Short Cuts

Details have been finalized for the premiere of Robert Rodriguez's hot new horror thriller The Faculty. The event will be a benefit for theTexas Filmmakers' Production Fund, hosted by the Austin Film Society, on Wednesday, December 16 at the Paramount Theatre. Tickets for AFS members go on sale at the Paramount box office on Monday, December 7 (membership card required). Your ticket includes the chance to win the 1970 GTO hot rod featured in The Faculty as well as guest admission into the after-screening party hosted by Mike Judge, Richard Linklater, Matthew McConaughey,Harry Knowles, and Guillermo Del Toro. For more info call the AFS at 322-0145... Other hinted-at AFS events -- the Quentin Tarantino Film Fest 3 and the Jack Hill tribute -- seem now to be on course for mid-January. We'll make the details available as they get ironed out. But this weekend, the Film Society will be busy hosting the appearance of filmmaker Bennett Miller at the Saturday evening screenings (7:40& 9:45pm, Dobie) of his appealing documentary,The Cruise...

A movie lover's paradise is to be found in all corners of the city this week in a sudden burst of inter-holiday activity. See this issue's "Film Listings" section for details on the events. The following list is just a rough outline of some high points. Austin FilmWorks wraps up its semester with a presentation of student shorts and the unusually produced feature In Flagrante (Thursday-Saturday, Dobie). The Monday night Funhouse Cinema series is winding down over the next couple of weeks with two of the season's most interesting offerings: Chris Smith's American Job and a projection performance by Luke Savisky, Bill Daniel, and Adam Wiltzy. Tuesday night continues the AFS free Fassbinder series. The Cinemaker Co-op presents Cold Turkey, its third Super-8 festival of the year on Tuesday and Wednesday, while the new F3 Film Series starts up on Saturday. The Austin chapter of the American Institute of Graphic Arts presents a lecture by Arnold Schwartzman on the king of the movie-title artists, Saul Bass, called "Anatomy of a Mentor" (Wednesday, 7:30-9pm, 6:30-7:30pm reception; Dobie). And the silent classic, Battleship Potemkin, will sail on Thursday to the strains of Golden Arm Trio's musical accompaniment...

The Drew Barrymore/Luke Wilson film in current release,Home Fries, was shot here in the Austin area. When I was at the Toronto Film Festival in September, I had the opportunity to ask producer Mark Johnson, who had previously produced Clint Eastwood's Austin-lensed A Perfect World, about his experiences filming in Austin. Here's some of what he said. "I had a very good experience there with A PerfectWorld. But we wanted to give Home Fries a sort of generic American feel. We didn't want it to be Southern, or necessarily Western. Austin alloweditself to come across as that sort of mid-American place. If you notice there are no identifiable license plates in the movie; we made up our own. We didn't want it to be localized in any one specific place. And Austin is a phenomenal city to begin with. It has this combination of being very cosmopolitan and also very much a collegetown. But they're very filmmaker-friendly. They've built up a great, great crew over the years and we were able to find the bulk of our crew there, and a lot of our actors, and all of our locations."...

Speaking of films on the festival circuit, word just arrived this week that Toni Kalem's movie, A Slipping-Down Life starring Lili Taylor (which shot here this summer and is an adaptation of an Anne Tyler novel), won a coveted spot in the Sundance Film Festival dramatic competition this January. Congratulations.