Slackery News Tidbits, May 16

Here's the latest in Austin and Texas film news.

• The Blue Starlite Mini Urban Drive-in has a new home this summer: Austin Studios, home of Austin Film Society. AFS will work with Blue Starlite on the programming as well. Slackerwood is especially proud because after Elizabeth interviewed Josh Frank about the future of the Blue Starlite, Josh asked her if she could put him in touch with someone from AFS ... and that's how the collaboration started. (via Austin Chronicle)
• The dark comedy Killer Joe, starring Matthew McConaughey, will be released in theaters by LD Entertainment on July 27 with an NC-17 rating, according to Deadline. The William Friedkin-directed movie, based on the play by Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winner Tracy Letts, is about a tough but quiet killer in Texas who befriends a young man (Emile Hirsch) who wishes his mother to be murdered. It screened at SXSW this year.
• Speaking of Matthew McConaughey, he's in two movies that will screen at Cannes this month: The Paperboy, about a reporter who returns to his hometown to investigate a case involving a death row inmate; and Mud, Jeff Nichols' story of an unlikely friendship between a fugitive and a 14-year-old boy who helps him escape off an island in Mississippi to reunite with the woman he loves. Watch clips from the Nichols-directed film at IndieWire.
• MovieMaker reported that assistant UT RTF professor Andrew Shea's first documentary Portrait of Wally opened May 11 at the Quad Cinema in Manhattan. The documentary explores the history of Egon Schiele's 1912 oil painting of his mistress that was purchased by Jewish art collector Lea Bondi before WWII and was later stolen by a Nazi art dealer.
• Magnolia Home Entertainment has made plans to bring the 2012 Norwegian film Headhunters to Blu-ray on Aug. 28, according to High Def Disc News. The Morten Tyldum-directed movie, based on the 2008 novel of the same title, about a talented headhunter who is in search of a valuable painting, was a favorite at Fantastic Fest 2011.
• NPR reported that the 1997 documentary Hands on a Hard Body (still unavailable on DVD in the U.S.), about an endurance competition at a Longview, Texas car dealership in which the winner would receive a brand-new truck, has been adapted into a musical. The stage production of Hands on a Hardbody features an all-star crew, including Tony Award-winner and director Neil Pepe, co-composer Trey Anastasio of the band Phish, Pulitzer Prize-winner and playwright Doug Wright and choreographer Benjamin Millepiedc (former New York City Ballet star and choreographer of the movie Black Swan).
• The romantic drama Satellite of Love, starring Zachary Knighton (Happy Endings), recently screened at the Dallas International Film Festival (where Jette saw it) and the Hill Country Film Festival. Check out Victor Diaz's interview on YNN with filmmaker (and UT alum) Will James Moore about the movie and the Austin and Central Texas locations where it was shot (including a historic Travis Heights house and the Luling Watermelon Thump). You can see some of the film's lush locations in the trailer below.