Slackery News Tidbits, June 14

Here's the latest Austin movie news -- a lot of which is interconnected in a way that reminds me the Austin film community can be a small world sometimes.

• Austin Film Festival is gearing up for its October conference and fest, and has just announced the 2011 Extraordinary Contribution to Filmmaking honoree: John Lasseter. This means that Lasseter, Disney/Pixar Chief Creative Officer, will be in Austin this fall to receive his award and possibly host an interesting screening of some sort. In case I hadn't mentioned it earlier, AFF is also honoring Caroline Thompson with the Distinguished Screenwriter Award and Hart Hanson with the Outstanding Television Writer Award.
• AFF is also hosting excellent screenings throughout the summer. On Sunday, June 26, AFF and Ballet Austin are co-sponsoring a screening of Robert Altman's The Company at Ballet Austin, and your ticket gets you into not only the movie but a free Ballet Fit class right after the movie. I like the idea of pairing movies and athletic endeavors. (Can you guys do something similar next with Boxing Gym or even The Fighter? Thank you.)
• One of the highlights of AFF 2010 for me was a script reading of Maggie Carey's The Hand Job, which was on The Black List of unproduced screenplays. Gordon and the Whale reports that inevitably, the script now has a new title: The To-Do List (which, if you've seen my photos from the reading, is quite apt). The article also has an update on casting for the production, which I hope means we'll get to see this movie sooner rather than later.
• One more from AFF: I'd be sad to hear that Kelly Williams is leaving his position as AFF's Film Program Director after 10 years, except that a) he'll continue to do some consulting on the fest's programming and b) he's working as producer on a number of fascinating local movie projects that I can't wait to see, including Splice of Life (we visited the set this spring) and Pictures of Superheroes. AFF's new Film Program Director is Stephen Jannise, whom I know only as one of the great writers over at Austin Cinephile.
• Another local film Williams is producing is the short Hellion, which Kat Candler will direct. Hellion will star Jonny Mars, whom you may have enjoyed watching in The Happy Poet or in Wuss (he's a bit scary in the latter, admittedly). They have an IndieGoGo campaign going to offset production costs, with some nice premiums for donors. Yep, that's Williams with Candler in the video.
• Local producer Chris Ohlson (The Happy Poet, Lovers of Hate) also wanted to alert us to a film in need of your financial support, a feature called Good Night. Which also stars Jonny Mars. (Which actor have we written about on Slackerwood more this year: Mars or John Merriman? It's a close race so far.) The cast includes not only Mars but Alex Karpovsky (Lovers of Hate), Chris Doubek (Poet AND Hate), Todd Berger (The Scenesters, and he was in that AFF Hand Job reading too) and Parisa Fakhri. This is the first feature for local writer-director Sean Gallagher. Check out the Kickstarter campaign page for more info.
• Local fans of actor and now author Simon Pegg will be happy to hear that he'll be in Austin on Wednesday night. He's doing a reading/signing at BookPeople of his autobiography, entitled Nerd Do Well. Let us know if you see him anywhere else that night -- we're not usually celebrity stalkers at Slackerwood, but we are almost all nerds.
• While idly flipping through Twitter the other day, I raised my eyebrows at a tweet from actor Kevin Corrigan, who's been in movies from Slums of Beverly Hills (which I just watched again this weekend, coincidentally, and it is still awesome) to local feature Harmony and Me. His tweet from Sunday: "The fact is, I do have a project next week. The new Bob Byington movie." So now we know that a) Byington is making a movie and b) Corrigan is in it. Is it Byington's Seven Chinese Brothers project (which has Alex Karpovsky in it, incidentally), or something else? If anyone has further details, please drop me a line. Otherwise I'll have to start sending nosy tweets to Mr. Corrigan.