Zoe Kazan

BEN BARNES ACTOR WHO'S A PRINCE OF A GUY IN THE NEXT 'NARNIA' BARNES' starring moment is still five months away, but already more than 33,000 people have checked out a website devoted to the man who would be king, playing Prince Caspian in Andrew Adamson's "The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian," due for release in May. "It's terrifying," says the 26-year-old British actor. "Everyone has been warning me about what I'm in for, but I think I still don't understand the half of it."

After a hand-stitched title card announces the year and place as 1845 Oregon, "Meek's Cutoff" shows the slow, laborious process of a small wagon train moving across open country. A river is crossed, water gathered, clothes wrung out, cookware scrubbed. Then, as one shot dissolves slowly into another, one barren landscape fading in from the last, the wagons and their guide seem to roll right across an expanse of open sky, an image at once rustic, fragile and mystical. "Meek's Cutoff" is by all technical definitions a western but also clearly something more.

Independent filmmaking often acts as a farm team of sorts for Hollywood, a showcase for performers and filmmakers who go on to bigger, if not always necessarily better, things. The following is a look at some of the people - and some of the films - that made a splash in the indie waters in 2012 that are likely to have a ripple effect in Hollywood. As a writer and critic with a focus on independent cinema, it's gratifying to watch emerging talents as they make their way into the mainstream.

Oscar-nominated writer-director Noah Baumbach is known as the creator of literate, personal films about characters in crisis. Actress Greta Gerwig has parlayed her deft touch playing blond oddballs in small indie films into work with an impressive roster of filmmakers including Woody Allen, Ivan Reitman and Whit Stillman. Now the real-life couple, who worked together on "Greenberg," have co-written a melancholy comedy, "Frances Ha" that's becoming one of the most-buzzed-about films on the fall film festival circuit.

The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences announced Wednesday that screenwriter Robin Swicord ("The Curious Case of Benjamin Button") has been elected to the board of governors, representing the writers branch. She fills the seat vacated by Frank Pierson, who died in July. Swicord joins fellow writers branch governors  Bill Condon and Phil Robinson. She will remain on the board until the next election, scheduled for July 2013. Swicord earned an Oscar nomination in the adapted screenplay category for her work on "Benjamin Button.

The sort of adolescent anxiety as body horror writer-director Bradley Rust Gray attempts with his new lesbian werewolf love story "Jack & Diane" has been done better elsewhere - the 2000 Canadian film "Ginger Snaps" immediately springs to mind. Here, Juno Temple's British free spirit Diane meets up with Riley Keough's tomboy Jack, and the two fall madly, passionately in love with such recklessness that the force of it seems to awaken an actual monster within Diane. The transformation sequences are conjured through brief, evocative animated sequences courtesy of the Brothers Quay.

CBS This Morning Audra McDonald; Bonnie Raitt. (N) 7 a.m. KCBS Today Loans for fertility treatments; crafts; summer style; eating environments. (N) 7 a.m. KNBC KTLA Morning News (N) 7 a.m. KTLA Good Morning America (N) 7 a.m. KABC Live With Kelly Salma Hayek; Rhys Ifans; co-host Carrie Ann Inaba. (N) 9 a.m. KABC The View Celebrating family; Troy Dunn. (N) 10 a.m. KABC The Talk Mary McCormack; chef Paul Bartolotta.

YOUR article "Faces to Watch 2008" [Dec. 30] reminds me of a reality that is rarely investigated or talked about: how "pedigree" enables stardom. For example, in your story about Zoe Kazan [granddaughter of Oscar-winning director Elia Kazan and daughter of screenwriter Nicholas Kazan], where you actually use the word "pedigree," Ms. Kazan relates how she went through "six rounds" of auditions for a major movie role that she was continually told she was wrong for.

SATURDAY CBS News This Morning (N) 4 a.m. KCBS Today (N) 5 a.m. KCBS Good Morning America (N) 7 a.m. KABC McLaughlin Group 6:30 p.m. KCET SUNDAY The Chris Matthews Show (Season premiere) What may happen if Mitt Romney loses the election; memorable political moments of the last 10 years. (N) 5:30 a.m. KNBC Today Andrew McCarthy; Danny Pino. (N) 6 a.m. KNBC Good Morning America (N) 6 a.m. KABC State of the Union With Candy Crowley Politics, Democratic agenda, immigration reform, U.S. troop drawdown in Afghanistan: Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.)