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It was just yesterday that Jenn Brown and I were plotting our SXSW coverage strategy for Slackerwood (and other outlets) and hoping B-Side would host a Festival Genius site for scheduling SXSW Film. All of us at Slackerwood who have covered film festivals have loved the scheduling application from B-Side and found that it made fest planning vastly easier.

So we were very sad to learn that Austin-based B-Side Entertainment will be closing its doors this week. Filmmaker Magazine's blog is reporting that the company has been unable to find new investors and is out of funds. B-Side employees have all been laid off, many of which we've become familiar with at local film festivals -- including occasional Slackerwood contributor Chris Holland -- and we are obviously personally unhappy about the news as well. Back at SXSW 2007, I interviewed B-Side founder Chris Hyams (pictured at right) for Studio SX (sadly, SXSW no longer seems to have it archived) and his company sounded like an exciting business model.

Here's what Hyams has to say about the closing on the B-Side website: "I am sad to have reached the end of this chapter, but am incredibly proud of what we've achieved. I am confident that our efforts will have a lasting impact on this business. I am also confident that the B-Side team will bring their experience to new ventures that will pick up where B-Side is leaving off."

The soundtrack to Stingray Sam, the Fantastic Fest fave that had people singing for days afterwards, is now on sale. Written and performed by director Cory McAbee and co-produced  with Robert Lurie, it's full of delightful absurd and often deconstructed songs like "Lullaby" or the progeny naming song "Fredward."  

The episodic interplanetary adventure musical is still on the festival circuit, wowing crowds with its old-school serial wrapped in Western sensibilities. Both the soundtrack and the movie itself are available for purchase online at corymcabee.com, as digital media downloads or as discs.

To celebrate, we're giving away DVDs and soundtrack CDs. Find out how to win after the jump.

If you were paying close attention to Slackerwood last week, you may have noticed something new in the left sidebar. If you hadn't ... well, that's why I'm telling you now. Slackerwood has created the amazing and awesome Austin Film News Mega-Feed. You have to imagine monster-truck-show echo effects whenever I say it, it is that awesome.

Like many things about Slackerwood, the Austin Film News Mega-Feed (echo, echo) was born out of sheer lazy slackerhood. I was complaining to Chip, who not only performs great technical feats on Slackerwood but also is my husband and often tolerates me fussing about stuff, that I was tired of rewriting the same news items every other local outlet publishes, especially if a) I'm later than they are and b) I have nothing new to say. I sighed and wished that I could just publish one big conglomerate news feed of all these news items on Slackerwood and not have to worry about reporting on every single little bit of news, so I can focus on finding interesting news that isn't available everywhere else.

Chip nodded and sympathized .... and went to his computer and created the Austin Film News Mega-Feed, possibly out of a sense of community, but I suspect also so he wouldn't have to hear me whine anymore. Look over in the left sidebar (you may need to scroll down a bit) and you can see all the headlines from major sources of film-related news in Austin, like the Austin Chronicle's Picture in Picture blog, the Statesman's Austin Movie Blog, and Austinist. We've also added RSS feeds of blogs from local film festivals and theaters.

I receive updates every few months from photographer and filmmaker Phil Mucci, whom I met in 2006. Phil's short horror film The Listening Dead took the Best of Show award for short films at Fantastic Fest that year. Four years after its initial release, this short film has been translated into eight different languages. Phil has just announced that a "behind the scenes" short film on The Listening Dead is now available and can be viewed on his website. You can also watch his videos and short films, including Far Out, which screened at Fantastic Fest 2007.

That's Phil on the left with Alamo Drafthouse impresario Tim League at a filmmakers brunch during Fantastic Fest 2007. Note that Phil is sporting my "Last Night at the Alamo" hard hat that was given out to the audience for the special screening of Earthquake in Sensurround.

[Photo Credit: Phil Mucci and Tim League of the Alamo Drafthouse, courtesy of Debbie Cerda]

Here are a few of the Austin-related, movie-related news items that have been floating around recently:

• Nancy Schiesari's documentary Tattooed Under Fire (pictured at right) airs on KLRU on Tuesday, November 10 at 9 pm. Tattooed Under Fire is about the stories and secrets that Fort Hood soldiers share while getting tattoos. Schiesari is a professor in Radio-TV-Film at The University of Texas in Austin.
• I'll Come Running, directed by former UT Austin instructor Spencer Parsons, is now available to watch via IFC On Demand. The film played Austin Film Festival in 2008 and was shot in Austin and Denmark. Melonie Diaz stars as a young woman who befriends a Danish tourist and forms an unusually strong connection. Jette recommends it.
• Cine Las Americas will host its 2010 season kickoff and happy hour fundraiser on Tuesday, November 17 at Malverde. All proceeds benefit the 13th Cine Las Americas International Film Festival, including 10 percent from diners at La Condesa after the happy hour. 

