Short Cuts

You could hear the wailing and the gnashing of teeth echoing across Congress Avenue, arising from the legions of gutshot downtown dot-commers as Austin's tech stocks took a direct hit in last week's stock-market fiasco. Like most everyone else, I was concerned about my own portfolio's performance and logged on to find -- sigh of relief! -- that things weren't as grim as they first appeared. In fact, my Jet Li StarBonds had continued their upward swing, landing at a comforting $982/share while my stock in Bryan Singer's highly anticipated X-Men film remained relatively unchanged at an easy $106/share. Oh, wait, that's the Hollywood Stock Exchange. You say there's another? No matter. While this doesn't exactly fall within this column's parameters of local film news, I doubt I'll get a more timely chance to plug this film-fan friendly online site/game, http://www.hsx.com, which translates the riptide rigors of the real deal into the Hollywood medium, allowing users to buy and sell stock in films and actors in a set-up that closely parallels that of real-world online brokers such as E*Trade. The free site is wildly addictive, but unlike the NYSE, you're not likely to lose your car/wife/life when those 1,000 shares of Pauly Shore futures you purchased in the midst of a 3am SXSW bender turn out to have been perhaps not the wisest decision of your life thus far... Another Web site to pay particular attention to these days is AntEye.com, the film and video production-deal pipeline that has been roving around town for the past two weeks in search of talented Austinites to boost. The company held a very well-attended shindig this past Saturday night at La Zona Rosa, where locals Kim Flores and Mike Swenson were awarded a $100,000 production deal based on their short film "Maid! Madonna! Whore! -- The Latina in American Cinema." Speaking of the film, Flores says, "Basically AntEye is trying to do one of three things: develop some type of trailer for a feature, or an episodic pilot, or perhaps something on the Web site as well. In the perfect scenario, everybody would like to have something that has a little more longevity to it. I know the budget can go up to $250K if it's an all-digital project." The pair is slated to fly out to Los Angeles (on the company's dime, natch) in early May, and "Shortcuts" will be following the development of the kim+mike project as things progress... The Austin Film Society, along with the Association of Independent Video and Filmmakers, has announced an informational workshop on the Texas Filmmakers' Production Fund 2000, Wed., April 26, 7:30pm, at The Austin Community Access Center, 1143 Northwestern. Information on applying to the fund and screenings of previous applicant sample work will be the order of the day, though anyone with an interest in Texas indies is encouraged to attend. More info is available at http://www.austinfilm.org or by calling 322-0145... Finally, the Cine las Americas Festival of New Latin American Cinema runs April 21-29. Check out Belinda Acosta's story ("Between Worlds," p.66) or visit http://www.cinelasamericas.org for more info.

Send film and multimedia news to: shortcuts@auschron.com or "Short Cuts," PO Box 49066, Austin, TX 78765.