Willie Nelson in 3-D

Are you ready for The Red-Headed Stranger in 3-D? Stereo Vision Entertainment, Inc. has announced plans to produce Secrets of the Lost San Sabas, a film in which Willie Nelson will play "an Indian guide to afterlife on a 300-year quest for justice. The movie's filled with ghosts and goddesses from the Aztec Nation, along with some of today's most colorful characters, all shot in state-of-the-art, digital 3-D." Cowabunga.

Seven things you may not know about "The Magnificent Seven"

Robert Vaughn tells tales and shares secrets throughout A Fortunate Life, his sharply observed and self-deprecatingly witty autobiography. But we were especially intrigued by those parts of the book -- newly issued in paperback -- that focus on The Magnificent Seven, the classic 1960 Western -- based on Akira Kuroswa's Seven Samurai (1954) -- in which the actor appeared as a self-doubting gunslinger alongside co-stars Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen, James Coburn, Charles Bronson, Horst Buchholz -- and Brad Dexter.

Yes, Brad Dexter. Not Eli Wallach.

As Vaughn notes in his autobiography, Dexter "is the 'Bashful' of The Magnificent Seven -- the actor in the group who most people fail to name, just as most people forget Bashful when naming the Seven Dwarfs. Many movie buffs will mention Eli Wallach as one of the Seven, which is wrong. He was great in the picture as Calvera, the leader of the bandit gang that is terrorizing the Mexican villagers we come to rescue."

Six other choice nuggets to savor in A Fortunate Life:

THIS GROUP OF SEVEN WAS A HAPPY ACCIDENT. Long before taking the reins of The Magnificent Seven, filmmaker John Sturges earned his spurs as a director of Grade-A Westerns with Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, Last Train from Gun Hill and The Law and Jake Wade. But during the production process for this film, he had to race against the clock: The Screen Actors Guild had called a strike to start in Spring 1960. Vaughn writes that when he showed up at Sturges' office for his audition, on a morning in January, “an ax was hanging over every movie project in Hollywood. Unless the casting for a picture was completed by noon on a particular Friday, production couldn’t begin.” The good news: Sturges had already more or less decided to cast Vaughn on the basis of the actor's Oscar-nominated supporting performance in The Young Philadelphians. The bad news: At that point, Sturges had commitments from only two other actors, Brynner and McQueen. And the clock was ticking.

Sturges told Vaughn: “We don’t have a script, just Kurosawa’s picture to work from. You’ll have to go on faith. But we’ll be filming in Cuernavaca. Never been there? You’ll love it — it’s the Palm Springs of Mexico.” Vaughn told Sturges: "I'm in." Sturges told Vaughn: "Good decision, young man. And do you know any other good young actors? I’ve got four other slots to fill.” As it turned out, Vaughn did indeed know at least one likely candidate: James Coburn, a friend and former classmate who had attracted attention one year earlier in a supporting role opposite Randolph Scott and future Bonanza star Pernell Roberts in Budd Boetticher’s Ride Lonesome. The other three? Sturges managed to round them up on his own.

WHEN YOU'VE GOT TO GO, YOU'VE GOT TO GO. Vaughn discovered fairly quickly after filming began that there was a downside to filming on location in Mexico. He might have passed on the film, he wrote, "[i]f I'd known that I would be spending my three months in Cuernavaca with a stomach-churning case of the Aztec two-step."

THEY MADE IT UP AS THEY WENT ALONG. "There were long periods," Vaughn recalls, "when we didn't work because the script was still being written. We'd be told one evening, 'Tomorrow we'll be doing scene so-and-so.' and that night carbon copies of the script on onion-skin paper would be slid under our doors to learn for the next day."

PISTOL ENVY. Throughout the production, Vaughn writes, Steve McQueen "always was intensely competitive, even to the point of being paranoid." He was convinced that Yul Brynner was pulling every nasty trick in the book to steal scenes, and often complained to Vaughn about what he felt were Brynner's underhanded attempts to upstage him. At one point, he actually went ballistic -- figuratively speaking, of course -- about Byrnner's choice of weaponry. The gun "has a bleeping pearl handle for God's sake," McQueen ranted. "He shouldn't have a gun like that. It's too bleeping fancy. Nobody's gonna look at anything else with that goddamn gun in the picture." Notes Vaughn: "Of course, Steve meant that nobody would be looking at Steve McQueen."

NO SMALL PARTS. "It's a sobering thought," Vaughn writes, "to realize I'm the last of the Seven still alive." On the brighter side, however, "Eli is still going strong." Ironically, though, Eli Wallach very nearly turned down the role of Calvera, the bandit chief whose repeated raids on a remote village lead the villagers to hire The Magnificent Seven in the first place. As he recalls in his own autobiography -- The Good, The Bad, and Me: In My Anecdotage, also available in paperback -- Wallach was still best known as a New York stage actor, despite his showy turn in Eli Kazan's controversial Baby Doll (1956). He knew full well that exposure in a major Hollywood movie could help his career. At first, however, Wallach was concerned about the relative scarcity of his screen time. He accepted the part only after he realized how he could make every minute count. “After rereading the script,” Wallach writes, “I realized that even though I only appeared in the first few minutes of the film, the natives spoke about my return for the next forty-five minutes – ‘Calvera’s coming.’ ‘When is he coming back?’ – so, I decided to do the part.”

YOU NEVER CAN TELL. After filming wrapped in Cuernavaca, Vaughn admits, "I was convinced that The Magnificent Seven would be a failure. Instead, of course, it became a box-office hit, a star-making vehicle for several in the cast, including Steve McQueen, James Coburn, and Charles Bronson, and a classic Western drama still enjoyed today almost half a century after it was made. It's the second-most frequnetly played movie on American TV (trailing only Casablanca).

