Film Independent chief Dawn Hudson and new LAFF director Rebecca Yeldham were heaving sighs of relief at the sunny awards brunch at the Hammer Museum Sunday. While official figures are not in, sales of festival passes were down at this year's LAFF, but day-to-day ticket sales were brisk, with many sell-outs, Hudson said. While the various jury and audience award winners are listed on the jump, the real winners of the 10-day fest were the movies that picked up attention and possible distribution.

Winner of a jury acting prize for Shayne Topp, Suzi Yoonessi’s Dear Lemon Lima picked up the most buzz at the fest. Submarine's Josh Braun is repping the mother-daughter flick set in Alaska. (Photo right of cast and director at LAFF awards brunch.) The epistolary film is narrated by 13-year-old Vanessa (part-Yup'ik actress Savanah Wiltfong), who tweets her disappointment that Philip won an acting prize:

although I won snowstorm survivor, philip won the lead in my life story. I tried to reach for the stars, but all I got was melted ice cream.

Winner of the dramatic audience award, surprisingly, was Cyrus Nowrasteh's intense Iranian drama The Stoning of Soraya M., starring Shohreh Aghdashloo, which is in current release. The doc audience award went to Jeffrey Levy-Hinte's music movie Soul Power, which Sony Pictures Classics is releasing July 10.

The narrative jury prize winner was Ben Chace and Sam Fleischner (pictured) for Jamaica-set Wah Do Dem (What They Do). They worked nine months on the film, about a white kid who runs afoul of some Jamaicans, and hope to capitalize on their win to get a distribution partner and a music compilation album, they said.

Building on momentum from Sundance, Ondi Timoner's We Live in Public continues to grow a following. The film will play at the IFC Center in New York in August followed by LA and five other cities in September. Timoner wants to hire a high profile publicist to push the film for awards consideration and an Internet event as well. UPDATE: Abramarama (Anvil! The Story of Anvil) will handle the film's release.

Other docs played well, from Sundance hit No Impact Man, which pits passionate environmentalist Colin Beavan against his journalist/consumer wife Michele, to blogger/filmmaker A.J. Schnack's behind-the-scenes Denver expose, The Convention. Oscilloscope picked up No Impact Man just before LAFF, while The Convention seeks a distrib.

It's crucial that new Los Angeles Film Festival director Rebecca Yeldham programmed an indie opener for Thursday night's LAFF launch. She waited and waited and hung in for the right movie, long after her staff was comfortable, through Cannes. But she finally found her opener. "I wanted for the opening to find a film that reflected the spectrum of great movies in our contemporary film culture," says Yeldham. "We didn't have an American independent as one of the tentpoles."

Yeldham had read Paper Man at the script stage. She knew the filmmakers. "I was excited about what it could be," she said. "We had to see it manifested." In the nick of time, she and programmer Rachel Rosen were able to see Michele and Kieran Mulroney's finished movie, which stars Jeff Daniels as a man with an imaginary superhero friend (Ryan Reynolds). It passed muster. So LAFF is debuting a brand new indie film no one has seen. "I loved the idea of playing something of this quality for the home crowd," says Yeldham. "We're presenting two new directors to not only the industry and the public but to specialty distributors."

For Yeldham, who during a deep recession managed to hang on to most sponsors, add a few new ones and streamline without losing any significant programs, LAFF is "a distinctive festival. It's not just an indie film fest. We're embracing all films from all sources."

Thus Yeldham booked a few studio tentpoles into the Westwood-centered summer fest, from Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (after all, the fest had premiered Michael Bay's first iteration) to the fest's centerpiece, Michael Mann's Public Enemies, starring Johnny Depp as John Dillinger, and fest closer, Disney's English-language version of animation great Hayao Miyazaki's Ponyo.

The fest also waited until the last minute to announce artists in residence Khaled Hosseini (Yeldham produced, with William Horberg, the movie version of Hosseini's book, The Kite Runner) and Thom Mayne, the Pritzker-prize winning architect. Hosseini presents on Saturday night The Stoning of Soraya M. After the screening he'll talk with the film's writer Cyrus Nowrasteh, star Shohreh Aghdashloo and religious scholar Reza Aslan about women and Islam. "This sort of rich contextualization of the movie might never happen again," says Yeldham.

Mayne will talk about architecture and cinema to cinematographer Fred Elmes, who shoots for Jim Jarmusch, Charlie Kaufman and David Lynch.

Austin filmmaker Robert Rodriguez will present a festival conversation with his three kids; they'll talk about making the family film Shorts, with a behind-the-scenes show-and-tell. "They conceived the movie and worked together," says Rosen. "It's for kids."

Some movies are being presented free, including Sundance faves Amreeka and The Cove. The LAFF is also assembling its filmmakers for an off-the-record retreat.

Yeldham and Rosen decided not to worry about where some of their fave selections had already played---a healthy number of films debuted at Sundance, especially--so 500 Days of Summer, Big Fan, Cold Souls, In the Loop, Paper Heart, it Might Get Loud, Humpday, We Live in Public, Black Dynamite, Soul Power, and When You're Strange: A Film About the Doors are all in the program. "Plenty of American independents didn't meet the standards for our programmers," says Yeldham. "Beautiful movies need support. We don't censor anything. I'd rather present films we can stand behind. We're aggressively launching new talent and movies too."

IndieWire posts interviews with LAFF directors.

Here are Yeldham profiles in the LAT and LA Weekly.

DF Indie Studio generated a surprising number of stories, many of them written on the fly over the weekend without much probing. (Here's DHD.) I was skeptical; as I suspected, there was less to the announcement than met the eye. That doesn't mean it's a complete sham. It means that these neophytes have a long ways to go before they sleep. A.P. corrected their DFIS story.

Here's IndieWire's update, including Ted Hope's targeting Chris Monger's The Amateur Photographer as the first film. He told me they had not greenlit anything, nor had he gotten any money from DFIS.

What this tells me is that there is a great hunger for DFIS to exist, to work, to thrive. If not this company, than another. There is a need that DFIS is seeking to fill. Whether they have the chops is another matter. BTW, the reason DFIS supporter Ira Deutchman has been flying under the radar: he had an emergency appendectomy this week.

As Overture Films lines up their 2009/2010 slate--hoping for a breakout--Wednesday they announced development of Celeste & Jesse Forever, a divorce rom-com co-written by and co-starring Rashida Jones (I Love You Man, Parks and Recreation) and Will McCormack (Must Love Dogs, Syriana). Team Todd (Austin Powers, Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland) is producing. (It's odd that Overture announced without a director in place.)

Overture CEO Chris McGurk and COO Danny Rosett have slated for release: Sundance screenwriting award-winner Paper Heart, starring Charlyne Yi and Michael Cera (August 7); horror-thriller Pandorum, starring Dennis Quaid and Ben Foster (September 4); and the untitled Michael Moore Wall Street greed expose (October 2). Set for the first quarter is the F. Gary Gray thriller Law Abiding Citizen, starring Jamie Foxx and Gerard Butler.

The company recently acquired The Men Who Stare at Goats, a war satire starring George Clooney, Kevin Spacey and Ewan McGregor, which is in post-production and not yet dated, and pre-bought Ron Nyswaner and Catherine Hardwicke's contemporary remake of Shakespeare's Hamlet, starring Emile Hirsch, which is casting.

Of these titles, the Michael Moore and Law Abiding Citizen boast the most potential to become breakout hits. So far, DeNiro/Pacino thriller Righteous Kill is Overture's biggest grosser at $40-million. Espionage thriller Traitor and heist comedy Mad Money grossed $24 million and $21 million, respectively. Rom-com Last Chance Harvey scored $20 million worldwide. Art-house acquisitions The Visitor and Sunshine Cleaning fared modestly well. But Sleepwalking, Nothing but the Holidays and Henry Poole Is Here lost money.

This is not an embarrassing track record. With Starz and homevideo, all these pics generated more numbers. What McGurk and Rosett need is a breakout like Twilight.

There's a new producer/distrib/foreign sales combine in the works. DF Indie Studio is led by finance experts Mary Dickinson and Charlene Fisher, who are raising coin. Two years ago they first met with Ted Hope, one of several indie-prods lined up to supply future product for which there is guaranteed U.S. distribution, potentially supervised by consultant Ira Deutchman; ex-Focus and Weinstein Co. foreign sales maverick Glen Basner is set to handle foreign sales. Having domestic release assured would make it easier for producers to raise foreign funding. That's been the scary factor for producers in recent years, as studio specialty distribs have decreased, and even existing ones often refuse to sign on to projects before they are complete.

UPDATE: Dickinson and Fisher started to raise an investment fund, but as they talked to indie insiders, they moved to a more full-service model. "We encouraged them to dream larger," says Hope, "all the way beyond a fund to distribution and marketing, looking at things we felt would help them to raise money and attract producers. I was excited that they were in the under-$10 million space, as I could see the movement out of it. The other writing on the wall was the ending of producer overhead deals. Where I sit, it's producers who generate good material."

Hope also likes the promise of carefully nurtured domestic releasing that doesn't depend on 1500-screen openings. "There are so many changes in the game being played that people have to be innovative in the ways we reach upscale audiences," he says. "Newspapers are shutting down film critics, people don't go to movies, newspaper ads don't have show times, they've cut out the ways we always built interest and attention for films. It's a bigger challenge than ever before. People have to experiment if something is to pop."

Clearly, DFIS has a ways to go to reach its goals and will need to build a track record before it becomes competitive. At this stage, Dickinson and Fisher are unknown to reps for stars and name directors, who won't take a chance on a new outfit sight unseen. "If something's working, that's a good thing," says Hope. "It builds momentum and trust. They've hit some key thresholds, and like everything else they have a series of hurdles to go through."

For his part, on a non-exclusive basis, Hope has "earmarked" a "handful" of projects that DFIS is interested in, he says. But he has not yet received any funding.

It's odd that the indie duo picked the name DF Indie Studios. "Studio" to me connotes the old Hollywood system, with its back-lots and theaters (you had to have both to be called a major studio). That's not what this is. They're sending the message that they're occupying a low-budget space that the studios are not, and taking over a function that the studios have largely abandoned. While the DF Indie Studio business model is structurally sound, and relative neophytes Dickinson and Fisher have lined up strong execs, consultants and producers, their trickiest feat will make or break them: combining accessible competitive commercial indie fare with the strongest possible marketing and distribution.

