Festivity

Coachella is almost around the corner (scary, huh?) and the music festival might have dropped a hint about the headliner for the 2013 festival.

The above image of what could be a stone (or beach ball … but let’s just go with stone) is via the Coachella Facebook page, leaving many to speculate this is a subtle hint the Rolling Stones will be the headline act.

Mick Jagger and the rest of the wrinkled crew were first linked to Coachella last month when their official app listed the festival as an upcoming tour date before quickly deleting it.

The two-day, two-weekend festival is scheduled for April 12-14 and April 19-21. The full lineup will be announced later this month.

AFI FEST 2012 comes to a close today, and the winners of this year’s prizes are in. Sadly, we were only able to catch two of the winning films this time around: New Auteur Grand Jury Award winner Eat Sleep Die, a subdued but brilliant look at working class immigrants struggling to survive in Sweden; and New Auteur Audience Award winner A Hijacking, a hyper-realistic portrayal of protracted hostage negotiations between a Danish shipping company and the Somali Pirates who kidnapped a crew of sailors.

Both were brilliant and well worth viewing should they see a wider release.

Full list of winners after the jump.

Photo: Eat Sleep Die

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The 2nd Annual ArcLight Documentary Film Festival wraps up tonight with a screening of Backyard Blockbusters. The 119-minute feature, scheduled for 8:15 p.m. at the ArcLight Hollywood location, surveys the fascinating history of fan films.

Writer-director John E. Hudgens comes to the subject matter the best way possible. He won Audience Awards in 2003 and 2005 at the Lucasfilm Star Wars Fan Film Awards for his parodies The Jedi Hunter and Sith Apprentice. He can also claim to have worked on the franchise through his day job as an artist-animator and is known for his Babylon 5 spoof-tribute work as well.

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West of Memphis, Amy Berg‘s comprehensive documentary about the wrongly accused West Memphis Three, made its  debut at AFI Fest yesterday. There weren’t a whole lot of dry eyes in the audience. With today’s vote on Proposition 34 to end the death penalty in California, the timing couldn’t have been more perfect.  If you didn’t make the screening, do yourself a favor and at least watch the trailer above before you vote today.

The 2012 Found Footage Festival road show kicks off tonight in Arlington, Virginia. Although the closest the event will come to LA is Chico and San Francisco in December, this year’s edition showcases a critical City of Angels component.

As event co-founder Joe Pickett tells Big Hollywood’s Christia Toto, newly discovered VHS wonders include some sequel footage he and event partner Nick Pueher have been hunting down for some time now. The video in question dates back to a few years before their event’s launch in 2004:

“My personal favorite [this year] is a public access video from Los Angeles called Dancing with Frank Pacholski. This guy, Frank, shot two episodes in 1999, and we’ve had the first episode in our possession for a while. But recently we found the legendary second episode that’s 1,000 times weirder. Without giving too much away, it involves a man dancing around in Speedos, elderly people, salad dressing and raw chicken.”

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Culminating with an awards ceremony Tuesday night at the Backstage Theater on the Sony Lot, TheWrap’s inaugural ShortList short film festival recognized the top vote getters from a dozen hand-picked entries.

A judges’ panel consisting of Roadside Attractions co-president Howard Cohen, producer Cassian Elwes, actor Zachary Quinto, producer Lynette Howell and Sundance Institute feature film program founding director Michelle Satter crowned Fishing Without Nets – a drama about Somali pirates told from the pirates’ point of view – as the Jury Prize winner. The audience vote, gathered via thewrap.com and MTV websites film.com and nextmovie.com, favored The Maker. From Lucas Shaw’s report:

[Fishing Without Nets] director Cutter Hodierne nets a $60,000 reward from Panavision to be used for a future filmmaking project… Hodierne and [The Maker director] Christopher Kezelos will receive a new Sony Alpha A77 DLSR Cameras, as well as a first-look deal with Cinedigm.

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A year ago at this time, Scott Feinberg (pictured) had just signed a contract with The Hollywood Reporter to join the publication as lead awards blogger and tumbled into his first-ever trip to Telluride. This weekend, he’s back in the picturesque Colorado mountains, ready to handicap 2012 Oscar hopefuls alongside a small group of LA journo regulars that includes Anne Thompson (Indiewire), Gregory Ellwood (Hit Fix), Steve Pond (TheWrap) and Pete Hammond (Deadline).

“It’s funny, the one place where we all end up is the Santa Barbara Film Festival,” Feinberg told FishbowlLA via telephone yesterday shortly after arriving in the rain. “It’s weird. Some of us can’t make it to Telluride, some of us can’t make it to Toronto. But the one that it just seems, year after year, all the usual LA Oscar beat writers end up at is Santa Barbara.”

Everything is walking distance in Telluride. It’s also a place where, with a very few exceptions, outlets pay the same hefty price for journalist passes as attendees. And because locals are used to living next to the likes of Ralph Lauren, Oprah Winfrey and Tom Cruise, the already secluded event has a welcome, casual feel for A-list attendees. Starting with today’s traditional kick-off picnic.

“At the end of last year’s awards season, George Clooney told me Telluride had been one of the highlights of the circuit, which he was on for a whole six months,” Feinberg recalled. “He felt that he could walk around here with no bodyguards, no entourage… Of course, one or two people might still ask him for photos. But it’s nothing like LA or Toronto.”

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The Coachella Festival looks to expand on their recent success by taking their music festivities out to sea.

On a cruise ship dubbed the S.S. Coachella, 20 musical artists (highlighted by Pulp, Hot Chip and Girl Talk) will headline the event that stretches over two separate weekends in December (Bahamas Dec. 16-19, Jamaica Dec. 19-23).

The Celebrity Silhouette holds just under 3,000 people. Cabins start at $500 for a room with four people (pretend you’re back in college for four days) reservations go on sale on Saturday morning.

Could 2013 be the last year we see the Coachella Music Festival in Indio?

The LA Weekly points out the wildly popular three-day event would take a year off and find a new venue if a proposed tax initiative makes it on the November ballot:

“[W]e’re going to take off 2014,” [Goldenvoice president Paul] Tollett threatened to the Desert Sun, which covers Palm Springs and the Coachella Valley. “2015 we’ll be at a new facility outside of Indio.”

The measure, proposed by councilman Sam Torres, applies to 2014 and would require an extra five to ten percent tax on admissions fees to events with attendance above 2,500 people. Tollett estimates that would come down to about $36 per ticket for a festival that drew nearly half a million attendees over its two weekends in April.

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Never mind the Narrative Competition; never mind the docs. The most widely seen and strangely hypnotic offering at the 2012 Los Angeles Film Festival is a nifty white-background promo from the event’s major media sponsor.

Playing before each featured attraction, the Calendar section shout-out showcases the brief close-up musings of entertainment reporters John Horn and Nicole Sperling, followed by those of esteemed film critic Kenneth Turan. The promo was shot in-house at the LA Times, and honestly, director Tim French deserves high marks for making it hold up under the burden of maximum repeat viewing.

The script was concocted by LAT VP of consumer marketing Donna Tarzian and her team consisting of Jim Fisher, Brandon Botta and Sally Lok. In terms of Hollywood leitmotif, Horn up on the big screen looks a little like Bruce Willis while Sperling actually bears a striking resemblance to Elisabeth Shue.

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