Sex and drugs? Got it -- now they need rock

John C. Reilly’s poignant performance of “Mr. Cellophane” in “Chicago,” for which he earned a best supporting actor Oscar nomination, may have come as a surprise to moviegoers whose only previous exposure to his musical talent was “Feel the Heat,” the ‘80s rocker he belted out in ironic splendor with “Boogie Nights” costar Mark Wahlberg five years earlier.

But writer-producers Jake Kasdan (“Zero Effect”) and Judd Apatow (“The 40 Year-Old Virgin”) have created a starring vehicle for Reilly that will take full advantage of both of these approaches to his prodigious musical talent: “Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story,” a comedic take on tortured musician biopics. The three filmmakers and a variety of musical talents are in the studio recording 15 songs for the project.

“It’s a parody of the genre,” says Kasdan, who cites “Ray,” “Great Balls of Fire” and, uh, “Selena” as inspirational touchstones. “The character is an amalgamation of a lot of different guys, but the movie is playing on the conventions of ‘great-man’ movies and biopics in general.”

Kasdan and Apatow’s screenplay tracks the tumultuous life and five-decade career of early rock ‘n’ roll star Dewey Cox, who bursts onto the scene during the Buddy Holly era. The film will emphasize the ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s, but Reilly will play the character from age 13 into his 60s -- an artist ravaged by a life lived (and walked) so hard he makes Sid Vicious seem like Haylie Duff.

“The movie charts the character’s rise and fall and rise and fall that happens many, many times,” says Kasdan, who is also directing the film. “He’s addicted to pretty much everything you could possibly get addicted to, in and out of rehab, many, many children, and several wives.... It’s an American epic.”

After writing song titles and lyric fragments into the screenplay, Kasdan and Apatow reached out to musicians they admired who could use the script cues for songwriting inspiration. The brainstorming has resulted in songs like Cox’s first huge hit, “Walk Hard”; a tune from his “dangerous period” called “Guilty as Charged” and songs from a protest album he turns out during his socially conscious political phase named “These Are My Issues.”

Marshall Crenshaw penned the title song, and indie singer-songwriters Dan Bern, Charlie Wadhams and Candy Butchers co-founder Mike Viola are contributing material. The filmmakers have also recruited Van Dyke Parks, a legendary composer and producer who wrote lyrics for Brian Wilson, produced early Randy Newman and Ry Cooder records, and composed the feature soundtracks for “Goin’ South” and “The Two Jakes,” to write a musical sequence.

As the song demos come in, Apatow, Kasdan and Reilly are tweaking and arranging them with Kasdan’s usual composer, Mike Andrews (“Orange County,” TV’s “Freaks and Geeks”), to make sure they best fit both the character and Reilly’s style. The songs aren’t straight parodies in the Weird Al Yankovic vein, but “good songs that are funny within the context of the movie,” Kasdan says. “Some of them are kind of jokey, and some are less jokey. For the purposes of the movie, we don’t want the comedy to be dependent on listening to the lyrical content of the song line for line. It’s got to work in a sequence.”

The filmmakers are recording the songs at Andrews’ home studio in Glendale before shooting starts in February so Reilly has the tracks to perform to, and Kasdan plans to release an accompanying soundtrack album of complete studio versions of the songs along with the film.

Though Kasdan showed off his songwriting skills in his first film, “Zero Effect,” which included star Bill Pullman performing two songs they had co-written, he and Apatow will not be performing on the “Walk Hard” soundtrack. “We both play really mediocre adolescent Jewish-boy-who-loved-Bob-Dylan, campfire-type guitar,” Kasdan jokes. “We both know the same six chords.”

Longtime friends and collaborators (“Freaks and Geeks,” “Undeclared”), Kasdan and Apatow wrote the script, mostly over the phone, in the spring after Kasdan offhandedly mentioned the idea and Apatow “totally responded to it, in the way that he is able to do, and immediately came up with 40 jokes on that phone call,” Kasdan says. This evolved into frequent riffing sessions over a few months in which they recalled classic tales of rock ‘n’ roll excess and passed scenes back and forth for a “real rock comedy” that also expresses their deep love for the music.

“There’s so many great, crazy rock stories and it’s all kind of fodder,” Kasdan says. “The more you work on it, the more stuff you want to include.”

A history of screenwriters

“People write the movies they want to see, and they write the books they want to read,” says Oscar-winning screenwriter Marc Norman (“Shakespeare in Love”), referring to his 700-page manuscript, “What Happens Next: The History of American Screenwriting.” “This was a book I had always wanted to read, and nobody had ever written it. So I decided to do it myself.”

Norman spent much of the last three years writing his expansive social history of the screenwriting profession on spec. Harmony Books, a division of Random House, picked it up in July and plans to publish it next fall.

Along with brief scene and dialogue excerpts, juicy “X-rated” anecdotes and 16 pages of vintage photographs, the book is structured as a chronological tour through Hollywood history from the writers’ perspective. It ranges from late 19th century American theater through the title-writing of the silents, the birth of modern screenwriting with the advent of sound, the war-era golden age, the devastating blacklist and coded writing of the ‘50s and ‘60s, the emergence of the auteurs in the ‘70s and the big-budget blockbuster mentality of the ‘80s and ‘90s.

Norman did most of his research in UCLA’s copious film archives, focusing more on personal memoirs and histories than the screenplays themselves, and he lays out a compelling narrative that pays special attention to some of his personal screenwriting heroes: Anita Loos, Herman Mankiewicz, Ben Hecht, Dalton Trumbo, Howard Koch, Paddy Chayefsky, Paul Schrader, Quentin Tarantino and Charlie Kaufman.

“The book is really designed to be useful in the sense that there are yards of how-to books, but nobody’s ever written about what historically the life of a screenwriter in Hollywood has been like,” Norman says.

Norman published three novels in the ‘70s, but the hope of a less financially dubious line of work drew him to Hollywood for the next three decades. There’s none of his own professional history in the book, and Norman claims he doesn’t have enough material for a memoir, but a little prodding provoked a few gems:

On his first movie, “Oklahoma Crude,” which he adapted from his own novel in 1973, Norman met his first real movie star, Faye Dunaway, who played the film’s heroine. The actress earnestly hugged his arm and said, “Thank you for giving me the words.... “ “Which I thought was fresh and original until I realized that every actress has said that to the writer since about 1910,” Norman says. “It’s the pro forma thing you say to the writer when he shows up on the set and everybody wishes he’d do his business and leave.”

Norman worked on the screenplay for the 1975 film “The Killer Elite” every day with Sam Peckinpah in the maverick filmmaker’s office on Santa Monica Boulevard. “It was like going through Camp Pendleton if everybody’s drunk,” Norman says of working with the cantankerous director. “And it was probably one of the best experiences of my life.”

Not so great were the six weeks Norman spent on location during the filming of the legendary disaster “Cutthroat Island,” which would occasionally entail being woken at 1 a.m. to drive to the set, find a stone in the dark to sit on, and scribble a completely new scene onto a legal pad for filming that morning. “I was the guy in Malta stuck with trying to make that work,” he says. “I did get paid well. But it was really hell.”

Although he brushes aside the pathetic fantasy that things were ever any better for screenwriters and believes the original screenplay is ailing, he says, “Things change like the weather in the movie business. Who knows: tomorrow could start a Golden Age.”

He pauses.

“Not likely, but not impossible.”

Scriptland is a weekly feature on the work and professional lives of screenwriters. For tips and comments, e-mail fernandez_[email protected].