Music, movies collide in print

In a year that has seen a veritable logjam of movie musicals, rockumentaries and biopics about famous singers – and at a time when more such films are being green-lighted every month – it was bound to come along: a magazine dedicated to the intersection of pop music and moviemaking.

Enter Movies Rock, a custom publishing supplement that will be mailed to about 16 million subscribers of 14 Conde Nast magazines – such as Vanity Fair, Vogue and GQ – beginning Nov. 1. Concocted by Vanity Fair Editor Graydon Carter as a counterpart to an earlier Conde Nast advertorial effort, Fashion Rocks (which, as its title suggests, encompasses haute couture and rock stardom), Movies Rock functions as eye candy for the coffee table and a kind of behind-the-music and behind-the-scenes compendium for iPod listeners and cineastes alike.

Edited by Mitch Glazer, a successful freelance writer turned movie scribe (“Scrooged,” “The Recruit”), the glossy annual is intended as a reflection of what’s hot in popular culture.

“This year going into next, you’ve got ‘La Vie en Rose,’ ‘Sweeney Todd,’ ‘El Cantante,’ ‘I’m Not There,’ ‘August Rush,’ ‘Once’ – it’s definitely of the moment,” Glazer said, naming a number of high-profile music-driven films. “So Graydon’s idea was to do a 13th issue of Vanity Fair devoted to the place where movies and music meet.”

Bill Murray, extravagantly kitted out in a rhinestone-studded jumpsuit and shiny pompadour, poses as Elvis on the cover. Inside, familiar Vanity Fair photographers – Mark Seliger, Jean Baptiste Mondino and Bruce Weber – have snapped a who’s who of musicians and actors who somehow straddle the movie-music divide: Kanye West, Nelly, Billy Bob Thornton, Eve, Freddie Highmore, Chris Brown and Zooey Deschanel among them.

Glazer also enlisted several of Vanity Fair’s go-to writers. James Wolcott covers the making of the Who’s rock opera “Tommy.” Novelist-essayist Nick Tosches takes on the work of Elmer Bernstein (the scoring genius behind soundtracks for films such as “Ghostbusters,” “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “The Great Escape”). And Sam Kashner went behind the scenes to detail the fractious production of John Travolta’s disco blockbuster, “Saturday Night Fever.”

Still, there were certain tweaks on the Vanity Fair formula.

“The last page of Vanity Fair is usually the Proust questionnaire,” Glazer said. (That is, ponderous questions for famous subjects about their thoughts and values, lives and experiences.) “I thought that was a little heavy and intellectual. So I gave Bill Murray the Tiger Beat magazine questionnaire. What’s your favorite flower? What animal best describes the kind of girl you’d be interested in?” Murray’s answer: “A wounded duck.”

 chris.lee@latimes.com