Guess what? Austin has had film-related news in the past week that has nothing to do with Fantastic Fest. Really! I'm as surprised as you are. Let's look at all the interesting stuff we at Slackerwood missed while we were watching festival films and then recuperating. If we left out anything else, feel free to share the news in the comments section.

• Austin filmmaker/instructor Kat Candler is on fire this month, I swear. You can catch her 2006 feature jumping off bridges tonight at the Windsor Park branch of Austin Public Library at 6:30 pm. She also has two new short films playing at Austin Film Festival later this month: Quarter to Noon and Love Bug. Finally, a feature-film screenplay that she wrote with Chris Mass (Chalk), The Spider in the Bathtub, has just been optioned by LAF Studios, with Candler to direct.
• Speaking of AFF, Austin Business Journal has an interview with festival co-founder Barbara Morgan.
• Renovations on Austin's (now all-digital) public access television studios are complete. This Saturday, Oct. 10, the public is invited to digital fusion fest, an open house for the upgraded facility. Stop by and learn how you can create your own video for cablecast and other media.

The next three film festivals in Austin -- aGLIFF, Fantastic Fest and Austin Film Festival -- all use B-Side's web application for their scheduling. If you're attending any of these festivals, you'll want to take full advantage of the B-Side Festival Guide to build a schedule, rate a film, and see what other people are watching and rating.

Just one account will work to build schedules for all festivals that utlilize B-Side, and there are many, all around the country. The B-Side scheduler includes lots of nifty features, from creating personal schedules to running the Festival Genius, which can help optimize your schedule. 

The B-Side application is integrated into each festival's website; you can access it directly from the festival site, see when and where each film is playing, and add the films to your calendar. Each film has a page with a synopsis, date(s), venue(s), photos, trailers, category, notes about whether anyone involved in the film will attend, and statistics.

If you haven't yet heard our most recent podcast, then you may have missed something new for South by Southwest (SXSW) Conferences and Festivals for 2010. The SXSW PanelPicker which has been a staple of SXSW Interactive since 2007, is now available for the Film conference as well. Don't know what I'm talking about? Here's what you need to know:

You can help decide what panels are offered at the SXSW Film Conference by either submitting a panel idea or voting as a member of the community. Panel submission process was closed last month but has re-opened this week. Want to submit a film-related panel idea or vote on all submitted ideas? You will first need to register for a free account.

To vote, all you have to do is visit the SXSW PanelPicker site and click either the "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" button. You can skip voting for any panels on which you don't have an opinion. For more details on how the community voting process works, check out the cool PanelPicker How-To video guide courtesy of Trigger Studios.

Austin film-related news does seem to have a definite musical theme going this week. Or maybe I'm just stretching the point to justify the above title? I do have a whole lot of movie news today, some of which has nothing to do whatsoever with music, but you can always sing while you're reading or play some nice show tunes in the background.

• A small paragraph in the Arts: Casting Call section of the Austin Chronicle provides us with the news that Salvage Vanguard Theater and Doctuh Mistuh Productions are planning to stage Evil Dead: The Musical in Austin in the near future. They're still holding auditions this week, so contact Elle Mahoney at stylelle [at] gmail [dot] com for details. I'm looking forward to seeing this very curious theatrical production when it opens: Ash! He sings, he dances, he uses a chainsaw!
• The celebrity-spotting related to Machete shooting in Austin has already started. Several people, including our own Jenn Brown, spotted Danny Trejo (pictured at right) catching a movie at Alamo Ritz over the weekend. In addition, Austin Metblogs' Tim Trentham got a peek at Tom Savini while at the Paramount watching Forbidden Planet. Obviously if you want to see the coolest cast and crew from Robert Rodriguez's production, you should go to the movies. (I know my audience: I bet most of you would rather see Savini than Lindsay Lohan.)

Julie & Julia has one connection to Austin, which isn't mentioned at all in the movie: the real-life Julie Powell grew up here, leaving for the Frozen Yankee Tundra when she went to college. In the movie, when we hear Julie's mom on the phone, as voiced by Mary Kay Place, the strong Texas accent sounds more Dallas than Austin, but that's Hollywood for you.

The movie, directed by Nora Ephron, is a blend of two stories about cooking: Julie Powell's book Julie and Julia about her attempts to cook her way through a Julia Child cookbook, which she tracked on a blog; and My Life in Paris, about Julia Child's learning to cook, teach cooking, and eventually co-author her first cookbook.

Fittingly, Jette and Jenn saw Julie & Julia and have some opinions to share. Let's start with Jenn:

If you are on a diet, don't go see Julie & Julia. Seriously. You will gain five pounds before the closing credits, and have an irresistible urge for beurre blanc (that's a white wine/butter sauce, for the culinarily challenged). Even at a run time over two hours, with some scenes desperate for a trim, it's destined to take its place next to Under the Tuscan Sun as a film that makes gourmet retailers very, very happy.