UPDATE: Here's the LAT's Company Town, the Financial Times and the NYT.

The press release is on the jump.

In the worst of times, Darwinian forces are winnowing out the weak. Companies like Marco Weber's Senator Entertainment that were making their mark at Sundance in January are no longer able to meet their commitments in June. Mark Urman went from the frying pan at David Bergstein's beleaguered ThinkFilm into the fire at Senator as president, moving from NY to LA--and back again. Weber, a hybrid filmmaker-businessman who bought out German company Senator's U.S. arm three years ago, assembled a production slate of six films with the intention of building a distribution company. To that end, he hired away Urman as Bergstein's empire was crumbling under financial strain.

Weber scored a deal with Sony Worldwide to release his slate on DVD and pay and free TV, on the strength of the films Weber had lined up: the horror thriller Clock Tower, based on a vidgame; two genre thrillers from Gregor Jordan, Unthinkable, starring Samuel L. Jackson and Sundance premiere The Informers, starring Billy Bob Thornton and Mickey Rourke, which flopped in April release; the long on-the-shelf family drama Fireflies in the Garden, starring Julia Roberts, scheduled for summer release; and the acquisitions Public Enemy Number One, a French gangster pic starring Vincent Cassel; and another long-finished horror film All the Boys Love Mandy Lane, which had been picked up, then dropped, by another struggling indie, The Weinstein Co. Senator also acquired indie Pierce Brosnan drama The Greatest after Sundance. UPDATE: Producers Don Murphy and Susan Montford withdrew their film Splice, starring Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley and produced by Guillermo del Toro, two months ago when signs became unfavorable, sources said.

Weber pre-sells some territories on each title overseas via different sales companies. Sundance acquisition Brooklyn's Finest, an operatic New York cop tragedy directed by Antoine Fuqua and starring Ethan Hawke, Don Cheadle, Richard Gere and Wesley Snipes, also appealed to Sony, which approved and bought into the deal as the seventh film on the Senator slate. Fuqua was re-editing the picture for a fall release on Senator's dime. But with Senator looking for distribution partners and unlikely to stay in the prohibitive release game, many of these titles are going to be up for grabs. UPDATE: Screen reports on where the films are going to go.

The Seattle International Film Festival had to scramble at the last minute when Senator's two-part Public Enemy Number One was pulled. The lab wouldn't let go of the print. Not a good sign, if other pictures are also in hock.

One would hope that distribution veteran Urman had learned a few things along the way; he spun himself out of his Senator contract nine months in. This time he protected himself from twisting in the wind. If there wasn't enough P & A money raised to back a bonafide distribution effort, then he was out. There wasn't.

Here's IndieWire, The Hollywood Reporter and Variety.

Cinematech blogger Scott Kirsner drank the digital Kool-aid some time back. So the author of 2007's The Future of Web Video and 2008's Inventing the Movies decided that he had to self-publish his newest book, Fans, Friends and Followers. "If I was writing that artists had to be their own entrepreneur," he says, "then I had to do it too."

For no up-front charge (and no advance), Kirsner selected his own fonts at Amazon's CreateSpace. He sent a PDF of the cover and interior to upload. They sent him back galleys to correct and within 10 days of signing off, he had books on sale at Amazon, and collects a bigger percentage of royalties than a publisher would pay. "If I had waited for traditional publishing it would be out in the fall of 2010," he says. "This stuff is timely, it's not the history of MGM. It would have been stale."

For the book, which has sold more than 10,000 copies, Kirsner interviewed three dozen do-it-yourself types in film and video, art and music, from internet pioneer and short video maker Ze Frank to animator M dot Strange. "Until the last three to four years," says Kirsner, "you made a film and either you picked up a distributor at SXSW or Sundance, or not. There was no plan B. You never thought about what might happen, how to get the movie out there. I tried to talk to people about Plan B."

In 2006, Strange persuaded the Sundance Film Festival to play his film We Are the Strange at a midnight screening at the Egyptian by using his YouTube following to prove that he had an audience. He then distributed the film through Film Baby and via YouTube (with a DVD click-through button) in April 2008. According to Kirsner, he made enough money to not only pay off the debt from the film, but to finance his next one.

Here's the trailer:

The agricultural documentary King Corn debuted at SXSW in 2007, went on to other festivals, had a theatrical run, aired on PBS in April 2008, and was one of the biggest selling films on iTunes. Aaron Wolff, Ian Cheney, Curt Ellis and their team kept building a database of fans in FileMaker, then created an email list on Constant Contact. They barraged their fans with new info, updated their website constantly, and kept the promo stream going by guest-blogging at different sites that they knew would be receptive to the film's green subject matter. Here's the trailer:

"A lot of online communities are interested in what you're doing, whether it's a sci-fi movie or a documentary about U.S. future policies," says Kirsner. "With the internet there's a direct link between that review or write-up and where you buy a book. People are closer to the transaction. There's a lot of innovation in terms of business models. People are trying different things. With places like Home Star Runner, which avoids advertising and built their model on selling t-shirts, merchandise and DVDs, or Lulu and CreateSpace, you can see there's a whole new infrastructure, a new pathway for getting books, DVDs, and CDs out there."

But DIY takes work, Kirsner admits: "The promotional energy has to come from you, using blogs and Twitter and getting people to write about your project. It's a whole new world. There are no more sugar daddies taking care of problems. With the old school Hollywood dynamic you had to shuck and jive to get observed by a talent agent, that was the only path to making it. Now you do what you want to get noticed and build up an audience. Then you have a choice to do a deal with a studio or record company, or do your own thing. Some will do it, some will not. But you don't have to wait around and cross your fingers and hope."

Kirsner has been working overtime to get out the word on his book. He's created a Power Tool Wiki that lists tools for building an online fan base. Here are some reviews, including Wired editor Chris Anderson, who log-rolled thusly:

"Making a living in the Long Tail means taking matters into your own hands, crafting a marketing strategy that's just right for you and your work. This book compiles the stories of those who've done it best. You'll get ideas from every one of them. Inspiring and incredibly useful--Kirsner's assembled a playbook for the social media age."

Larry Jordan of HDFilmTools interviewed Kirsner about ways that new technologies are changing the entertainment industry: Part One, Part Two, and Part Three.

Every once in a while I am reminded that my taste is not the same as the mass audience. I can usually call a blockbuster like 300 or Star Trek--in other words, I ignore the tracking and opening weekend predictions to insist--THIS MOVIE IS SO GOOD IT WILL DO BUSINESS. Sometimes, thank God, word-of-mouth counts for something, so that a movie becomes A MUST-SEE.

But occasionally I really like something--often beloved by critics as well--that just doesn't catch moviegoers' fancy. Take, say, the two-part Tarantino/Rodriguez Grindhouse. Both movies were simply too arcane, too close to their pulpy cinephile roots. But what was arcane about Drag Me to Hell, which earned a whopping 83 on Metacritic? But opened to $16 million? And is getting creamed by the competition? What makes this Sam Raimi movie a tweener? Well, the fact that it's a horror/comedy hybrid, for one. (See Slither.) It looks like you can't have a fun scary gross-out E-ride rated PG-13: that way you lose both the family and the horror crowd. (And there's a Fright Night remake in the works.)

That's Dennis Cozzalio's theory (scroll down). He hosted a fun gathering at the Mission Tiki drive-in last Saturday night, complete with hearse and Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule T-shirt giveaways. Was this film freak gathering a bad sign for the movie? Well, most of the drive-in's business that night was over on the side showing Pixar's Up. Other folks have criticized Universal's marketing, which failed to distinguish Drag Me to Hell enough. Debuting it at SXSW was the right move, but the message that the movie was really fun somehow didn't come across.

It's easier to recognize a smart-house tweener that isn't going to do any business. Focus Features' Away We Go, which has all the indie cred bonafides in the world, from Dave Eggers and Sam Mendes to TV comedy stars John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph and movie actress Maggie Gyllenhaal, just doesn't cut it. Mainly the two rom-com leads are not interesting enough, forming a warm mushy bowl of boredom in the middle of the film. We know they love each other. So?

Secondly, the film is a road movie, always a risky narrative structure (see: My Blueberry Nights, also with a non-pro, Norah Jones, at its center). Third, beware of smart sophisticated filmmakers who are making fun of US for being one or more of the following: idiotic, alcoholic, leftie, bourgeois, self-involved, or lousy parents. The movie might as well be called BOOBS ARE US. One of my favorite New Yorker cartoons shows one couple saying to some pals, "Did you see Honky Tonk Freeway? It ruined our August." That ill-fated 1981 John Schlesinger comedy also looked down on ordinary American folks who weren't as cool as the filmmakers. IFC's David Hudson rounds up Away We Go's bad reviews; 56 on Metacritic isn't going to get this pic very far.

We know how women respond to Rob Pattinson as Edward Cullen in Twilight . I knew the second I saw the first teaser trailer that he was a new heartthrob. He's dishy. In IFC's on-demand release, the British micro-indie How to Be, he plays a depressed loser version of himself. Not a big reach. On the other hand, Pattinson stretches quite a bit as Salvador Dali in Little Ashes, a European art film with a cultural pedigree. Set in Spain, the movie throws together three brilliant young university students: painter Salvador Dali (Pattinson), poet/dramatist Federico Garcia Lorca (Javier Beltran) and filmmaker Luis Bunuel (Matthew McNulty). Garcia Lorca and Dali form a powerful bond that is sexual, but Dali can't handle it.

Most of us remember Dali as a flamboyant performance artist with a crazy waxed mustache. He also created some of the great works of Surrealist art. (I was not the only kid to grow up in New York City in love with the Museum of Modern Art's The Persistence of Memory.) Pattinson is fascinating in the role--you can't take your eyes off him. The movie will play great for the gay audience and for ardent Pattinson fans who can take the homosexual content. But the jury is out on Pattinson's acting. It doesn't help that filmmaker Paul Morrison uses a Euro-pudding approach, so that Brit Pattinson sounds less authentic than Spanish co-star Beltran. Why not have all Spanish actors with subtitles?

