At the Sundance Film Festival last year, a young director named Craig Brewer was suddenly the biggest new thing in a business built on overnight sensations. His feature Hustle & Flow—a little movie about a small-time pimp and a scrawny geek who burst through the Memphis music scene with their homemade hits—wowed the snowbound crowd and, more important, sold to Paramount for ＄9 million. That sale instantly made Brewer's next script, for something called Black Snake Moan, the kind of smoking-hot property that gets read on the studio jets back to Hollywood. No matter that Black Snake Moan was a Southern fable about a God-fearing former bluesman, Lazarus, who chains a trashy nymphomaniac, Rae, to his radiator and tries to cure her of what the town's leering menfolk call her "itch." Big-name talent was all over Black Snake Moan like ducks on a june bug, as they say in Brewer's native Tennessee.

The role of Lazarus was preempted by Samuel L. Jackson, but no one actress could immediately lay claim to Rae's teensy blue-jean skirt.

"Everybody was auditioning for Rae," recalls Christina Ricci, one of the actresses who managed to get a copy of the script in early 2005 because her agent, Toni Howard, also represents Jackson. "I read it and immediately fell in love with her."