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4 inspirations behind wacky, wild 'Hail Caesar!' movie

You can count on the Coen Brothers to locate the lunacy in just about any subject or premise. Set them loose in the manufactured dreamland of old Hollywood and their imaginations go gaga.

Enter Hail, Caesar!, the newest Coen confection opening Friday. The story, about a kidnapped movie star (George Clooney), a Communist conspiracy and a studio fixer (Josh Brolin, playing a nice-guy version of MGM heavy Eddie Mannix), is something wild. But the movie's real juice is served up by the mischievously crafted homages to classic movie genres. This is where we see Channing Tatum tap dance, Clooney sport a sword and sandals, and Scarlett Johansson make like aquatic queen Esther Williams.

In a recent phone conversation, the Coens pulled back the curtain and discussed the inspirations behind these sequences and what it took to pull them off.

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The Biblical epic: Clooney's rather dim movie star Baird Whitlock is starring in the sword-and-sandals extravaganza Hail, Caesar! when a couple of extras engineer his kidnapping. The movie-within-the-movie, about a Roman soldier who comes to Jesus, is subtitled 'A Story of the Christ."

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"That's a little bit of an amalgam of a number of different sandal movies," says Ethan Coen. "It's got elements of Quo Vadis, which was early '50s, and elements of Ben-Hur, which was a decade later. There's also a little Spartacus. It's a mash-up of all kinds of Biblical movies."

"The stiff, literal Bible movies are almost like performance art," adds Joel Coen. "You almost can't take them seriously." "It's also like kabuki," says Ethan. "It's been stylized and formalized and abstracted to such an extent, but you only see it that way if you step back a little bit."

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The Navy musical: The sailors-on-leave dance number, "No Dames," finds Channing Tatum tapping away a la Anchors Aweigh. (It also has a great deal of fun with the homoerotic subtext of sailors singing about the absence of female companionship.)

"Channing is very athletic, and he's a very good dancer," Ethan says. "Gene Kelly was the closest to Channing in terms of body type and the athletic, muscular, gymnastic kind of stuff."

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"It's all from here and there and nowhere," says Joel. "We looked at a bunch of stuff. Anchors Aweigh, On the Town ... there's actually a lot of sailor dancing in musicals, or service comedy musical dance movies."

The Western: Alden Ehrenreich plays Hobie Doyle, a Western star who sings a little, ropes a little, rides a little and pulls off some comically exaggerated stunts. He's part Roy Rogers and part Yakima Canutt, the famed stuntman who pulled off death-defying feats in countless Westerns.

"We looked at a lot of B Westerns," Joel says. "We pushed the stunts a little, like when he swings on the branch. But you did see some really spectacular stunts in those old Westerns, with Yakima Canutt doing all that stuff in the early John Wayne movies."

Ehrenreich also gets to sing "Lazy Old Moon," made famous by Rogers in the 1939 film The Arizona Kid. "That's one of the only things we consciously went fishing for on YouTube," Ethan says.

The aquatic musical: Esther Williams was a champion swimmer before becoming a mainstay at MGM, where she starred in several swimming musicals choreographed by the great Busby Berkeley. In Caesar, Scarlett Johansson plays the Williams-like DeeAnna Moran, whose mermaid outfit and wholesome image don't fit too well when she gets pregnant. (Taking care of unwanted pregnancies was a specialty of the real-life Eddie Mannix.)

Caesar's Berkeley-style swim sequence is a showstopper.

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"It just seems odd that the studios felt audiences wanted to see people swimming" Ethan says. "And they were right! Audiences did want to see people swimming. But now they don't, and we were like, why not? We still want to see people swimming."

This sequence was the most challenging of the film.

"It was extremely difficult," Joel says. "Back then, they made something like 17 Esther Williams movies over a period of 15 or 20 years, and during the course of that they worked out the engineering and techniques for all of these spectacular effects and images. That's all lost craftsmanship and artistry. It was a very frustrating question of how do you reverse engineer all of these techniques using the methods they used from the period and also modern technology."

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That, as they say, is show business.