Film News

BY JOE O'CONNELL
Big Screen, Little Screen

Sin City the television series? Yep, if the Weinstein Co. has its way,
Robert Rodriguez's big-screen adaptation of Frank Miller's noir graphic
novel will be on the small screen about the time Sin City 2, the film
slated to start production in Austin by the end of the year, is
scheduled to screen. No word on what, if any, involvement Rodriguez and
the original cast will have in the project. And just for the kids in us
all, Holes, the young-adult novel by Austinite Louis Sachar, is also set
for a television pilot. Sachar's book about a Texas juvenile detention
camp has already been a 2003 film, then a stage play. The pilot from
Walden Media is expected to be a half-hour comedy.
Lights! Camera! Action!

Now shooting locally is All the Boys Love Mandy Lane, a horror film
starring local actress Amber Heard as a devastatingly beautiful school
girl who has a gaggle of zombie-like admirers. Recent American Film
Institute grad (and former assistant to Paul Schrader) Jonathan Levine
directs... Starting production this week is Steve Cauley's Wake Up,
Herbert, in which right before Christmas a guy loses a job he didn't
enjoy and keeps having a dream in which he asks Santa to give him his
manhood as a present. It's a first film for writer/director Cauley, a
St. Edward's University grad who's a former newspaper editor and teacher.
Truly Indie

Score one for John Pierson's advanced producing class at the University
of Texas. Cavite, the film by Ian Gamazon and Neill Dela Llana that was
pushed through the class (and premiered at SXSW Film 05), is the first
to be signed by Mark Cuban and Todd Wagner of 2929 Entertainment for a
new program called Truly Indie, in which indie films get help with
marketing and sales tools so they can get their film out sans a
traditional distributor in Landmark theatres owned by 2929.

You May Already Be a Winner

Austin's Lauren Sheppard is one of 10 finalists for a Nicholl Fellowship
in screenwriting from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences. Her
screenplay The Last Wish Girl made the cut out of a whopping 5,879
entries (which included Chronicle contributor Kimberley Jones as a
semifinalist), and, if chosen, will earn her a $30,000 fellowship. Cross
your fingers... University of Texas prof Ellen Spiro and her co-director
Karen Bernstein won a well-deserved Lone Star Emmy for their insightful
documentary Are the Kids Alright?, about how Texas children with mental
illnesses can get caught in the state's bureaucracy. UT grad student
Ya'Ke Smith won a Directors Guild of America Student Filmmaker Award for
his film Hope's War, about a U.S. soldier struggling to fit in after his
return from Iraq.
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