I'm shocked, shocked! Social communities Facebook and Twitter don't have viable business models. Even YouTube didn't make money on the millions who viewed Susan Boyle's video.

Tom Cruise's career may be turning the corner, as opposed to jumping the couch.

Amazon's new, bigger Kindle is trying to save newspapers.

Francis Ford Coppola has posted the first three minutes of Tetro.

There's considerable uncertainty heading toward Cannes this year. While the global theatrical market is strong, the indie sector is still fragile--and shrinking. With DVDs sinking and piracy on the rise, financeers and foreign sales agents don't know what's safe anymore. Many companies had coasted on funds they had already raised, but now reality is sinking in: new money is hard to find.

The WSJ paints a dire picture of the foreign sales market:

The rise of copyright piracy and increasing competition from local films have held a lid on presales of foreign rights in recent years. But since the credit crunch hit Wall Street and expanded across the globe, producers say they feel lucky if presales cover half of their budgets -- if anything at all.

UPDATE: Screen's Mike Goodridge counters that all is not lost in foreign pre-sales:

Like every other part of the film business, the sales world is going through a sea change. That said, for films that are cost-effectively made and marketable, nothing has changed: presales are still eminently achievable.

Anthony Kaufman in Variety describes a swiftly moving landscape for the indies:

What was once considered enduring in the sector -- the Weinsteins, a mix of active studio specialty divisions, robust DVD sales -- is no longer the case. New players (Summit, Overture) and arthouse upstarts (Oscilloscope, Regent) are making an aggressive go of it in these leaner, meaner times. If this year's Cannes marketplace reflects anything about the state of the business, it's that the industry is constantly shifting.

Whoever would have thought, for instance, that Cablevision's movie unit IFC Films -- one of the weaker distribs after Bob Berney exited in 2002 -- would eventually turn out to be Cannes' most active buyer? It snapped up a whopping 16 films out of Cannes last year for U.S. theatrical and/or VOD distribution. "It's been a gold mine for us," says IFC's Ryan Werner. "It's the most important festival of the year, without question."

Many of the movies in the Cannes market this year are low-budget exploitation titles, but a fair number are filled with recognizable stars like Hilary Swank and established directors such as Peter Weir. A handful of the several dozen movies in Cannes' main showcases also are looking for American distributors, including the late Heath Ledger's “The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus,” Rachel Weisz in “Agora” and director Ken Loach's "Looking for Eric," which features soccer superstar Eric Cantona.

Even though domestic box-office admissions are soaring, the global movie business -- particularly overseas DVD and television sales -- is slumping. International distributors can't get financing to buy movies, piracy is cutting into overseas ticket sales, foreign currencies are falling in value and key international territories have essentially discontinued acquiring American films.

Meanwhile, Focus Features International will be selling Mike Leigh's long-postponed new film in Cannes. It stars Leigh vets Jim Broadbent (Topsy-Turvy) and Imelda Staunton (Vera Drake), and since typically none of these ace improvisers know what the film will be in advance, neither do we. So far Leigh has nabbed six career Oscar noms. Focus Int. has more on its Cannes slate, including, reports Screen:

...Cannes competition entries Broken Embraces from Pedro Almodovar and Taking Woodstock by Ang Lee, and Alejandro Amenabar’s out of competition screener Agora. Kevin Macdonald’s The Eagle Of The Ninth is on the market roster, as are Noah Baumbach’s Greenberg starring Ben Stiller and Jennifer Jason Leigh, The Invention Of Lying directed by Ricky Gervais and Matthew Robinson, and Sofia Coppola’s Somewhere.

UPDATE: Variety surveys the weak domestic specialty b.o so far this year.

Over at the IFC blog, David Hudson has tagged his ongoing Cannes entries.

In the movie business, the mix of art and commerce is always tricky. Some people have taste and talent smarts, but no business acumen. Developing a good script is one thing, but getting it produced is another. The ability to smell a hit is a weapon that only some producers have in their arsenal. Others easily churn out "product" but wouldn't know a good movie if it hit them on the head. When one person combines taste, quality control, and business moxy, then you get the rarest thing of all in Hollywood: a consistent track record.

Jim Stern of Endgame Entertainment is on a roll. While he varies his level of investment and responsibility in three to four projects a year, he had the sense to nail down significant pieces of several upcoming quality movies. At the recent Toronto Film Festival, during a time when self-distribution is the best option available to many indies, Stern went in with one film already sold: The Brothers Bloom, a caper comedy starring Rachel Weisz, Adrien Brody and Mark Ruffalo, which was pre-bought by Summit Entertainment (now set for release May 29). Two Endgame films also sold to Sony Pictures Classics: BBC Film's Noel Coward period comedy Easy Virtue, starring Jessica Biel, Ben Barnes and Colin Firth, and Every Little Step , a doc about the 2006 revival of A Chorus Line, featuring Broadway's first-ever filmed auditions, which Stern financed and co-directed with frequent collaborator Adam Del Deo. And at Sundance in January, Sony Pictures Classics also acquired Lone Scherfig and Nick Hornby's BBC film An Education, which Stern partly funded.

Not bad, having your own production funding. But the question is, how do you use it? In the case of Every Little Step, which opened April 17 to strong reviews, Stern was in a position to know what to do. The Chicago-born theater major from the University of Michigan had produced sixteen Broadway shows, including Stomp, The Producers, and Hairspray. He had produced such films as Proof and Stage Beauty. Stern had directed three films with Del Deo, on basketball, politics and theater. And he had financed a number of films, plays and TV shows since he founded Endgame in 2003. "It really helps being a director," Stern says, "even when I'm producing. It makes things easier and smoother when it's easy to understand what people are trying to do. All you ask is that the director makes the film they say they're going to make."

All Stern's experience came together with the doc Every Little Step when an old theater acquaintance, attorney John Breglio, gave him the Michael Bennett tapes from the snowy night in 1974 when he first conceived of A Chorus Line at a 12-hour marathon session with 19 dancers. When Stern heard the tapes, he felt chills and thought, "This is a movie."

Stern and Del Deo shot some 500 hours of video, and waded through tons of archived footage. With first-time ever permission from Actors' Equity to shoot auditions for the new show, the filmmakers began following 50 to 60 singer/dancers, often using four cameras to capture key moments. "Fortunately in this world, people were used to cameras," says Stern, who knew he had "doc gold" when director Bob Avian wept as Jason Tam nailed his audition as Paul. "We were like flies on the wall. You shoot first and ask questions later."

YouTube has gone live with long-form feature content. One of the charter partners on the new deal is SnagFilms, which now has a YouTube channel featuring full-length feature documentary films selected from SnagFilms' online library. Their long-form feature collaboration launches April 17.

Now, YouTube users can view free ad-supported, full-length feature documentary films via YouTube's search feature as well as library listings on the SnagFilms channel. The initial film slate will come from the 650 docs available on SnagFilms, and will grow over time. SnagFilms splits the revenue it receives from the accompanying commercials with its filmmakers.

Exposure for docs from this co-venture "will help grow the reach and impact of non-fiction films," says SnagFilms CEO Rick Allen.

Jim Jarmusch's movie music tends to be as arty as his visuals, and his new movie The Limits of Control, which Focus Features will release May 1, is no exception. Shot on multiple exotic Spain locations with DP Chris Doyle, The Limits of Control follows the same m.o. as Jarmusch's recent movies Broken Flowers and Coffee and Cigarettes: lure a sprawling ensemble happy to work for peanuts. The movie stars frequent Jarmusch collaborator Isaach de Bankole; Bill Murray, Tilda Swinton, Gael Garcia Bernal, John Hurt and Paz de la Huerta deliver bite-sized roles. In this WSJ interview, Jarmusch seems aware that the film's commercial potential is limited.

Lakeshore's two soundtrack CDs, which include selections from the Japanese rock band Boris, Sunn O )) and Jarmusch's own psychedelic rock-n-roll Bad Rabbit band, will be sold on iTunes and other online retailers on April 28 and in stores on May 12. “When I’ve finished a film and it’s released into the world, the most important thing to me, besides the film itself, is the soundtrack record," the filmmaker writes in his intro to the soundtrack CD. "It collects the musical gifts that both inspired the film and, like passing clouds, shaped and shaded its sonic atmosphere.”

Here's the trailer:

Adam Yauch of the Beastie Boys fits right in at SXSW. He's performed here countless times, but this year he's taking a break from the recording studio to hunt for new acquisitions for his indie label Oscilloscope, which released Wendy and Lucy the old-fashioned way: slow. The pic might actually make it to $1 million, says his partner David Fenkel, who brings his marketing experience from ThinkFilm to the ever-evolving universe of indie film.

Oscilloscope released about seven features in the last year, not bad for a start-up, and has about five more lined up for take-off. Last year the distrib acquired two films at SXSW, docs Frontrunners and Not Your Typical Bigfoot Movie. They picked up Dear Zachary from Slamdance and played it at SXSW last year. Recent pick-ups include the well-received Sundance doc Burma VJ and doc Unmistaken Child, a Tibetan reincarnation mystery. Yauch feels strongly about keeping things small --in fact, he agrees with Magnolia's Eamonn Bowles, who spoke on a Saturday distribution panel, that many indie distribs got into trouble with too much overhead and too-pricey movies. Yauch saw his own record label, Grand Royal, get too top-heavy and go down, he said.

Yauch got tired of going to film fests and seeing how well people responded to movies, only to have distribs say they were unmarketable. The indie companies had become "more stiff and businesslike," he says. "I wanted to take some of what many indie labels do and apply that to making a little indie film distributor." He started out taking a shot with a movie of his own, the basketball documentary Gunnin' for That #1 Spot, so that he wouldn't mess up somebody else's film. "One of my big objectives," he said, "is to keep it pretty streamlined."

