Slackery News Tidbits, December 5

Here's the latest Austin film news. And if you read all your news, you get a treat ... a video embedded at the end.

• Sundance Film Festival has announced much of its 2012 lineup. So far, one Austin movie is included -- Kid-Thing, the latest feature from David Zellner and Nathan Zellner. The cast includes not only the Zellner brothers but also Susan Tyrell, who now lives in Austin. In addition, former Austinite Mark Duplass (who once participated in a filmmaker "wrestling match" with the Zellners) has scripted a thriller in the Park City at Midnight category: Black Rock, directed by and starring Katie Aselton. Aselton and Duplass are married. (If you haven't seen Aselton before, Bryan Poyser's short The Fickle is a fun place to start -- it's available online, and the gentleman who leaps is David Zellner. Full circle.)
• UT alum Todd Berger has been signed to write an adaptation of Where's Waldo for the big screen. I'm not sure how you get a feature film out of a puzzle-based picture book, but Berger is a very funny guy who's made some great movies that have played AFF in recent years: the hipster-noir comedy The Scenesters in 2009, and Don't Eat the Baby, a documentary about the 2006 Mardi Gras in New Orleans, which played AFF in 2007.
• Mike Woolf of Beef and Pie Productions here in Austin (they made Richard Garriott: Man on a Mission), has found a truly alternative method for distribution of one of his short films. His 2007 short doc Life is Marbleous is now available for you to watch online ... if you play the iPod/iPhone game Life is Marbleous, and win. The game costs less than a dollar to download, although I'm not sure how easy it is to play. The short played SXSW in 2007 and is about people who love, you guessed it, marbles.
• Finally, I recently learned that over Thanksgiving, Austin journalist and political "character" Sid Smith died, age 100. He ran for Congress against Michael McCaul in 2008 with the slogan, "At 95, who needs term limits?" To find out a little more about Smith, check out the short documentary embedded below, Sid Smith for Congress, made by Austin filmmakers Kelly Williams and Don Swaynos.