With a sly hipness that is the trademark of Joel and Ethan Coen, a billboard just outside the Melrose Avenue gate at Paramount Pictures promotes their next film, "True Grit," with a promise:
"Retribution. This Christmas."
Maybe the picture will also settle some old business in the film world.
A Western with Jeff Bridges, Matt Damon and Josh Brolin in leading roles, the new "True Grit" movie is adapted by the Coen brothers from the 1968 novel of the same title by Charles Portis. It's a revenge story of Mattie Ross, a 14-year-old Arkansas girl, played by newcomer Hailee Steinfeld. She hires a gritty federal marshal, Rooster Cogburn, played by Bridges, to pursue her father's killer (Brolin as the no-good Tom Chaney).
"True Grit," which will open in Tucson on Dec. 22, is the last major entry in a crowded Oscar race that includes contenders such as "The Social Network," "The King's Speech" and "127 Hours." But that is counting chickens. There is an old Rooster to fry. The Coen brothers' film is bound to rouse memories of an earlier picture and another Oscar race. John Wayne, well past his prime, won his only Academy Award for portraying Rooster Cogburn. His selection fiercely split those who felt justice was thus served from those who viewed this original "True Grit," released in June 1969, as the last gasp of a Hollywood stuck in its own past.
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"It was a token Oscar," producer Robert Evans said when asked this week about the best-actor trophy that went to Wayne.
The original "True Grit" received only one Oscar nomination besides the one for best actor, for a song by Elmer Bernstein and Don Black. But that prize went to Burt Bacharach and Hal David for "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head" from "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," just one among a dozen hipper movies that were turning the film scene on its head.
The best picture of 1969 was "Midnight Cowboy," John Schlesinger's X-rated study of Manhattan street life. Both Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight received best-actor nominations for their roles in the film.
In their leaner, meaner new movie, the Coens deliver a fiercer young heroine - and one rooted in what they described in a phone interview as stiff, old-time Protestantism.
Inevitably, however, a craggy, overweight Wayne subsumed the original "True Grit." He wore an eye patch and played the role with over-the-top bluster.
Promoting the premiere of "True Grit" on a studio-sponsored antique-train ride from Denver to Salt Lake City, Wayne drank freely while holding court with reporters. By the time a band of Indians staged a prearranged ambush, "he was loaded," recalled producer Robert Rehme.
Hollywood ate it up.
By the time the Oscar was awarded, Wayne was being described as a "sentimental favorite."
The Coens said they only dimly recalled having seen the earlier movie when they were young, and they did not watch it in preparing their own.
No John Wayne movie, the brothers figured, according to Joel, "would possibly reflect the very acid sensibility" they found in Portis' work. So the Coens, who turned Cormac McCarthy's arch story of a killer, "No Country for Old Men," into the Oscar-winning best picture of 2008, turned to "True Grit."
By boring into the tale's harsh Western core, they may have found a cool that has eluded it for 42 years.