In a way, the recession is helping--not only is theatrical business booming, but with some of the bigger companies out of the fray, it leaves more low-hanging fruit for Oscilloscope, which is also taking a new approach to DVD packaging, using eight-panel gatefolds and 80% consumer-recycled paper, "more like LPs," Yauch says. "It's easy to go for movies that are marketable but not very good. Others are good but not very marketable. We ended up going that route."

The Los Angeles Film Festival has nabbed producer Rebecca Yeldham as their new fest director. She starts Monday, replacing Rich Raddon, who left the fest three months ago (not because he wasn't doing a good job, but under a cloud of controversy surrounding his financial support of Proposition 8, the gay marriage ban). Filmmaker Bill Condon, even while exec producing this year's Oscar show, lobbied fellow executive board member Yeldham hard to take the job. Here's Indiewire.

Yeldham admits that she resisted at first, wanting to continue her career as an indie producer of such films as Anvil! The Story of Anvil and The Kite Runner and producing partner Walter Salles' upcoming adaptation of Jack Kerouac's On the Road. But she began to realize that her own enthusiasm for the prospect of redefining and building a world-class film festival in Los Angeles was taking her over. She decided to take on the annual festival, which takes place this June, while continuing to produce.

Yeldham brings a strong resume to the job. Born in Australia, she worked on the Sundance programming team with then-director Goeff Gilmore and now-director John Cooper from 1997 through 2001, when she left half-way through the year to launch Film Four's American division. She helped Sundance build the World Cinema section with more world premieres, and continued to participate in selection committees and juries at the Indie Spirit Awards, Edinburgh Film Festival and Buenos Aires International Film Festival. Her other credits include Salles' The Motorcycle Diaries and Linha de Passe.

Planning for this summer's 14th LAFF is already well under way under programmers Rachel Rosen and Sean McManus; Yeldham does not expect to make any major changes right away, she says. "I will without question have a role in the program. The team is excellent and doing a great job. We'll see how it shakes out. The definition of the festival and programming agenda will evolve."

Film Independent's Dawn Hudson and Raddon's pursuit of Hollywood studio participation in the LAFF with such films as Universal's Wanted and Hellboy II and Paramount/DreamWorks' Transformers will continue, Yeldham says, citing Wall-E as an example of the sort of studio movie she wants to include. She's already chasing several studio summer releases. "I want this festival to be a destination for great films from all sides of the festival spectrum irrespective of their source," she says. "The lines are blurred about what is independent. Even studio budgets are getting crunched and going after independent financing. In my dream vision of the festival, we could play work of quality that had never been seen before: on a studio, medium or micro budget."

Yeldham kicked the financial tires at LAFF before signing on, so she says the support for the fest, even in uncertain economic times, is "enormous." As the Sundance and Tribeca Festivals go through their own reinvention during a recession, says Yeldham, "This isn't just about the festival world. All industries have to take a breath and look inside their wheelhouse and think about how it's working, if it's working, and cultivate goals about how better to serve their constituents, within the reality of our times."

It's no shock that after six seasons of programming the Tribeca Film Fest, Peter Scarlet is moving on. Rumors of his exit had started to circulate at the Indie Spirit Awards. And word is Scarlet was getting antsy with Robert DeNiro and partner Jane Rosenthal's push for a smaller, event-oriented festival with less room for esoterica even before he learned that Geoff Gilmore, after 19 years running the higher-profile Sundance Film Festival, was coming in to supervise him. (When he announced the job switch, Gilmore told me that he was planning to let Scarlet run this year's Tribeca festival.) But while Scarlet could have opted to stay on board through this April's fest, which had his fingerprints on it, leaving now is an act of protest indeed.

Now we play a game of musical chairs. With Scarlet leaving, Gilmore will look to install another programmer in his stead. Meanwhile, Gilmore's post at Sundance will need to be filled. The fest has a deep bench of talent. Long-time Gilmore lieutenant John Cooper, who had taken over much of the programming over the past two years, is the presumed heir, but the festival is grabbing an opportunity to take stock of itself and figure out its strategic goals going forward. But it's unlikely that if Cooper doesn't get the job that he would stay.

And at the Los Angeles Film Festival, the Rich Raddon vacancy is still open. Film Independent's Dawn Hudson has appointed a search committee, including UTA's Rich Klubeck, WMA's Rena Ronson and attorney Craig Emanuel, to vet potential candidates--and in this crazy economy, there are many. Rachel Rosen is still programming the fest, which has been on an upswing since it centralized itself in Westwood, but the LAFF needs a strong fund-raiser/administrator/director with strong showman skills who can help crystallize the summer fest's identity both inside--and outside--Hollywood.

I got a big kick out of Humpday at Sundance. Its director, Lynn Shelton, is someone we will be seeing a lot more of going forward. She's that good. And at Saturday's Indie Spirits, Shelton won the Someone to Watch Award (with a $25,000 grant from Acura) for her last film, My Effortless Brilliance. The prize goes to "a talented filmmaker of singular vision who has not yet received appropriate attention." I grabbed the Seattle-based Shelton at the IFC Shutters party with the Flipcam:

One of the most unlikely people walking the red carpet to the Oscar show Sunday was Kimberly Rivers Roberts, the 9th Ward New Orleans ex-drug dealing heroine of the Oscar-nominated doc Trouble the Water. There she was, resplendent in a silver gown, accompanied by her husband Scott Roberts and executive producer Danny Glover, who agreed to back Tia Lessen and Carl Deal's New Orleans doc featuring Roberts' homevideo footage of her struggle to help her neighbors survive Hurricane Katrina. The pic was a sleeper hit at Sundance 2008, where Roberts gave birth to her first child.

Since Hurricane Katrina, Roberts and her husband have turned their lives around; Kimberly's first hip-hop CD will come out in April at the same time the movie debuts on HBO. Before flying into L.A., she participated in the New Orleans Mardi Gras in the Muse Parade as the muse of tragedy, Melpomene. A celebratory week indeed.

Here's some red carpet Flipcam footage of Glover and Roberts (with some Dominic Cooper wedged in):
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On a bright Saturday afternoon at the Santa Monica Beach, I mingled with the presenters, nominees, media and guests at the Independent Spirit Awards. On the way in, I photographed waiters with free booze and Michael Barker, co-president of Sony Pictures Classics, which won best actress (Frozen River's Melissa Leo), best foreign film (The Class) and best first feature and ensemble cast (Synecdoche, New York). On the blue carpet, I grabbed a shot of Mad Men star Jon Hamm; Dana Delany; At the Movies co-host Ben Mankiewicz; Top Chef host Padma Lakshmi; Film Independent's Dawn Hudson; and IFC's Matt Singer; and then spent a good hour hobnobbing outdoors, the highlight of the event.

UPDATE: Here's Mickey Rourke's acceptance speech:

Photo gallery on the jump:

The Indie Spirits award show on the Santa Monica beach, the day before the Big Show, is my favorite awards event. It's relaxed, convivial. Everyone hangs out outside for an hour or so before the lunchtime ceremony gets under way.

Slumdog Millionaire wasn't up for any awards (eligible for foreign, it wasn't nominated), so it was possible for The Wrestler to walk away with top honors for best film, best cinematography (Maryse Albert) and best male lead Mickey Rourke. Darren Aronofsky thanked his actors, including Rourke, who when accepting his prize took the opportunity to exhort the audience to give Eric Roberts, "The best actor I ever worked with," a second chance. Roberts looked stunned in the crowd. Rourke cried over his dog Loki who died six days ago, saying, "This is for you baby." The crowd under the white tent gave Rourke a rousing standing ovation.

As expected, Milk star James Franco won best supporting male, while Milk scribe Dustin Lance Black won best first screenplay. Charlie Kaufman had to suffer various presenters, from Aaron Eckhart to Cameron Diaz, mauling the pronunciation of Synecdoche, New York. "I guess it really is a bad title," he quipped as he accepted the first of two awards for the night, for best first feature and the Robert Altman award for best ensemble acting. Accepting the supporting actress award, Oscar nominee Penelope Cruz said, "Woody Allen is the symbol of independence in our industry. He does whatever he wants." Allen won best screenplay for Vicky Cristina Barcelona, but did not attend the event.

Sony Pictures Classics enjoyed wins for best actress, foreign film and two for Kaufman. Accepting his award for best foreign film The Class, Laurent Cantet thanked his producers for giving him "the freedom to make films the way I want to make them."

My favorite Indie Spirits host will forever be John Waters, who presented the best director award Saturday afternoon with Zooey Deschanel to The Visitor's Tom McCarthy. Host Steve Coogan did OK--introduced at the show's start via clip by Tropic Thunder co-star Ben Stiller. Indie films are "all about shared experience," Coogan said. "We have all shared the experience of not having seen most of the films." He told Man on Wire star Philippe Petit that "it would have made the film a little better for me if you'd fallen." Man on Wire eventually picked up the win for best documentary.

Coogan's best schtick was showing up onstage as Christian Bale as a foul-mouthed Batman berating an actor dressed up as Joaquin Phoenix in fake wig, beard and shades who whined, "I'm giving up acting." "You've given up shaving," Batman replied, "There's a difference." Last year's host, Rainn Wilson, impersonated Mickey Rourke as The Wrestler, which prompted Rourke as he accepted his award say: "That little blonde dude that did that thing, I'm going to beat your ass."

Of the song homages, Teri Hatcher's renditon of "Bitch is Gone" clearly did not go over with the folks at the Wendy and Lucy table, including a perplexed Michelle Williams.

Best female lead Melissa Leo thanked a theater in Albany, New York for holding Frozen River for "eight fucking weeks." Alec Baldwin, presenting best feature, said, "I want to get back into the movie business so bad. I got to get a dog, get in shape and drop F- bombs on live TV."

After the ceremony, the Indie Spirits gang repaired to Shutters down the beach for a very loud party hosted by IFC, which aired the awards show.

After 12/ 1/2 years, Tom Ortenberg made his farewell rounds at Lionsgate Friday, with tears in his eyes. He opened the LA office back in 1996. On Monday, he starts his new gig running theatrical distrib for The Weinstein Co. and Dimension.

