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It took 26 years to bring Chicago to the screen and only 17 years for Nine, so some progress is being made, figures Rob Marshall, who helmed both movie musicals and pushed Chicago toward the Oscar-winner's circle for Best Picture of 2002, bringing the entire genre back in fashion. Nine is riding that wave of resurgence this holiday season — opening Dec. 18 in NYC and LA and nationally on Christmas Day — so naturally he's hoping for a second strike of artistic lightning. That hasn't been easy to anticipate. "I couldn't find anything to do right after Chicago so I did Memoirs of a Geisha," he says. "Musicals are part of who I am. It's just in my blood, so I was really searching, looking at anything, thinking about remakes, what hasn't been brought to film from stage, what's there still out there." Then, he hit upon the Italian for "Eureka!"

"One of the great things about Nine for me is that, in its DNA, is Fellini's "8½," of course — that's what it's inspired by and based on," he notes. "Fellini's work moves between reality and fantasy and memory — seamlessly — and that's what you try and do in a musical. For me, it was helpful for me to have that already built into the fabric of the piece so I could start seeing how the numbers could take place and be shaped. I think it's important these days in film to really have a strong conceptual plan so you can understand why people sing. That's not easy."

Mind you, this is coming from the man who arrived on Broadway, climbing out of a garbage can on the stage of the Winter Garden as one of the Cats — a replacement Munkustrap, at that — and gradually made his way up the theatrical ladder from Understudy to Performer to Dance Captain to Assistant to the Choreographer to Movement Consultant to Musical Staging to Co-Choreographer to Choreographer to — finally! — Director-Choreographer. A steady, heady ascent like that can make a guy understandably self-conscious about his musical-theatre roots.

Guido Contini of Nine is haunted by the ghosts of Guido Anselmi of "8½" — Marcello Mastroianni impersonating a fictional facsimile of Federico Fellini as a filmmaker stumbling toward a shooting date without a script or, indeed, a creative clue in his head. What's in his head is a dense and dizzying procession of the women in his life — women he has used, abused and loved. That's the plot, folks!

"The fun thing about this versus Chicago is that I could explore the world of film where Chicago is really about exploring the world of vaudeville. The fact that it's about a filmmaker seemed like a natural reason to make it into film."

This property is chameleon-like. When "8½" was upgraded and musicalized to Nine for the stage, it went from a totally cinematic world to a totally theatrical one. Now, adapters Michael Tolkin and the late Anthony Minghella have taken on the task of restoring it to its original screen state while still bringing along its stage baggage — a Tony-winning score by Maury Yeston, who, something of an adapter himself, chipped in three new songs for their needs.

"On stage, it made sense, of course," Marshall allows. "The whole thing was more fantastic because it was one man and all these women. It was all a kind of dream."

In "8½," it was a dream rooted in reality. Returning to that world meant reassigning roles allotted to the female cast on stage to men — indeed, putting the men back into the picture (including, out of the blue, the cuckolded husband of Guido's mistress).

"I understand why Fellini's work could be the basis for musicals. It has that quality in its fabric. I think it's interesting that we follow the same trajectory as Sweet Charity because 'Nights of Cabiria' was a Fellini film that became this big Broadway musical, Sweet Charity, which, in turn, then became a big movie musical."

The third musicalized Fellini — La Strada with Bernadette Peters, in her first Broadway lead, and Stephen Pearlman following Giulietta Masina and Anthony Quinn on film — "didn't make it into a movie musical," he understated. (It barely made it through an opening night 40 years ago next week — Dec. 14, 1969.) Continued...