Rooftop Films has set up a donation fund to help foot hospital bills for SXSW filmmaker Benh Zeitlin (Wholphin Award winner "Glory at Sea"). Zeitlin, who is uninsured, shattered his hip and broke his pelvis in a car accident on the way to SXSW. Three more members of his crew were in the car and sustained minor injuries.

(Thanks to Spout for the link.)

We'll get to the rumpus in a minute.

When we heard the Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar was showing the Coen Bros.' terrific 1990 gangster noir Miller's Crossing on St. Patrick's Day, we pulled off the shelf our copy of the script – dog-eared and scribbled on and beat all to hell, exactly as our best-loved books should be. We started pawing through for quotables ("Look in your heart!"); truth be told, there are too damn many. ("Don't think so hard, Eddie. You might sprain something.")

Thusly, we give you, in part, the masterful push/pull, I-love-you-I-hate-you seduction scene between Gabriel Byrne's Irish hood Tom Reagan and Marcia Gay Harden's double-crossing vamp, Verna:

Seth Hyman, a film rep from Humboldt County, just called us up to let us know that the last two screenings for the fields-of-weed seriocomedy sold out not once but twice (or, um, four times altogether). Instead of turning away hundreds still waiting in line, those crafty folks at the Alamo South Lamar double-projected the film into two packed theatres simultaneously – while still having to turn away 100 people at the Tuesday screening and another 40 at the Thursday one.

The audience is certainly there, so where the hell are the buyers?

"Hey there. My name is Johnny and this a little film about a horrible and brutal war I've been fighting for the last seven years against the disease Multiple Scrlerosis … "

Let's talk about dread, yeah? And death, too. And while we're throwing bones and crossing phalanges, why don't we kick up some life and love and art and the mad, brilliant spittle of courage, spat fast into the faceless, sardonic perma-grin of the worst thing that ever happened in 2000 AD?

Let's talk about heroes and nemeses, pens and pain, and the lawless lay lines of a central nervous system gone haywire under the neuron-timebomb that is multiple sclerosis. Nothing is forbidden on this planet, this physiology, this life.

Let's talk about Johnny Hicklenton, the celebrated UK artist and inker of Britain's iconic future-copper Judge Dredd, who, in case you haven't wept at CNN or Al Jazeera of late, isn't nearly as fictionally ironic as he once was, Sartre's ubermensch and Orwell's pig, bearing badge and bullets atop bike-burnt blacktop, lawgiver, gunner, judiciary godhead, executioner. Not Johnny's law. No way.

I had a thought the other day while watching Frontrunners, Caroline Suh’s documentary about the race for student-council president at New York’s prestigious Stuyvesant High School. The teacher in charge of the election, talking about what he thinks students look for in a candidate, argues for the primacy of personality over ideology. He believes that a particular politician’s take on an issue can change depending on circumstance, while his personality is likely to stay the same regardless. This kind of consistency, he says, is what voters look for when they mark their ballots, whether during a high school election or in a presidential primary. Take George W. Bush, he says. The fact that Bush changed his campaign-era position on nation-building after the events of Sept. 11 didn’t change most of his supporters’ belief that, personalitywise, he was still the candidate they’d most like to have a beer (or two)) with and, therefore, the guy they'd most likely vote for come Nov. 2004.

This personality/issues debate is at the heart of Frontrunners, not just in terms of the election it documents but in relation to the audience’s appreciation of the movie itself. The film’s “lead,” George, is only one of four main characters, but his personality is so enormous, so idiosyncratic, so sui generis, that – win or lose - he is the guy viewers walk away from the theatre thinking about, discussing, and rooting for. Consequently, he is, in essence, the movie.

Trailers your favorite part of the festival experience? Now you don't even have to sit through the film – a couple of the always-funny Burger Hut trailers have popped up at YouTube here and here.

And wax nostalgic with Dan Brown, Mike Mitchell, and Kent Osborne's sextet of 2002 SXSW trailers here. It's hard to predict the shelf life of certain pop culture product, but turns out Three Men and a Little Lady jokes never grow stale. Prescient guys …

SXSW Interactive may end, but some bits keep going, like the Unnamed Exquisite Corpse Movie, which made its sorta, kinds debut.

Taking its inspiration from the old surrealist thought experiment, it brings a new meaning to film-making as a communal experience. Quick skinny: a cast and crew has two weeks to make five minutes of a film. When they're done, they send the last minute of their segment to another cast and crew, and one instruction ("Use something pink." "This actress is pivotal." "There needs to be a fake eyelash.") and see what they come up with. Confused yet? The film makers are betting you won't be by the time it's completed.

"We hope that there will be a through-line, and that there will be a wonderful, watchable movie," said moderator and executive producer Meghan Scibona of Small Media XL. "Actually, we've all watched the first 20 minutes and we're shocked about how well it works as a short."

"It's gone somewhere exciting and interesting," said projected innovator Jason Nunes of Adobe Consulting, "and it's not a mess yet." With four of a planned twenty segments in place, the group plans to send push the experiment as far as possible by getting international collaborators.

They're just wrapping things up at the SXSW Film Awards Ceremony, which means the embargo's lifted and it's time for us to drop some knowledge. See winners after the jump.

Be sure to check out the Chronicle’s daily issues (March 13-15) for reviews and interviews with Festival award winners. And, of course, keep checking here for continuing coverage of the film fest.

The SXSW Interactive party at Scholz Bier Garten brought together a disparate mix of people last night, among them artists, musicians, gamers, futurists, and various techno-friendly types, as well as a few robots, which made their way through the crowd like children who couldn't find the right grownup's leg to hug.

There was also music, free food, masked revelry (admission was free for anyone in costume), and a Maker Faire-esque contingent of groups showing off their pet projects, which included a machine that printed words on ping pong balls; a video game with a curvy, wrap-around monitor; and some of the miniature sets, props, and characters from John P. Funk's short, stop-motion film "Quest for the Dark Planet."

Such oddities are apparently par for the course at these parties, thrown annually by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which seems to have made a lot of friends in its 18 years of crusading for free speech, intellectual property, and privacy rights on the Web.