The Columbia Pictures lot here is decked with poster art for movies due in the coming months.

Bright red graphics promise a new version of “The Karate Kid,” with Jackie Chan and Will Smith’s son, Jaden. Angelina Jolie peers through the title of her action-thriller “Salt.” Letters made of pasta, prayer beads and flowers advertise Julia Roberts in “Eat, Pray, Love.”

But as of last week there was still no poster in the studio’s central walkway for perhaps the most closely guarded of Columbia’s movies this year.

In an era of cut-price filmmaking, the picture in question has an unusually full roster of well-paid stars: Reese Witherspoon, Jack Nicholson, Owen Wilson and Paul Rudd. And while the film business prefers sequels and pop adaptations, and has been shying away from such expensive, star-driven vehicles, this movie tells a complicated, original story about people who might be funny enough, in their own troubled way, to remind Hollywood that it is O.K., occasionally, to buck the trends.

Until recently the project was known publicly as “James L. Brooks Untitled,” Mr. Brooks being the gray-bearded writer-director behind the film. Word is he has decided to use an earlier working title, the stubbornly low-concept: “How Do You Know.”

It is a question without a question mark. Which pretty much sums up Mr. Brooks, a creator of television hits like “The Simpsons” and “Taxi,” who has built an intermittent filmmaking career on near-obsessive observations of the human condition — with laughs. By and large the combination has worked.

To date Mr. Brooks has directed just five films, beginning with “Terms of Endearment” in 1983. That one and two others, “Broadcast News,” a triangle set in the news business, and “As Good as It Gets,” in which Jack Nicholson played the crustiest of curmudgeons, were best picture nominees. “Terms of Endearment” was not only a winner, but also gave Mr. Brooks the rare distinction of picking up separate Oscars as the writer, director and producer of the same film.

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