississippi. Bosworth plays the wife, who left the South for LA. to become an actress and returns home so her husband can finish his script in quiet. Skarsgard plays her high school boyfriend, an ex-football hero who sees the return of his former girlfriend as a way to reclaim glory.

Casting the central character as a screenwriter rather than a mathematician could imply serious differences, though both could be seen as geeky/intellectual, reclusive, potentially elitist characters. But the deeper nature of the character is more important. Peckinpah’s original version is one of the more widely misread films out there; the director considered Dustin Hoffman’s character, ostensibly the hero, to be in reality the film’s antagonist. He’s a guy whose repressed humanity causes the explosion of violence that is the film’s climax; without his inability to directly engage the men intimidating him as the story begins, most of the film’s events would not take place. Peckinpah’s film was a brutal meditation on violence that has been mistaken for an endorsement of same. Will Lurie’s film be along similar lines, or does it have totally different concerns?

I woke up this morning to find an an email from an anonymous source, with an attachment. A photo from the most anticipated movie of the next year (at least among film geeks). That’s right, the first real photo from James Cameron’s Avatar. I freaked out because I receive cool stuff all the time, which unfortunately the law prevents me from posting. And if I was the one to leak a photo like this, it would surely start a shit storm.

But I wanted to be sure, so I contacted Fox directly to ask permission to post what I had received. It was one of those moves to just make sure, a last resort. I didn’t really expect them to be like “yeah, that’s fine…” but, well, that’s almost exactly what they said. Apparently the photo was sent out to a couple magazines this week, so Fox is fine with me posting this. So here you have it, the first photo from Avatar.

So what is in the photo? (spoilers which will be revealed in the trailer follow) Sam Worthington plays Jake Sully a paraplegic war veteran, who gets the opportunity to travel to another planet, Pandora, to work with a mining operation. Because the planet is so harsh, traditional armor and envirosuit solutions are not good enough to protect miners, and a clone program has developed in which DNA from humans and Na’vi, the natives that inhabit Pandora, are combined. The result is essentially a cloned Na’vi that can house the consciousness of an individual with human DNA. This means that Jake will be able to walk again. The photo above shows Sully in front of the tank that houses his Avatar. Click on the photo to enlarge.

20th Century Fox will be holding a special preview of 15-minutes of Avatar on August 21st, in an event called Avatar Day.Avatar is scheduled to hit theaters on December 18th 2009.