Wes Anderson's follow-up to The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou and The Royal Tenenbaums is The Darjeeling Limited, which opens in New York on Saturday and stars Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody and Jason Schwartzman. But the director will lead off with a related short film entitled Hotel Chevalier that will serve as a prequel to the feature and a marketing tool for it. Hotel Chevalier has screened at the Venice Film Festival and will be shown at the New York Film Festival on Friday. And starting Wednesday, you can download it for free from ITunes.

"I shot Chevalier in 2½ days and edited it in about a week on my computer," said the director in a recent interview, adding that he financed it from his own pocket.

Natalie Portman, who appears only briefly in The Darjeeling Limited, has more to do (and less to wear) in the 13-minute short. "I asked Wes to make sure that I'm not in the previews (for the feature) because I really think it's false advertising," she told the Wall Street Journal.

In addition to a free copy of the short film, Anderson (or Wilson, or Brody, or Schwartzman) fans can bid on a piece of the Louis Vuitton luggage used in The Darjeeling Limited. Proceeds go to UNICEF and an Indian medical treatment charity called the Rawal Mallinathji Foundation.