Truth is, the day Mandate's Joe Drake arrived at Lionsgate as co-chief operating officer in late 2007, theatrical films prexy Ortenberg was on his way out. There wasn't enough air in the room for both senior execs. Drake inherited a raft of disappointments at the boxoffice, including Frank Miller's The Spirit, which fell flat at Christmas. This did not sit well with the new boss, who was learning the ropes of distribution and marketing. He decided to roll up his sleeves and take charge himself. With Ortenberg's contract up, it was time to go their separate ways.

This happens all the time: a talented, experienced guy gets promoted into a job that--especially with a new hands-on boss coming in-- made him expendable. At Lionsgate, seasoned execs run distribution (Steve Rothenberg), marketing and publicity (Tim Palen and Sarah Greenberg), and acquisitions (Jason Constantine). So the not-so-obvious play for Ortenberg was to join the Weinstein Co. as president of theatrical distribution. It makes more sense if you remember that he has the unusual distinction of having a smooth and cordial relationship with the Weinsteins, having partnered with the brothers W. since the Disney/Miramax days on Kevin Smith's Dogma and Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, as well as the more recent TWC pics Sicko (also from Moore), Forbidden Kingdom and Rambo. Ortenberg knows who he's dealing with: two challenging and brilliant mavericks who need their next slate to hit. For the Weinsteins, 2009 is make-or-break time.

On paper, TWC offers a promising list of pics for Ortenberg to work with. First, there are two pricey epics I can't wait to see, Rob Marshall's musical Nine (November) and Quentin Tarantino's World War II actioner Inglourious Basterds (August). Also set during that war period is Mikael Hafstrom's long-delayed Shanghai, starring John Cusack (which was not shot in China, set for September); coming up is Wayne Kramer's Crossing Over, starring Harrison Ford (February) and John Hillcoat's adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's dystopian epic The Road, starring Viggo Mortensen, which the Weinsteins gave more time to breathe away from awards season, but have yet to date, as Hillcoat has not completed the 2929 movie, which TWC has invested in.

It also remains to be seen what will happen with John Madden's Killshot, based on the Elmore Leonard novel and starring Mickey Rourke, which has suffered repeated delays and opened for a test run in Phoenix last weekend. Ortenberg can handle such bread-and-butter summer horror as Rob Zombie's H2: Halloween 2 with his eyes closed.

The question is, how much P & A money will the Weinsteins have to play with? Ortenberg assures me there's plenty. "It's time to open a new chapter," says Ortenberg, who insists the parting was amicable. "I'm joining the Weinstein Co. at an opportune moment."

As for Lionsgate, it will be interesting to see if Drake (who chose smartly at Mandate, with such pics as Juno, Stranger than Fiction and Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist) alters the game plan going forward, away from low-cost niche genre pics that have fueled the rich Lionsgate library and toward the higher-budget faux-studio features that the likes of Overture, Summit and CBS Films are chasing. That can be a risky business.

I'm not a big fan of live-blogging, but it does work occasionally, as NY Post critic-blogger Lou Lumenick demonstrates with his play-by-play reporting of the New York Film Critics's divisive voting this morning.

Thus, Rachel Getting Married led the first two ballots and Milk pulled ahead on the third, followed by Happy-Go-Lucky and Slumdog Millionaire; Milk star Sean Penn handily beat The Wrestler's Mickey Rourke; Milk's Josh Brolin beat out The Dark Knight's Heath Ledger; and documentary Oscar front-runner Man on Wire beat out Waltz with Bashir and Trouble the Water. Vicky Cristina Barcelona's Penelope Cruz easily defeated Viola Davis of Doubt; third place was a tie between Rachel Getting Married's Rosemary DeWitt and Debra Winger. Happy-Go-Lucky writer-director Mike Leigh narrowly edged out Slumdog Millionaire's Danny Boyle. Wall-E took best animated feature over Waltz with Bashir.

Here's Lumenick on how the best actress vote went down, which helps explain the ballot process:

Sally Hawkins of "Happy-Go-Lucky'' won the New York Film Critics Circle award for Best Actress as voting got under way this morning at the Time-Life Building. Hawkins won on the second weighted ballot, receiving 39 points to 32 points for Melissa Leo of "Frozen River,'' with Kate Winslet ("Revolutionary Road'') and Anne Hathaway ("Rachel Getting Married'') with 22 apiece. In the NYFCC's convoluted voting system, the critics make one choice apiece n the first round. If nothing captures a majority, there follows one or more weighted ballots, each critic ranks choices with 3, 2, and 1 points; the winner also has to appear on the majority of ballots until the fouth ballot (if there is one) -- in Hawkins' case, 18 ballots.

OSCAR ANALYSIS
Finally, the critics voting solidifies my thinking re: the Oscar race. The Golden Globes may add some fuel tomorrow, but for now I see Milk as the front-runner for best picture, followed by Slumdog Millionaire and The Dark Knight, with The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Frost/Nixon, Doubt and Revolutionary Road fighting it out for last two slots. Penn may be the front-runner now, but the man he has to beat is Clint Eastwood, who gives a devastating performance in Gran Torino. The Academy will be moved to tears by him. Mickey Rourke looks solid for a nom. The Visitor's Richard Jenkins could have used more help here.

Thanks to critics, Sally Hawkins and Melissa Leo are moving into best actress contention, while I've Loved You So Long's Kristin Scott Thomas may not. Changeling's Angelina Jolie is fading fast. Milk's Josh Brolin and James Franco could both win supporting slots.

Revolutionary Road will be in the hunt for picture, director, adapted screenplay, actress, actor and supporting actor. But the grim, serious drama needs some love at this point, especially from critics. And may get it.

The Reader, which may have a shot for Kate Winslet in supporting and David Hare for adapted screenplay, has a long way to go. It got slammed by critics today, earning an initial 54 % on Metacritic. That is not good enough. It needs all the help it can get.

Doubt has the support of the dominant actors branch and likely the writers (if not directors); it will be vying for actress, supporting actress, supporting actor and adapted screenplay.

Much as I admire Four Months, Three Weeks, Two Days, it strikes me as oddly perverse for the NYFCC to throw their foreign vote away on a movie that is only available on DVD at this point, rather than trying to boost the theatrical and Oscar fortunes of a new upcoming release. But it's a free country.

The full list of winners is on the jump:

For those of you hardy enough to embrace more than four hours of Steven Soderbergh's exhaustive biopic of Che, this trailer gives a taste of the riches in store. I'd actually send cinephiles to the first one, The Argentine, which I prefer to the second, Guerilla, which takes a more cinema verite approach to Che's tragic Bolivian campaign, but becomes repetitive. In any case, Benicio del Toro deserved his best actor award in Cannes. Which does not change the fact that a best actor Oscar nom this year is a long shot. Being pragmatic about this doesn't mean that Oscar-watchers are committing a crime against art cinema.

We're in the thick of the award season now.

Today's Indie Spirits noms were largely predictable. (The biggest surprise was the inclusion of Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker, which debuted at Toronto, but won't be released until 2009.) Some movies got a much-needed boost in the awards derby, while others didn't get helped at all. Waltz with Bashir was a surprising omission from foreign film. Elegy and Adam Resurrected came up empty-handed.

Slumdog Millionaire was deemed ineligible for best feature as a foreign film, but it is three-quarters in English, so didn't make it into the foreign category either. But the Fox Searchlight/Warner Bros. film doesn't need help from the Spirits anyway, and neither does Focus Features' Milk, which scored for four noms, including best actor Sean Penn and supporting actor James Franco, but not best feature or director. It's also odd that Fox Searchlight's The Wrestler landed best feature and actor (Mickey Rourke) but not director or writer.

Sony Pictures Classics led the fray with 18 noms and looked to make good on its goal to land best actress noms this year for Anne Hathaway (Rachel Getting Married) and Melissa Leo (Frozen River), and best supporting actress for Married's Debra Winger and Rosemary DeWitt. Laurent Cantet's The Class was among the foreign nominees.

IFC landed 11 noms for its plethora of year-end movies, including foreign entries Hunger and Gomorra. Overture's The Visitor scored a welcome nod for Richard Jenkins for best actor, as well as best director for Tom McCarthy.

Newcomer Oscilloscope scored noms for best feature (Wendy and Lucy) and best actress (Michelle Williams). This is what needs to happen for Williams to gain traction in the best actress race. And Lance Hammer's critic's fave Ballast scored amazing six noms even though he distributed the movie himself. Some films that have already been released theatrically will benefit from awards attention via DVD sales and Netflix rentals.

Charlie Kaufman (also winner of the Robert Altman award and nominated for best first feature) and Woody Allen got boosts for their original screenplays for Synecdoche, New York and Vicky Cristina Barcelona, respectively. Vicky Cristina's Penelope Cruz also added a notch to her belt for supporting actress.

Two popular docs on the Oscar short list grabbed additional attention with Spirit noms, Werner Herzog's Encounters at the End of the World and Man on Wire, the story of Philippe Petit's tightrope walk between the Twin Towers.

The full list of Indie Spirit nominees is on the jump.

Sometimes when so many things are going wrong, some things do go right:

Like retail holiday sales getting off to a robust start.

Like a strong holiday weekend at the boxoffice, well up from last year.

Like the best-reviewed two movies, Milk and Slumdog Millionaire, doing great in limited release over the weekend. Like Slumdog and Hunger picking up three awards apiece at the British Independent Film Awards.

Like Australia playing well enough with adults so that studios like Fox won't regret taking risks like that on other crazy-bet movies. We want studio co-chairman Tom Rothman to keep hosting Fox Legacy, my current fave TV show, where he actually gives intelligent and often passionate background analysis of what made some of the studio's classics so great. It's hard to imagine the studio green-lighting movies like Love is a Many-Splendored Thing or Gentleman's Agreement these days. But by golly they did make Australia, which is in itself a many- splendored thing.

Fox Searchlight will send out its first trailer for The Wrestler today. Their mission: to make filmgoers want to see a movie that looks very male--Mickey Rourke plays a down-on-his-luck, aging wrestler facing the end of his career who suddenly needs to reach out to his daughter, poignantly played by Evan Rachel Wood, and a stripper pal, Marisa Tomei. Communicating with women is not his strong suit.

