I know. It's like South by Southwest isn't even cold in its grave yet, and already we're sniffing around, making eyes at Tribeca's ass.

Actually, that particular film festival is still about five weeks away, but news just came down the pike that – count it – five Austin filmmakers will be screening there. The feature-length narrative The Wild Man of Navidad by Duane Graves and Justin Meeks will represent Texas alongside three shorts: "Polar" by Scott Nyerges, SXSW 08 alum "KID" by Miguel Alvarez, and "The Aviatrix" by Toddy Burton (who also premiered her short at SXSW 08 and is – yeah, Toddy! – a Chronicle contributor).

Steve Buscemi ducked in to some SXSW showcases over the weekend while in town to catch his son's punk outfit Fiasco perform and also visit with John Pierson's RTF Master Class on Monday for a wide-ranging discussion with the students of his legendary career in film.

The extensiveness of Buscemi's acting career (IMDB credits the actor with more than 100 film and TV appearances since his start in the mid-Eighties) prompted Pierson to wonder why the game isn't called Six Degrees of Steve Buscemi instead of Kevin Bacon (an actor, Buscemi pointed out ironically, with whom he has never worked).

South by Southwest Film announced (somewhat belatedly) on Saturday night the winners of its last two audience awards. (The bulk of the awards went out Monday night.) Voted audience favorite from 24 Beats per Second was Sascha Paladino's Béla Fleck doc, Throw Down Your Heart; top votes for the Lone Star States sidebar went to David Pomes' Cook County.

Finally, all of Dan Brown's fest trailers – which riff on the likes of 300 and Glengarry Glen Ross – are up online now. Check 'em out here.

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 …