News Out of Sundance...

Not that I'm at Sundance or anything, or have ever been there. From what I hear, it's overrated anyway; unless you have a movie there and are being fawned over, its all lines, parkas and pretension.

It's much more comfortable watching from Los Angeles, and trying to piece things together from afar.

News -- "Little Miss Sunshine" sells for a record $10.5 million.

Little Miss Sunshine is directed by longtime star video directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, who did some of the better Smashing Pumpkins videos, among others. The basic plot is that it is a wacky road movie, about a makeshift family trying to get their pudgy little girl across the country for a beauty pageant. Steve Carell and Toni Collette topline.

It's nice to hear that they made this movie funny enough to get a bidding war out of it. But unfortunately, it is also too symptomatic of how the studios handle movies like this -- they tell the filmmakers to get the movie made themselves, and then if it is any good, the studios might buy it.

The budget of Little Miss Sunshine was $8 million. So the studios get to pass on it when it isn't a sure thing -- and now that it is a good movie, with suddenly-bankable stars, they can pick it up for a comparatively cheap $10.5 million. The extra $2.5 million is well worth it, knowing that you aren't going to get stuck with a stinker.

Of course, the Sundance record that the $10.5 million price broke was the $10.25 million that Miramax spent 7 years ago for "Happy, Texas", which tanked. So there are no sure things.

News -- Computer Geeks Figure Out How To Predict If a Sundance Film Will Be a Hit

A group of techies plugged all the information from the Sundance film guides of the last 10 years into a computer, as well as the info about which films had financial success.

They determined that the more producers a film had, the more likely that it might be a hit.

If, during the festival, a film is preceded by a short, it has a higher chance of being a flop than a hit.

And movies had a better chance being a hit if they had the following words in their program description: "academic, accomplished, bedroom, complex, dialogue, dream, death, focus, girl, human, high, journey, love, mother, narrative, romance, relationship, superbly, sex, ultimately".

Kiss of death words? "Africa, America, American, beautiful, black, best, emotional, fascinating, great, inspired, lake, new, riveting, Sundance, sexy, story, subtitles, truth, vision, world".

My analysis? The movies at Sundance with stars in them (and bigger budgets) have the biggest chance of being hits. The movies with stars and bigger budgets usually have more producers. Duh.

The short film thing feels like random chance. Though as it is, I think more Sundance films turn out to be flops than hits anyway.

The words thing is just random as well. Once, a friend of mine and I made a long list of movies with the word "Heart" in the title that had tanked; we figured it was a kiss of death word. Then Braveheart came out and was huge. There are no rules.

Lies, lies and damned statistics. Garbage in and garbage out.

News -- Missing Katie Holmes Nude Scene Sparks Mystery

The makers of the new film "Thank You For Smoking" were confused when a Katie Holmes naked sex scene disappeared from the print before it ran at Sundance.

Conspiracy theories were wafted. Was it the religious freaks? The Mormons? The Scientologists?

It turned out that the scene had accidentally been snipped out when the reels were being edited together, because it was at the end of a reel with a bit of black before it. Though somewhere, Tom Cruise is grinning.

News -- Filmmaker Slams the MPAA For Piracy

In a solid bid to get more publicity for his movie "This Film Is Not Yet Rated", a documentary that focuses on the shady MPAA and their ratings practices, filmmaker Kirby Dick has accused the MPAA of pirating his movie, because when he sent it to them to get rated (they gave it an NC-17), they also made a copy of it for in-company use.

The MPAA is hemming and hawing about how that really isn't piracy, even though they previously said that any illegally copying was piracy.

I think it's just brilliant to gave your film a name that pops up on so many other movie ads. I think I may call my next movie "Opens Friday At a Theater Near You".