Indie-financed for $6 million by French company Wild Bunch (the same outfit that backed Che), The Wrestler debuted at the Toronto Film Fest, where Fox Searchlight scooped it up. It went on to play well at the New York and AFI Film fests and opens in theaters at the end of December to qualify for the Oscars.

Director Darren Aronofsky, recovering from The Fountain, initially wanted to cast Rourke but was convinced to raise foreign coin with Nic Cage; to his credit he realized that he just had to have Rourke. He told the actor, who has been dealing with anger management issues for years, to act professionally, cut out the night life and do what he was told. Rourke listened to him and gives a sensitive, nuanced performance. Expect to see some great Rourke stories in the press as he does the rounds. The Academy actors often respond to a comeback like this, but Rourke is not your typical actor.

About 12 years ago, Rourke found himself lying alone in a big giant house with "no career," he recalls, "my entourage had left with everything they could take, including my best leather pants. My ex-wife said to me, 'you need help.' Something happened that night. It was thunderstorming. The doctor came over and I had a gun. They took every gun I had out of the house. I was howling. There was blood everywhere. The dogs were covered with blood. It was mine, I had cut my finger off. I left the house in the thuunder and lightning and took my six dogs to sleep on the beach. I couldn't stay in the house anymore."

Twelve years of intense psychotherapy followed. "I'm down to a phone call every Saturday," he says. "I didn't want to change. I was ashamed, I was proud of the armor I had built up. It was a street macho thing, from where I came from. But it's a weakness. If you take it too far, it scares people. It's a strength if you're living on the street, where I spent too many years. Even after I made it as an actor, I was surrounding myself with a group of people from that world. I didn't want to live in a state of shame and anger. I still have nightmares to this day. I'm thankful to get this second chance. When you were as bad as I was, out-of-control and unprofessional and scary--I didn't realize the degree to which I frightened people in the business."

I ran into Steven Soderbergh this weekend at the AFI Fest Che party. He's going to start filming Cleopatra in April. "What's your favorite musical?" I asked him. Pause. He said his inspiration for the 3D musical was Rita Hayworth as Gilda. That's the stylized, ripe tone he's going for, he said. The movie will be shot with with hi-def Red cameras and star as the Egyptian queen Chicago's Catherine Zeta Jones (who worked with Soderbergh on Traffic).

Mark Olsen writes up Che, which Jeff Wells remains ga-ga over. I still think Soderbergh could have wrestled Che into submission at a more audience-friendly length. But all power to him. He's never, ever dull: he just wrapped filming his latest no-budget 2929 movie, The Girlfriend Experience, with porn star Sasha Grey.

Here's a clip from the Che press conference at Toronto.

[Photo of Steven Soderbergh by Jeff Wells]

Here's my Weekly column on Slumdog Millionaire director Danny Boyle, and in case you missed it, my flipcam interview with him from Telluride, one of the first he gave on the film.

Fox continues to assemble its marketing materials for Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire. The official trailer debuted on Yahoo Movies today.

Focus Features had a plan: mount the world premiere of Milk, the gay agitprop biopic about San Francisco politician Harvey Milk, on the 30th anniversary of his death, at the famed Castro Theatre, in San Francisco. Universal's specialty distrib, which also released Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain, held off on showing the pic to the press (except for some long-lead folks) until the same day as the SF launch Tuesday night. Here's Pamela McClintock, William Horberg's blog report, Greencine and A.P. :

Van Sant said he had been talking about making this film for 18 years."He's an American hero," Van Sant said. "He's a great example of a man representing his community and his city."

Holding off the press until the premiere led to some accusations that the distrib was hiding the pic. Au contraire. Now the floodgates will be unleashed. I missed the screenings Tuesday: all I'm hearing is that it's Sean Penn's picture.

[Photo by William Horberg]

This teaser was prepared for Slumdog Millionaire's recent screening at the London Film Festival. Check out the fluid, high-speed camera work. This could not be done with a steadicam operator. The camera man is running with a hard drive in his backpack, holding the lightweight SI 2K gyro with a camera lens in his hand, which shoots a high-res digital image. Boyle shot about 70% of the film this way.

Fox Searchlight went from zero to 100 when it took over the release of Danny Boyle’s rags-to-riches romance Slumdog Millionaire (from partner Warner Bros.) just before its launch at September’s Telluride and Toronto Film fests. (Here's an exclusive first look at the official poster.)

The specialty label wasted no time in getting up to speed on Slumdog marketing materials in advance of a November 12 limited opening. They had Boyle, a director who has built a core indie cinephile following, but no name stars. The movie, which is 80 percent English, 20 percent Hindi, is about a teen from the slums of Mumbai, India who answers every question right on India’s “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” The movie is less about how he won—although it answers that question—than why he needed to win. The final answer: Love.

“We do some of our best work under extreme pressure,” says Searchlight COO Nancy Utley. “You have to go with your gut. We tried to capture the spirit of the movie. The upside of the title is it doesn’t seem like anything you’ve ever heard before: it’s a contradiction in itself. We picked up the color palette of the foreign locale, and a beautiful girl, in action."

Searchlight is sending Boyle to spread his Brit charm on a press tour of a dozen American cities through October and November. And Searchlight will do what they did with “Little Miss Sunshine”: wrestle up pre-opening buzz with word-of-mouth screenings, 215 to be exact, in 50 cities. “They’re starting now,” says Utley.

TV spots will take advantage of the movie’s Bollywood soundtrack and closing dance number, and eventually reviews and awards. Natch, Searchlight is supporting an Oscar campaign for the filmmaker—“it’s time,” says Utley—and adapted screenplay writer Simon Beaufoy, who was Oscar-nominated for the label’s The Full Monty. “We always have the little underdog,” says Utley, who’s banking that Slumdog will place favorably against darker, grimmer Oscar competition. “This movie makes you feel good in a time of deepening anxiety.”

UPDATE: As to the controversy about Slumdog's R rating--which Boyle himself is helping to fuel--look at the movie. While it ends up in a good place and is exhilarating to watch, the film puts the viewer through some tough nasty violent real world shit (literally). I spoke to some media folks last night who, while they liked Slumdog, disagreed with its "feel-good" rep. They felt a little beat up along the way. "Definitely an R," said these two parents of a ten-year-old.

At the Gotham Awards, Ballast was the big leader with four noms. MovieCityNews has a rundown. Ballast will also be a likely strong Indie Spirit contender. Of the movies nominated, those gaining needed forward momentum going into this year's awards season include Frozen River's Melissa Leo, Rachel Getting Married's Rosemary DeWitt, and Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York, all backed by Sony Pictures Classics, plus Woody Allen's Vicky Cristina Barcelona (Weinstein Co) and The Visitor (Overture), which will likely benefit Penelope Cruz and Richard Jenkins, even though their actual Gotham noms are for best feature and ensemble.

Well, the day has arrived. Wayne Wang's Princess Nebraska will go up online for free streaming tonight at the YouTube Screening Room.

But I've got the exclusive preview: you can stream it here and now. This is a first. Yes, Michael Moore did it--but he charged for the privilege. And many young filmmakers share their wares online. But this is a name director, Wayne Wang, who has the option of going with a distributor--his companion film A Thousand Years of Good Prayers is in theaters now. And on some level he's using this movie to market the other one. But still--this is a chance to see if a marketing effort in support of this video stream of an admittedly small and arty film will yield big numbers. (Dennis Lim profiles Wang in the NYT.)

For Wang, Magnolia's pioneering distribution plan ties in with the Princess of Nebraska's theme: in the film, a young Chinese woman "tries to locate her identity through different kinds of new media," said the filmmaker, who shot the film "with various kinds of easily accessible digital sources. I am very excited that the distribution will be consistent with the way the piece was conceived and produced."

"The internet's ability to provide free streaming video is going to radically redefine independent film's access and availability to its audience," said Magnolia distribution exec Ray Price, who coordinated this strategy with Wang, Cinetic Rights Management and YouTube. "It provides a new platform which can free us from the 'Top Ten' mentality in the same way that FM radio did for the music business."

Many people have been waiting for a name auteur is put his film online for free, points out Matt Dentler of Cinetic Rights Management. "That time is now."

Enjoy! This is not a trailer. This is the whole film.

I knew when I booked Ballast at Sneak Previews that some of the folks wouldn't go for it. The movie, a critical and audience hit at Sundance, where it won prizes for director and cinematography, was one of the few films there to land a distributor, IFC Films. But writer-director Lance Hammer decided to release the film himself.

Hammer is a tall, lanky, healthy guy with clear, intelligent eyes. He started out as an architecture student at USC who needed such expensive equipment to render his designs that he did VFX for hire at Warner Bros., building a virtual CG Gotham for a Batman sequel. He was pursuing a career as a studio art director--making pots of money--but the excesses of the studio system, the sheer inanity of the content, depressed him. Between shows he'd go on the road, exploring rural areas in the South. Ten years ago, he fell in love with the Mississippi Delta. He wanted to capture the feel and mood of the place, but didn't know how to shape a narrative to accomplish that. He kept working on a script.

When a project he was developing with producer Mark Johnson fell through, Hammer took the funds that he had raised and applied them to Ballast instead. (The title refers to the balanced weight in the hull of a ship that keeps it from sinking.) He hired Brit cinematographer Lol Crowley sight unseen on the basis of his reel; luckily they hit it off immediately when he showed up for work. They scoured the Delta, scouting locations, talking everything through.

Hammer spent long months in the area casting locally for non-pros who fit his idea of the characters they would be inhabiting. One actor who had done local theater and film work proved to be the most difficult, in terms of bringing him back down to some level of authenticity, but he eventually figured out what Hammer wanted.

Finally, the "acting" in the film--by Tarra Riggs, as a single African-American mother struggling to support her herself and her 12-year-old son, played by JimMyron Ross, who is attracted to the local drug culture, and Michael J. Smith, Sr., playing a bereaved twin whose brother committed suicide--is authentic, but inexpressive and flat.

But the story is powerful, the images beautiful, the tone, mood and sense of place are all strong. Hammer, inspired by John Cassavetes, Mike Leigh and the Dogme movement, rehearsed his actors, gave them things to react to in search of emotions, and only as they were filming, supplied more concrete direction about where the story was going. He insists that only by roaming the area with a hand-held camera--35 mm, to take full advantage of available light--could he capture flights of geese and other improvisational moments.

