Forget about Ben Stiller at the Oscars. The Joaquin Phoenix skit at the previous day’s Independent Spirit Awards was so hilariously dead-on that it left some attendees wondering whether the recently retired actor was actually up on stage. Not so. But who was that masked man? EW has learned that the guy behind the Grizzly Adams beard was director Frank Coraci (Click, The Wedding Singer), an Adam Sandler protege, who is now prepping the new Kevin James comedy, The Zookeeper. He and Spirits host Steve Coogan came up with the bit at the last moment, says a source close to the dynamic duo, who met while filming the doomed Jackie Chan adventure, Around the World in 80 Days.

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Writer/director Bill Condon, who just completed his debut run as producer of the 2009 Academy Awards, is shopping his script Richard Pryor: Is It Something I Said? to the studio subsidiaries and independent distributors around town. Eddie Murphy is attached to star. Sources tell EW.com that Fox Searchlight, the studio behind this year’s big Oscar winner Slumdog Millionaire, is interested in the film. The studio, which declined comment, has a relationship with Condon, having partnered with the director on his 2004 feature Kinsey. Condon, who most recently wrote and directed Dreamgirls, had the Pryor biopic set up at The Weinstein Company but was able to pull it out when the indie outfit put it into turnaround. He initially was hoping to secure $30 million to produce the film, but that number, sources say, has dropped down to $25 million. Murphy, who has featured Pryor impersonations in his act as far back as the 1987 concert movie Raw, seems a likely choice for this role.

You know times are tough when a Steven Spielberg movie is no longer considered a slam-dunk for any studio in Hollywood. After a flurry of news reports surfaced about the on-again, off-again status of Spielberg’s longtime passion project about the life of Abraham Lincoln, a credible source told EW that the project had been shelved after Paramount and a series of other major studios all passed on the $50 million biopic. According to the source, it was less a sign of the father of the modern blockbuster’s waning power than of the cold reality that studios are clamping down on greenlighting anything but the most broad commercial fare.

But Spielberg’s longtime publicist, Marvin Levy, insists that the rumors are untrue and that Lincoln (with Taken star Liam Neeson in the title role) is still moving full steam ahead. “Lincoln is alive and well and continues in active development,” Levy tells EW. “Everyone is proceeding with great enthusiasm. The script is still being revised by Tony Kushner and our plans are now to shoot the picture later this year.”

On the heels of Heath Ledger’s posthumous Best Supporting Actor Oscar win for The Dark Knight, interest has spiked in the late actor’s still-unreleased final film, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, but at this point its fate is still up in the air. Ledger was midway through shooting director Terry Gilliam’s fantasy film when he died in January of 2008; after nearly scrapping the partially completed project, Gilliam wound up recruiting Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell, and Jude Law to fill out Ledger’s role. Rumor has it the movie may make its debut at the Cannes Film Festival in May, but as of now it still has no distributor or release date. (One scribe at The Hollywood Reporter speculates that Gilliam’s typically bizarro vision may make the film a hard sell.)

Late last December, Gilliam told EW that he was hoping Parnassus could come out this spring, but he seemed perfectly content (even gleeful) to sit and wait until a suitable distributor came calling. “My attitude is: We don’t have to worry about it,” Gilliam said. “I think people are going to be astonished when they see the film, and there will be a rush to want it. So I’m happy to wait. We have a film with Heath Ledger, Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell, and Jude Law, and no deal. Isn’t that great? Nobody came forward at the right time — and now it’s going to cost them.”

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