AFF

We have lots of news and events information for you today, and only one of these items is part of Fantastic Fest -- okay, maybe two. Remember to keep an eye on our Event Calendar if you want all the details about upcoming events.

• Cabin Fever 2 plays Alamo Ritz this Wednesday, Sept. 23, with many cast members in attendance. It's an Austin School of Film fundraiser screening, sponsored in part by Fantastic Fest.
• Film and video artist Luke Savisky and Golden Hornet Project’s Graham Reynolds and Peter Stopschinski, will perform live as part of the Fantastic Fest opening night festivities. Graham and Peter will improvise music to live projections from Savisky onto the front facade of the Alamo Drafthouse on South Lamar on Thursday, Sept. 24 at 9:30 pm.
• Austin film and SXSW selection Artois the Goat -- cast and crew shown above -- will have its New York premiere at the Friars Club Comedy Film Festival on Sept. 25.

The Austin Film Festival (AFF) has recently announced the panel schedule for the 16th annual film festival and conference to be held October 22-29. The lineup of over 80 panels and roundtable discussions includes an all-star cast of actors, screenwriters, producers, and many others who have contributed to films, television shows and new media including Lethal Weapon, Mad Men, Lost, Freaks and Geeks, Raiders of the Lost Ark and Watchmen.

Featured panelists include Damon Lindelof (Star Trek, Lost), Matthew Weiner (Mad Men, The Sopranos), Melissa Rosenberg (Twilight), Shane Black (Lethal Weapon), William Broyles Jr. (Cast Away, Apollo 13), Paul Feig (Freaks and Geeks, The Office), Michael Green (Kings, Heroes), Peter Hedges (About a Boy, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape), and many more.

The selection of panels features television, screenwriting and filmmaking panels, roundtables, meet-and-greets with conference speakers, roundtables, and more including the seventh annual AFF Pitch Competition. There are a few interesting running series with various speakers throughout the conference, including "Write What You Know," "Breaking into Business," "Script to Screen Series" and "Should Movies Reflect the Real World?"

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.

Austin Film Festival is gearing up for the 2009 fest and screenwriters' conference, which takes place October 22-29 this year. They've just announced 10 films for the lineup, including Austin filmmaker Bob Byington's film Harmony and Me.

The comedy (pictured at right) has played a number of film fests this year, including CineVegas, LAFF and Traverse City Film Festival ... but not Austin yet. The cast includes Justin Rice (in the title role), Kevin Corrigan, now-local filmmaker Alex Karpovsky, musician Bob Schneider, and other Austin-area actors and filmmakers.

Robert Townsend's documentary Why We Laugh will also play the fest -- I caught a glimpse of Townsend at AFF last year and am glad to hear he's returning. (I'd share my photo of him but it's essentially a blur; he's a fast walker.) The documentary Tales from the Script, about screenwriting, is most appropriate for a film fest that has always had a focus on screenwriters.

Would you like to learn the secret about how I find all the Slackery News Tidbits? Sure, some of them come from press releases I receive and articles I find, but most of them -- okay, I'll confess. I find most of them by reading Twitter posts. Someone links to a cool article or news, I mark the post as a favorite, and then periodically I dig through my favorites and create a list like the one below.

Now you're all thinking that you'll never read Slackery News Tidbits again because you can just check Twitter ... but the first item on the list isn't from Twitter, it's from a press-release email and is news you may not know yet. It's not even on the fest's website yet. So see, you have to keep reading.

• Austin Film Festival has just announced that Ron Howard will be attending this year's screenwriters conference and film fest. AFF is presenting Howard with the Extraordinary Contribution to Filmmaking Award, and will also be a featured speaker during the conference. Which films will they show that he's been involved with? Hoping for Splash and Night Shift, myself.

Writer/director/actor Mike White obviously wants to spend some quality time in the Central Texas area this fall. Fantastic Fest has just announced via Twitter that the Year of the Dog writer-director will be in town for the fest's opening-night film, Gentlemen Broncos, in which he has a role (and is a producer). He'll be joining the film's writer-director Jared Hess and actor Jemaine Clement.

But wait, there's more. White will return to Austin less than a month later for Austin Film Festival ... or maybe he'll hang out here the whole time, who knows? AFF has posted a fun interview with him that covers screenwriting, film fests, and other topics. No word yet on whether AFF will show any of White's films during the fest -- his screenwriting credits also include The School of Rock, The Good Girl, Nacho Libre and several episodes of Freaks and Geeks. Fortunately, both festivals are at the right time of year for Austin, weather-wise.