Paula Garces (Harold & Kumar 2) is inviting audiences to participate in the creation of her new feature film, Red Princess Blues, via her interactive website myProducer.tv, which launches next week.

The ad-based site boasts social networking, video streaming, and micro-financing fundraising. Garces wants filmmakers to start a free profile and ask other site members for feedback on fundraising, casting, script, editing, promotion and release. She posits that if a filmmaker engages other experts on the site, he or she will not only raise money but will gain the insight to produce a better and potentially more popular film. (Really?)

Filmmakers can also create a "private collaboration area" on the site which permits access only to crew members.

It sounds like a good idea, but more established indie filmmaker sites like Withoutabox, iKlipz and Spout have already built a community of filmmakers. It's hard to imagine that this will compete.

Lionsgate threw a party at the Landmark in Westwood Monday night for Oliver Stone's W, which was basically an intimate L.A. premiere for Stone and his cast; the movie will also premiere in New York and the Austin Film Fest. Josh Brolin soaked up the applause, flanked by his father and uncle; everyone agreed that he did a helluva job as George W. Bush, from Yale frat-party boy to reformed drunk and born-again Christian and one of the worst presidents in United States history. James Cromwell also scored big as Bush, Sr. in the father-son drama. Cast members Richard Dreyfuss, Scott Glenn, Ioan Gruffudd, and Noah Wyle were also on hand, along with producers Bill Block and Moritz Borman.

Stone is rushing the $30 million movie (distributed by Lionsgate and financed by Block's foreign sales firm QED International, with $25-million in P & A backing from Omnilab Media) into the marketplace October 17, less than three weeks before the presidential election, betting that audiences are hankering for a sharp psychological profile of their departing president. More than ever though, as the world teeters on the brink of financial disaster, it's hard not to be very angry with Bush. And Stone's movie focuses on Bush's failures in Iraq, which are not center stage right now.

The movie is utterly plausible, well-acted by a top-notch ensemble (except for a too-broad Thandy Newton as Condoleeza Rice) and surprisingly balanced, compassionate and even-handed. Somehow the film lacks the urgency of its own making.

"We started it in May and finished it this week, so we're pretty much on edge here," Stone told the crowd, which included Ellen Barkin, Casey Affleck, Phil Noyce, Jonah Hill, Maria Bello, Patrick Wachsberger, Andy Vajna, Jake Bloom, Irving Kershner, Bob Cooper, Jay Roach, CAA's Bryan Lourd, Doc O'Connor and Dan Aloney, James Woods, Al Pacino, Paul Haggis, and Bill Maher. "This is based on a true story. We actually did a lot of research to bring to life these murky things." Stone cited his reliance on the "raw body of material" of a dozen journalists, from Barton Gellman and Bob Woodward to James Risen, Michael Isikoff, Jane Mayer and Frank Rich. "There's more to come out," he said, "but enough here to start. Why make this movie? Where are we now as a country, and and where are we going? A large part of of that answer lies with this character, George Bush."

At the after-party, Stone admitted that he was walking a "tightrope" with W, because these are all well-known, real people. It's not satire, like Dr. Strangelove, which is "fiction, beautifully done," he said. "We couldn't go to Strangelove. We have Saturday Night Live and Comedy Central. They have done that. We have to find credibility, we have to eventually care about him--not sympathize. I didn't like Nixon, but I was able to empathize with him. Bush is the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain now. All his policies are in place. We'll be dealing with this stuff for 20 years."

Maher's own Religulous is playing well to left-skewing audiences, write Pamela McClintock and Tatiana Siegel, who report on how polarizing political films are faring at the box office. Here's Todd McCarthy's review, and Peter Bart's take on the political film landscape.

Jeff Wells muses about W. So does David Poland. Stone opens up in GQ, talked in June to the LA Times, gave EW a cover story, and talked yesterday to Larry King on CNN:

Here's the trailer:

There's something missing from our American movies. After watching a mess of films in Telluride, Toronto and New York, I realized I was seeing great foreign films and mediocre American ones. What's the missing ingredient? Many of our great directors. Where's Lawrence Kasdan, Jim McBride, Bob Rafelson, Robert Towne, Joe Dante, Walter Hill, William Friedkin, Phil Kaufman? These directors should all be working at the top of their game.

What other directors are we missing?

When foreign filmmakers like Caroline Link (Nowhere in Africa) come to America, they have the option of skipping town and going back to work in their own countries, where they can work at the top of their local food chain on modestly-budgeted movies with their top movie stars. (She finally made the terrific A Year Ago in Winter in Germany after developing it in Hollywood.) American directors are stuck here with our messed-up studio system that spoils and overpays people when they hit it big and then drops them cold when they become "irrelevant."

Here's my column.

The younger generation--even smart cinephiles--doesn't like westerns anymore. The period is just too far away for them, they don't relate. It's a genre that isn't surviving. It had its place in American history: basically, western tropes have been absorbed into other genres like action adventures and sci-fi fantasy.

All hail the folks who want to keep this aging genre alive, and actor-writer-director Ed Harris is one of them. I went into Appaloosa with the general impression from Toronto and various reviews like this one from Todd McCarthy, that it was an okay, respectable western, slow-paced, nothing great.

Well, I adored it. Why? It's for grown-ups. It's well-plotted, based on the book by Robert B. Parker, and Harris directed the hell out of it. He and Viggo Mortensen have a wonderful, deliberate, subtle time hanging out as two "lawmen" in a world where actors actually have something to do. I'm sorry, but western heroes (and anti-heroes) are sexy.

Many critics have taken issue with the Renee Zellweger character. Clearly, she's not your ordinary Western babe. (Any western involving a significant female character is a plus.) Obviously, we have a bromance here between two men, and the woman presents a challenge to their bond. The men will never doubt each other.

Their triangle is set within the strange warped milieu they live in: uptight Puritan morality on the one hand, wild, lawless frontier on the other. In those days if a woman wasn't a virgin, a wife, a squaw or a whore, what was she? These smart actors have a fine time playing with the genre within a naturalistic context. Of course the bad guys are real bad: Jeremy Irons and the great Lance Henriksen. Actors should love this movie. Harris and Mortensen continue to amaze. Other mature sensibilities--movie critics--appreciated the pic to the tune of 74% on Rotten Tomatoes. But will anyone go see it?

This weekend's movie lineup was a bizarre to say the least. Family comedy Beverly Hills Chihuahua (Tomatometer, 46%), about cute talking dogs, beat out everything else.

Liberal gadfly Bill Maher's Religulous (Tomatometer, 64 % did just okay on 500 screens, while David Zucker's anti-Liberal American Carol went to more than 1600 and came in ninth at the B.O. (Largely unscreened for critics, the reviews came in late and good: 75 % on the Tomatometer.)

Maybe moviegoers aren't seeking to be offended by polarizing political content. (Clearly, NY Observer Press critic Armond White doesn't.) Religulous is funny. Maher whisks us breathlessly through his whirlwind tour of the world's religions, riding roughshod over any pretension to serious doc journalism. It's coarse comedy. But Maher can't help but condescend to stupid people who actually care about these unbelievable things. When he runs up against someone smart who can hold their own with him it works better. There might have been a way to make his arguments with a defter, lighter hand.

While Oprah may not be willing to promote Barack Obama on her show these days, she doesn't hesitate to use her considerable clout with women to sell movies she believes in. She delivered for helmer Spike Lee, exhorting her millions of viewers to see his revisionist World War II epic The Miracle at St. Anna, for which he was duly grateful. The movie needs her help; it scored a miserable 29 % on Rotten Tomatoes.

And Oprah came through for Gina Prince-Blythewood's faithful, effective, and (given the presidential election) resonant adaptation of Sue Monk Kidd's 2002 bestseller The Secret Life of Bees. O Magazine also visited the set during filming.

Oprah gushed over Queen Latifah, who's warmly charismatic as the mom-figure bee-keeper in the 1964-set southern drama about a young teen runaway (Dakota Fanning) who seeks refuge with a cultured family of African-American women; Alicia Keys, who admitted to tapping into her own personality as a tough but lovelorn musician; Sophie Okonedo, who doesn't overplay an over-emotional woman who never recovered from losing her twin sister; Jennifer Hudson, who stays real as the young girl's nanny; and Fanning, in some ways more experienced than some of her co-stars, who carries the movie on her narrow 14-year-old shoulders.

Fanning told our first Sneak Previews class this week that while she reads and researches and prepares for any character she plays, this one came naturally, partly because she's from the South. Something happens the minute a director calls action, she says. She just becomes the character. While a group of reps and her mother read all her scripts, Fanning makes the final decision on what to make, based on what she responds to emotionally. While she enjoyed finally kissing a boy (The Wire's Tristan Wilds) in this coming-of-age story, Fanning only wants to do age-appropriate roles; she's in no rush to grow up.

Prince-Blythewood admitted that having been adopted played a part in her strong response to this story about a girl who thinks she accidentally killed her mother. Prince-Blythewood chased the project (produced by Lauren Shuler Donner, Will Smith and Joe Pichirallo) after it fell apart at Focus Features, and brought more Civil Rights consciousness to her adaptation for Fox Searchlight. Being a screenwriter, said the UCLA film school grad, has made all the difference in being able to direct movies like Love and Basketball (a fave of mine) and Bees. Despite the eclectic casting, from Brits Okonedo and Paul Bettany to untrained actor-singers Keys and Hudson, the ensemble hangs together. Even though the director wound up casting some mighty crooners in the film, Prince-Blythewood kept the singing to a minimum. "I was afraid it would pull the audience out of the movie," she said.

The Secret Life of Bees opens October 17.

Sony PIctures Classics is claiming first screener of the season this year. Academy voters should be getting today their copies of Frozen River, starring Best Actress candidate Melissa Leo (here on the cover of Filmmaker). Gold Derby weighs her Oscar chances.

Remember, when SPC started lobbying for Amy Adams for supporting actress in Junebug, nobody thought she had much of a shot. And Ryan Gosling was a long shot too, for Half Nelson. The actress race is weak this year, which helps Leo's cause.

