Meet the new Rooster: Jeff Bridges (left, in "Crazy Heart") will play the role made famous by John Wayne, right. (photos by Fox Searchlight and Paramount).

The trade paper Variety reported that Paramount Pictures -- sight unseen -- has given Joel and Ethan Coen a prestigious Christmas Day release slot for their upcoming western, "True Grit."

Filming has not even begun, but no doubt a big reason is that their star, Jeff Bridges -- stepping into the role of the hard-drinking, eyepatch-wearing lawman Rooster Cogburn that won John Wayne an Oscar 40 years ago -- is himself an Oscar front-runner after winning a Golden Globe Sunday for "Crazy Heart."

Matt Damon and Josh Brolin reportedly will co-star.

Don't expect a remake of the Wayne movie, which was the Hollywood icon's last big hit but has since been relegated to the kitsch bin. Rather, the Coens are going back to the source material: the 1968 novel by Charles Portis, about a teenage girl in 1870s Arkansas who hires Cogburn to track down the hired hand who killed her father.

"It's partly a question of point-of-view," Ethan Coen told the website IGN last fall. "The book is entirely in the voice of the 14-year-old girl. That sort of tips the feeling of it over a certain way.

"I think it's much funnier than the movie was, so I think, unfortunately, they lost a lot of humor in both the situations and in her voice. It also ends differently than the movie did. You see the main character -- the little girl -- 25 years later when she's an adult.

Also expect the Coens' version to be more violent (no surprise there, right?).

Sand Coen: "Another way in which [the book is] a little bit different from the movie -- and maybe this is just because of the time the movie was made -- is that it's a lot tougher and more violent than the movie reflects. Which is part of what's interesting about it.

"I don't actually remember the movie too well, but I do remember it as being much more of a standard western, and the book is just an oddity. It's a very odd book."

Brolin, who starred in the Coens' "No Country for Old Men," plays the killer while Damon is the proverbial good cop -- a polite, abstemious Texas Ranger (Glen Campbell in the first movie) who teams up with Cogburn and the girl, Mattie.

The movie is set to film in Oklahoma this spring.

Earlier this month, the production held an open casting call in Tulsa to find an actress to play Mattie. The Coens even set up a web site -- TrueGritCasting.com -- soliciting applications from young hopefuls, aged 12 to 17, who are "tough, strong and tell it like it is."