• Rosario Prestopino (1950-2008) - Makeup Artist, Special Effects Artist. Worked on Italian horror filmmaker Lucio Fuci's Zombie, City of the Living Dead, The Black Cat, The New York Ripper and The New Gladiators, as well as Lamberto Bava's DemonsDemons 2, Dario Argento's Terror at the Opera, Michele Soavi's The Church, Philip Haas' Up at the Villa and Mario Girolami's Zombie Holocaust. He died of a heart attack May 13, in Rome. (IMDb)

• Danton Burroughs (1944-2008) - Chairman of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. Handled licensing of properties created by his grandfather, Edgar Rice Burroughs, to films, television and other media. We can probably thank him for such adaptations as Disney's animated Tarzan and the studio's upcoming John Carter of Mars. He died of heart failure May 1, in Tarzana, California. (Variety)
• Carlo Colombaioni (c.1933-2008) - Clown. A favorite of Federico Fellini's, he acted in and advised on circus sequences directed by the filmmaker. He contributed to Fellini's La Strada, The Clowns, Amarcord, Roma and Casanova. He also appears in Claude Goretta's The Wonderful Crook and Yvan Le Moine's The Red Dwarf. He died May 16 in France. (Telegraph)
• Warren Cowan (1921-2008) - Publicist. Legendary in Hollywood, he co-founded PR firm Rogers & Cowan and represented Kirk Douglas, Frank Sinatra, Tony Curtis, Lucille Ball, Judy Garland, Steve McQueen, Natalie Wood, Cary Grant, Audrey Hepburn and the Doors, among others. He also pioneered the idea of independent Oscar campaigns, beginning with the push for Joan Crawford's performance in Mildred Pierce, for which she ended up winning the Best Actress trophy. Recent films for which he's credited as unit publicist include The Secret Agent, Shade, Metroland and One Man's Hero. He died of cancer May 14, in Los Angeles. Read Valerie Van Galder's (President of Marketing at Sony) moving tribute to Cowan over at MCN. (LA Times)

Okay. It's time to get down to brass tacks. I'm going to get up on my soapbox and hope that the right Academy members read the column this week, because it's time to re-do the rules of the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar category. Do you know how long it has been since a great film, a truly great film, won in this category? I'm talking about a film made by a genuinely great artist of the cinema, a film for the ages, and not just a perfectly good film, or a film about one of the great world wars. Here's your answer: twenty-five years ago. Ingmar Bergman's Fanny and Alexander (1983) was the last great one. That leaves 25 years of pretty good, just OK, forgettable, or flat-out awful winners (mostly forgettable). This year's winner, The Counterfeiters (41 screens) had to be one of the worst movies I saw all year; at it's center is a perfectly good (true) WWII concentration camp story, but it's warped by an entirely inept director, responsible for one of the worst movies I've ever seen, All the Queen's Men (2001). How did it win? How did it get past all the truly great films of 2007?

This Halloween, it will be 14 years since classic Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini died. We've already got Nine in the works -- a musical adaptation of 8½, which will be directed by Rob Marshall. But that's not all -- we're about to get a new Fellini film, and no, it isn't a documentary; it's fresh material that has yet to hit the big screen. The Hollywood Reporter posts that word has come from the second RomaCinemaFest that Viaggio a Tulum (Voyage to Tulum) will finally make its way to the screen under documentary director Marco Bartoccioni -- to begin production in January.

Tulum was a piece Fellini wrote in 1985; however, while it was adapted by Tullio Pinelli and published as a book, it never got the cameras rolling. The project focuses on Fellini's trip to Mexico to meet Carlos Castaneda, a famous mystic known for his controversial practices and shamanism. Production will be split between Mexico and Rome's Cinecitta Studios, for a crisp budget of at least $5 million; Tulum's backers say that half the funding has been secured, and that most of it has come from the Mexican government and Mexican investors. I imagine that some Fellini-files will step on board soon enough to top off the budget. The January start date will be the twentieth, which would have been Fellini's 88th birthday. I haven't read the piece myself, so I ask you out there, big Fellini fans who've read Voyage to Tulum -- are you ready to see it finally hit the big screen?

Director Rob Marshall is returning to movie musicals -- he directed the Oscar-winning Chicago, then was less successful with Memoirs of a Geisha. His new project, Nine, is (like Chicago) an adaptation of a Broadway musical, but the stage production of Nine is itself a reworking of the Federico Fellini film 8 1/2. The Weinstein Company has just announced the writer who will adapt Nine for the big screen: Michael Tolkin, whose script credits include Changing Lanes, Deep Impact and Gleaming the Cube. However, Tolkin is probably best known for his novel The Player, which he also adapted into a movie, and followed up with a sequel book last year, The Return of the Player.

I had never heard of the musical Nine before, which was originally staged on Broadway in 1982 starring Raul Julia (sigh ... I miss him) and won several Tony awards. The New York Public Library site has a very revealing photo of Anita Morris from the production. Like the Fellini movie, Nine is about a film director (not at all like Fellini) who is blocked on his current project and finds help by fantasizing about the women from his past. A 2003 revival starred Antonio Banderas. No news yet on casting -- I'm wondering if Banderas is still considered a viable option for the lead in the movie. I like him even in dumb movies like Take the Lead, and it would be delightful to see him in a musical like this one. The Weinstein Company says that the casting choices will influence whether the movie is released at the end of 2008 or later, and I am sure that with Marshall at the helm, they are thinking "Oscar season."

Ok, so this isn't exactly a mash-up, but it's a piece that brings together two things that have no business sharing the same screen-space, and makes them fit incredibly well. Everyone, meet 8 1/2 Mile, a trailer for Federico Fellini's masterpiece 8 1/2, set to the soundtrack of Eminem's Lose Yourself. I'm totally going to lose all my credibility as a snobby lover of foreign films here, but I have to admit that it gave me chills. Sure, it's not the best representation of what, exactly, the movie is about, but what trailer is? It creates a wildly effective atmosphere, and the editing is perfect. Plus, you get to look at the wonderful Marcello Mastroianni -- basically, there are a lot of worse ways to spend two-and-a-half minutes on a Saturday. (Of course, if the end result is that you, like me, find yourself seized by a desperate need to go watch 8 1/2, the time commitment is going to be a little longer.)

Edit: The original link stopped working; links now point to a reliable site.