But SPC is also pushing Anne Hathaway for Jonathan Demme's Rachel Getting Married, as well as Kristin Scott Thomas for I've Loved You So Long. That's three women chasing actress slots. Of the three I'd give Thomas the best shot. She's due. She's British. Wears no makeup. And acts in French.

As I previously reported, Ari Folman's animated doc Waltz with Bashir won't be tracking a documentary nod, SPC confirms, although it's eligible in the foreign film and animated categories. Documentarian/writer/ blogger A.J. Schnack has more.

Well, all that arguing and posturing and phoning and sending of legal letters between Scott Rudin and Harvey Weinstein last week were all about one thing: convincing Weinstein to loosen up the reins on a punitive post-production schedule for Stephen Daldry's The Reader.

Yes, Harvey got what he wanted: The World War II era romance starring Kate Winslet will open December 12. But producer Scott Rudin fought hard to get his director what he needed to finish the movie properly. Harvey will have to spend more money to give him an extra month to work on the movie. And more support in the editing room. And they're moving the music production back to NYC.

I got a taste last week of what happens when Rudin fights for a director. And what happens when Weinstein fights for an Oscar campaign. He doesn't want to wait. This year is better for the movie, he says, although he is slated to release some seven other pics before the end of the year, movies he retrieved from MGM.

It's a win-win. Daldry gets support to finish the movie, and Weinstein gets a potential Oscar contender. He's fighting to make some dough this quarter, and needs all the winners in his corner that he can get. Who knows where he'll be a year from now? UPDATE: Meanwhile, while Weinstein Co. pocketed some $20 million when it sold rights to Project Runway to Lifetime, it may not have had the right to do so, explains Portfolio.

Mark Gill's June state of the indies speech inspired many responses within the Indie community. Here's the most recent, a keynote speech September 27 from vet producer Ted Hope (The Savages, American Splendor, 21 Grams, Lovely & Amazing, Happiness) at Film Independent's Filmmaker Forum. Hope makes a very important distinction: between the health of the indie film business and the quality of the films themselves.

A THOUSAND PHOENIX RISING
How The New Truly Free Filmmaking Community Will Rise From Indie's Ashes
I can't talk about the "crisis" of the indie film industry. There is no crisis. The country is in crisis. The economy is in crisis. We, the filmmakers, aren't in crisis. The business is changing, but for us -- us who are called Indie Filmmakers -- that's good that the business is changing. Filmmaking is an incredible priviledge and we need to accept it as such -- and accept the full responsibility that comes with that priviledge.
The proclamations of Indie Film's demise are grossly exaggerated. How can there be a "Death Of Indie" when Indie -- real Indie, True Indie -- has yet to even live?
Yes, there's a profound paradigm shift, and that shift is the coming of true independence. The hope of this new independence is being threatened even before it has arrived. Are we going to fight for our independence and can we even shoulder the responsibility that independence requires? That is: will we band together and work for our communal needs? Are we ready to leave dreams of stardom and wealth behind us?
When someone says "Indie is dead," they are talking about the state of the 'Indie Film Business,' as opposed to what are actually the films themselves. They can say "The sky is falling" because for the last fifteen years, the existing power base in the film industry has focused on films fit for the exisiting business model, as opposed to ever truly concentrating on creating a business model for the films that filmmakers want to make.
This is where we are right now: on the verge of a TRULY FREE FILM CULTURE, one that is driven by both the creators and the audiences, pulled down by the audience and not pushed onto them by those that control the apparatus and the supply. We now have the power and the tool for something different, but will we fight to preserve the Internet, the tool that offers us our new freedom? Can we banish the dream of golden distribution deals, and move away from asking others to distribute and market it for us? Can we accept that being a filmmaker means taking responsibility for your films, the primary responsibility, all the way through the process? That is independence and that is freedom.
Indie, True Indie, is in its infancy. The popular term "Indie" is a distortion, growing out of our communal laziness and complacency -- our willingness to be marketed blandly and not specifically. Our culture is vast and diverse, and we need to celebrate these differences, not diminish them. It's time to put that term "Indie" to rest.
Independence is within our reach, but we have to do what we have never done before: we have to choose.
It's a lot like the [U.S.] Presidential election. And it's also a lot like the way psychotherapy works: we have to ask ourselves if the pain we are experiencing presently is enough to motivate us to overcome the fear inherent in change itself.

[Photo: producers Ted Hope and Christine Vachon; transcript courtesy IndieWire]

Film Panel Notetaker did what he always does at last week's IFP-produced Independent Film Week in New York. He took notes! Here are highlights of the panels (I did the Q & A with exiting Picturehouse chief Bob Berney, right, on the state of the indies):

Kevin Smith - Sept. 14.

Show & Sell: Positioning for Festivals - Sept. 14.

Medicine for Melancholy - Sept. 15.

State of Film Festivals, with Sundance's Geoff Gilmore - Sept. 15.

State of the Industry with Bob Berney - Sept. 16.

More panel links on the jump.

Every fall the good old New York Film Fest, which opens September 26, gets the same scrutiny. It's like an annual ritual. Some journalist asks, is it still relevant? does it only appeal to old people? And someone else, in this case The Reeler, defends it as an institution for the ages.

This year, even if the pickings were slim among higher-profile American pictures, I particularly commend Telluride and New York (Toronto plays a different kind of game) for sticking to the best that world cinema had to offer. New York has always kept arcane art films at the core of its selection of some two dozen films, and often chooses controversial and unpopular pics, such as last year's Brian DePalma Iraq flick Redacted.

More than Cannes, which tends to stick to name auteurs and only rarely anoints new members to the club, the NYFF has always been brave about its choices. Even the erudite programmers at Telluride this year hadn't heard of some of NY's picks. These days festivals are supposed to challenge audiences. That's their job.

Scott Kirsner posits a new role for film fests in this Businessweek story on Innovation Lessons from Hollywood, complete with an 18 People Who Changed Hollywood slide show.

Filmmaker magazine posts Jamie Stuart's NYFF 46 teaser and Spoutblog's Karina Longworth adds analysis of his series of NYFF shorts over the years.

[Photos: NYFF's Wendy and Lucy and Hunger]

Indie vet Peter Broderick read Mark Gill's zeitgeist-shifting sky-is-falling speech on the state of the independents and thoughtfully worked out a response of his own, A Guide to the New World of Distribution, designed to be a helpful primer for indie filmmakers trying to navigate in today's treacherous marketplace.

James D. Stern's L.A.-based Endgame Entertainment is on a roll.

As expected, Stern sold North American and Australian rights to his showbiz documentary Every Little Step to Sony Pictures Classics. The deal was in final stages Monday after the film won raves from auds and critics at the Toronto International Film Festival.

Endgame funded and produced Every Little Step, a behind-the-scenes look at auditions for a revival of the Broadway classic. Filming started back in 2005 as the show auditioned some 1,700 actors/singer/dancers hoping to land a slot on the 2006 Chorus Line. The pic blends audition footage with vintage material from the original 1975 production. The moving doc plays like a reality-TV show crammed with winners and losers as talented hoofers put themselves on the line. It’s a likely awards contender for best doc.

Stern and Adam Del Deo both produced and directed. The team also made docs So Goes the Nation and The Year of the Yao. Stern also produced shobiz productions The Producers, Hairspray, Stomp and Legally Blonde.

Endgame's other Toronto pics were Brothers Bloom, starrng Mark Ruffalo, Adrien Brody and Rachel Weisz, which Summit acquired in December 2007, and Stephen Elliot's romantic comedy Easy Virtue, based on the Noel Coward play, starring Jessica Biel, Colin Firth, Ben Barnes and Kristin Scott Thomas, which is also expected to sell. Endgame has also co-financed past releases I'm Not There, Hotel Rwanda and White Noise.

William Morris Independent repped Every Little Step in the sale. The agency's New York Theatre department was involved in early discussions on the project because they repped the attorney and the estate of A Chorus Line creator Michael Bennett, who died in 1987. William Morris Independent's Rena Ronson sold the Japanese rights to the film to Shochiku early on, and took the project to Endgame, which put up the lion's share of the budget.

[Sharon Swart contributed to this report]

So far, the big winner on the fall fest circuit, based on critical, audience and exhib reaction, is Slumdog Millionaire, the pic that Warners let get away.

That makes Fox Searchlight, the distrib that grabbed Slumdog and The Wrestler, another big winner coming out of Toronto. Based on its $6-million budget, The Wrestler looks to be a success, but it will be a tougher sell for Searchlight, which acquired it for under $4 million, than Slumdog, which is a more upbeat crowd-pleaser. Clearly director Darren Aronofsky steered The Wrestler to Searchlight when Lionsgate thought they had landed the picture. That's about messy multi-pronged negotiations.

Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker scored a sale to Summit, but it was modest ($1.2 million) because the filmmakers insisted on a wide release to differentiate the film from other Iraq War movies via arresting visuals in TV spots. So part of the cost of acquiring North American rights to the film was the marketing commitment.

The rest of the fest field were small movies that may have to settle for small distribs, if any. "This lack of 'breakouts' continues from the past several festivals," observes Picturehouse prexy Bob Berney. "IFC continues to be able to pick up interesting films for low cost for their VOD system, and Che is a great one for them. By Cannes, there will be more films available and probably some new buyers as well. The good films will find distribution on some level, even if the deals aren't as robust as a few years ago."

IFC is another winner, buying Che and Everlasting Moments and screening seven pics at the fest. "A space has opened up for them and Magnolia too," says one specialty distrib exec. "They're going to have a lot of films available to them."

One could say the losers were the sales agents who didn't unload their slates by fest's end. It may be time to come up with a new model for how to sell pics at fests, because the old one doesn't seem to be working anymore. Fanning bidding wars doesn't work when two big movies sell at a major fest and so many little companies are waiting to spend as little as possible on what's left. Says one Oscar campaigner: "There's no rush anymore."

[Photos: top, Danny Boyle, director of Slumdog Millionaire; IFC topper Jonathan Sehring and critic Leonard Maltin at the Indie Spirit Awards]