"So what the hell do I know?"

Bluegrass champs

The new duo Dailey & Vincent -- that is, Jamie Dailey (above, left) and Darrin Vincent (right) -- dominated the International Bluegrass Music Association awards Thursday in Nashville, winning entertainer of the year, album of the year, vocal group, emerging artist and gospel recorded performance. You can read more about it here.

Redford remembers Newman

"I first met Paul Newman in 1968, when George Roy Hill, the director of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, introduced us in New York City. When the studio didn't want me for the film — it wanted somebody as well known as Paul — he stood up for me. I don't know how many people would have done that; they would have listened to their agents or the studio powers." More from Robert Redford here.

R.I.P.: Paul Newman (1925-2008)

If you’re going to introduce a younger movie buff to the unique charisma of the extraordinary Paul Newman – well, where do you begin? After all, you’re talking about a superstar who was active on screen over six decades. Here are some suggested movies to use while tutoring the uninitiated.

HUD (1963) – As an anti-heroic heel in Martin Ritt’s anti-Western, Newman is a smolderingly sexy hunk who defies his tradition-bound father (Melvyn Douglas) and disillusions his admiring nephew (Brandon de Wilde) while selfishly looking out for No. 1.

HARPER (1966) -- Newman's self-assured star power has seldom been showcased as effectively as it is in this slick private-eye drama based on Ross Macdonald's The Moving Target. As Lew Harper (the detective known as Lew Archer in Macdonald's great series of crime novels), Newman cracks wise and dodges bullets with all the cynical élan of a classic movie shamus. (A somewhat lesser sequel, 1976’s The Downing Pool, is not without its charms.)

COOL HAND LUKE (1967) -- This is the one that solidified Newman's status as a pop-culture icon of the 1960s. As a rebellious chain-gang prisoner who destroys himself while becoming a legend in the eyes of other inmates (including Dennis Hopper, Harry Dean Stanton and Oscar-winner George Kennedy), he combines anarchy, nobility and plain old cussedness in just the right measures. Little wonder that a frustrated warden (the late, great Strother Martin) complains: ''What we got here is failure to communicate!”

BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID (1969) -- Newman and Robert Redford make the best pair of big-screen buddies since Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy in this tongue-in-cheeky Western written by William Goldman (who also scripted Harper) and directed by George Roy Hill (who would later guide Newman and Redford through the stylish con-artistry of The Sting).

SLAP SHOT (1977) – Rude and crude with apologies to no one, George Roy Hill’s profanely funny comedy about the misadventures of a third-rate, bush-league hockey team remains a much-quoted favorite of sports-talk radio hosts everywhere. Look beyond the surface hilarity, however, and you’ll better appreciate Newman’s risky and frisky performance as a middle-aged player-coach whose desperation mounts as he become increasingly aware that he won’t have much left when he hangs up his skates.

THE VERDICT (1982) -- Sidney Lumet directed, and David Mamet wrote, this brooding courtroom drama about a malpractice case that brings out the best in an unlikely hero. Newman's masterful portrayal of a boozy, burnt-out lawyer who gets a shot at redemption ranks with his finest work as an actor.

BLAZE (1989) -- Written and directed by Ron Shelton, who also gave us the equally robust Bull Durham, Blaze is a riotously funny and rigorously earthy romantic comedy about life, love and the pursuit of political mandates. Newman gives a big, boldly flamboyant performance as Earl K. Long, the three-term Louisiana governor who infamously romanced Blaze Starr (Lolita Davidovich), a spectacularly endowed Bourbon Street stripper known affectionately as ''Miss Spontaneous Combustion.''

NOBODY’S FOOL (1995) – Everyone has a favorite Paul Newman performance. But if you’re going to choose his very best performance, you’ll be hard-pressed to name one better than his Oscar-nominated turn in this quietly superb comedy-drama from writer-director Robert Benton (Places in the Heart). Based on the well-received novel by Richard Russo, Nobody's Fool is the story of Sully (Newman), an aimless and amiably impoverished construction worker with a banged-up knee, a who-cares attitude and a scolding landlady named Miss Beryl (Jessica Tandy). At age 60, however, Sully finds himself, much to his amazement, on the verge of finally becoming a responsible adult. Like just about everything else in his life, it just happens, without warning, and Sully has to deal with it.

From Captain Jack to Kimosabe

Johnny Depp -- whose maternal grandfather, not incidentally, was Cherokee -- has signed on to play Tonto in producer Jerry Bruckheimer's new version of The Lone Ranger. No word yet, however, on who'll be wearing the black mask and shooting the silver bullets.

R.I.P.: Jerry Reed (1937-2008)

Jerry Reed wrote songs for superstars such as Johnny Cash and Elvis Presley, and scored smash hits on his own with the likes of “Amos Moses” and “When You’re Hot, You’re Hot,” 70’s chart-toppers distinguished by Reed’s rambunctiously raspy vocals and twangy guitar virtuosity. But it’s entirely possible that most people will remember the Atlanta native best as a scene-stealing character actor who specialized in Southern-fried sidekicks (Smokey and the Bandit, Hot Stuff, Bat-21). He was surprisingly effective as a deadly serious redneck crime lord in Burt Reynolds’ Gator, and a sassy/cynical cop in the short-lived 1977 TV series Nashville 99. He even managed to occasionally upstage Walter Matthau and Robin Williams as a domesticated hit man in Michael Ritchie’s under-rated The Survivors. He'll be missed.