It's too hot for film news, isn't it? It's too hot for just about anything except sitting in the air conditioning and watching movies. And yet, some of you have the energy to make movies in this weather, which brings us to some of this week's local movie news:

• Austin Film Festival is co-sponsoring the Funniest Filmmaker in Austin series for the fourth year. Send them your short film (under 5 minutes) by August 10, and all films will be screened the following week. The winning film will be screened at AFF this year, and the winner also receives two AFF producers badges for the 2009 fest. There's no entrance fee, so why not take a chance?
• Another great chance: SXSW is still accepting panel submissions for the 2010 Film, Interactive, and Music conferences until 11:59 pm tomorrow night.
• BookPeople is hosting a book signing next Wednesday, July 15 at 7 pm for stuntman Gary Kent's book Shadows & Light: Journeys With Outlaws in Revolutionary Hollywood. As if that's not cool enough, special guests that evening include "entrepreneur/philanthropist/stuntman Rex Cumming (Walker, Texas Ranger); actor/stuntman Bob Ivy (Bubba Ho-Tep, Phantasm); writer/director Don Jones (Lethal Pursuit, The Forest); producer/author Michael MacFarland (The Pyramid, The Ultimate Joy); and iconic director/actor/stunt legend Chuck Bail (The Stuntman, Freebie and The Bean, Beastmaster)." (Thanks to Lars for the heads-up.)

It's Monday morning and time to wake up, smell the coffee, and find out what's going on in Austin film right now. Here's what I've got so far:

• Fantastic Fest and website HorrorSquad are co-hosting a special screening of the horror thriller The Collector on July 22. Writer/director Marcus Dunstan and co-writer Patrick Melton will be in attendance. Click the link above to find out how to RSVP if you have a Fantastic Fest badge. If you haven't heard of The Collector, the movie toured the fest circuit under the title Midnight Man. [Full disclosure: I write for HorrorSquad's sister site, Cinematical.]
• Speaking of Fantastic Fest, a preview of the poster and t-shirt art is now available on the Mondo Tees blog for you to admire. "Yes, but when do we find out what's actually playing at Fantastic Fest this year?" The first batch of fest films will be announced on July 13.
• Decider Austin (the local online Onion site) has a fun interview with Austin Film Festival programming director Kelly Williams called "How not to enter the Austin Film Festival." Don't forget that the deadline for AFF film submissions is this Friday, July 3.

[Ed. Note: Please welcome Slackerwood's newest contributor, Debbie Cerda.]

When Jette blogged in late March about the Austin Film Festival (AFF) "Made in Texas Film Series," the July 8 screening had yet to be set. I am quite pleased to see it's been announced and is one of my favorite films made in Texas, True Stories.

There are many reasons to appreciate this gem of a film beyond the fact it is set in Texas, beginning with the director and co-writer, David Byrne of the Talking Heads. Mr. Byrne brings the quirkiness of Texas urban legends to the screen, set to a well-blended soundtrack by the Talking Heads. When he was scouting locations for his film in 1985, he enlisted the assistance of a Dallas real-estate agent to find several pink houses for potential locations. This real-estate agent was the mother of a friend of mine who was quite happy to help his mom show David Byrne around Dallas, including a viewing of Mary Kay Ash's pink palace.

True Stories features a strong cast, including John Goodman, Swoosie Kurtz and the late Spalding Gray. Goodman's performance as Louis Fyne is both genuine and endearing. In my list of "Who Should Star in This Film?" I would wholeheartedly support Mr. Goodman if he were to star in the role of the late Don Walser, "the Pavarotti of the Plains." The droll but ever-amusing Spalding Gray delivers as well. Who knew that you could use food to represent modernization and industrialization?

Austin Film Festival and the Blanton Museum of Art have teamed up to bring us more good movies over the next couple of months. The New Directions Summer Film Series will focus on "the exceptional work of emerging independent filmmakers," and several of the films in the series were shot locally.

The series kicks off on Thursday, June 18 with one of my favorite Austin-shot films that hasn't had a theatrical release: Gretchen, directed by Steve Collins and photographed by P.J. Raval. Watchmaker Films may be releasing it on DVD soon, but in the meantime, this is a chance to see this oddly sweet movie in a theater. I reviewed the film when it played SXSW in 2006.

Another Austin-connected feature ends the series: Shotgun Stories, written and directed by Austin filmmaker Jeff Nichols. The drama, which stars Michael Shannon, won a Best Narrative Feature award from AFF in 2007 and was also nominated for an Independent Spirit award.

You can catch the series at the Blanton's new auditorium on the University of Texas campus, on the Sundays and Thursdays listed below. Admission is $5 -- or $3 if you're an AFF member, a Blanton Museum member, or UT Austin faculty/staff/student.

Full schedule after the jump: