LOS ANGELES (AP) - Robert Redford's Sundance Film Festival is going on the road for one night next winter.

The independent-film showcase is sending eight films playing at the festival for screenings in eight cities around the country on Jan. 28.

One film will go to each of the following cities: San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Brooklyn, N.Y., Nashville, Tenn., Madison, Wis., Ann Arbor, Mich., and Brookline, Mass.

The directors of each film will travel along to introduce their work and answer audience questions afterward. The films will be announced after the festival releases its lineup in December.

The screenings will allow audiences around the country a taste of the festival that runs Jan. 21-31 in Park City, Utah.

Now I have some bad news. G.W. Pierce Auto Parts placed Sky Vue Drive-in and various other properties up for auction. Dennis Jackson will conduct the sale on Dec. 1,2009.

The theater occupies about 8-12 acres in the center of a 100 acre farm. How the sale will effect next season, slated to open in april, remains to be seen.

- Paul  

Nov 2, 4:51 PM (ET)

LOS ANGELES (AP) - Sony thinks its new Michael Jackson documentary could be a contender for best picture.

Spokesman Steve Elzer said Thursday that the studio will submit "Michael Jackson's This Is It" for Academy Awards consideration this year.

It missed the deadline to be considered for a 2009 documentary Oscar, but the film about the late King of Pop's preparations for a series of comeback concerts will be eligible in several other categories at the Academy Awards, including sound, film editing, director and best picture.

"This Is It" opened worldwide Wednesday and has already earned $20.1 million at the box office, along with praise from critics and fans who say it restores Jackson's reputation as a world-class entertainer.

Director Kenny Ortega, a longtime Jackson collaborator who was overseeing his concert comeback, crafted the nearly two-hour film from more than 100 hours of footage recorded during rehearsals for the London shows, which were to have begun in July. Jackson died June 25 at age 50.

"What we did here was focus on telling a good story and creating a film for the fans really enabling them to understand what Michael Jackson had dreamed for them," Ortega said Wednesday.

He added it was his hope "the audience for this film will grow and that as many people come to see it as possible because I think that it's a wonderful story about a brilliant man. ... Awards, Oscars, that's all great wishful thinking."

It may be more than wishful, said Steven Gaydos, executive editor of the Hollywood trade paper Variety and a self-described cynic. With the Academy Awards best-picture slate expanded to 10 films this year rather than the traditional five, "This Is It" could find itself among the contenders, he said.

To qualify, the film must complete a seven-day run in Los Angeles County and filmmakers would need to "submit the proper paperwork," said Leslie Unger, spokeswoman for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which puts on the Oscars.

Sony, which paid $60 million for the global film rights, plans to keep "This Is It" in theaters for just over two weeks. Elzer said the studio will submit it for consideration for best picture "and other appropriate categories." He wouldn't specify which ones.

Entering it in the Oscar race this year means "This Is It" cannot be considered in the documentary category next year.

Ortega, a veteran director, producer and choreographer who counts TV's "High School Musical" among his credits, could also find himself in contention for a best-director nod, Gaydos said.

"He did a masterful job putting this whole thing together," he said. "It was so powerful and interesting, so creative and well-done, I think he should be considered... Kenny just won over all these critics like me with Michael Jackson that anything interesting could go on with this guy."

The film can't be considered for a Golden Globe. The Hollywood Foreign Press Association, which puts on the annual ceremony, doesn't permit feature documentaries to enter, said spokesman Michael Russell.

Ortega said an Oscar nod would be a fitting recognition of Jackson's last work.

"He deserves one," he said. "Come on people."

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Associated Press writer Marcela Isaza in Los Angeles contributed to this report.

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AP Entertainment Writer Sandy Cohen is on Twitter: Follow her at http://twitter.com/APSandy

Have you been to www.adventurelandvideo.com recently? I should be starting on page 2 soon. A few of our tools have been refreshed too.

- Paul

Hollywood gushes bloodsuckers in vampire boom

LOS ANGELES (AP) - Vampires have been an eternal force in Hollywood horror since silent-movie days, yet they have risen to new heights as the "Twilight" franchise, TV's "True Blood" and other incarnations put the bite on viewers.

In studio flicks, independent and foreign-language films and small-screen series, there are more bloodsuckers out there today than you can shake a wooden stake at.

With so many vampires afoot, will Hollywood's favorite night creatures lose their flavor with fans?

"Will there be a vampire glut? Will the vampire market crash? I don't know," said Chris Weitz, director of November's "The Twilight Saga: New Moon," part two in the movie series based on Stephenie Meyer's vampire-romance novels. "It's kind of the only growth industry in America, that I can tell."

So many of Dracula's brethren are being sired nowadays that Weitz and his brother have dueling vampire films out this fall.

Paul Weitz's "Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant" opens Friday, with John C. Reilly as a centuries-old bloodsucker in a traveling freak show.

While vampires have a strong pulse in Hollywood, some expect the genre could bleed out from overexposure.

"Sometimes there are trends with audiences and with film studios, TV stations, and they go wild, and they run like lemmings in one direction until they go over the cliff," said Werner Herzog, who directed 1979's "Nosferatu the Vampyre.""The genre of vampire films in its darkness and in its nightmarish aspect is a genre that will be forever, but sometimes, you have an overload, an overkill, and when the heap gets too, too big, everybody starts to turn away."

In his 2007 Antarctica documentary "Encounters at the End of the World," Herzog wisecracked that he was not making yet another movie about penguins, a reference to a spate of films on the cold-weather birds.

Penguins reached a glut after only a handful of movies, but the sheer variety of vampire stories lends them superhuman durability for exploring the issues and fears of mortals.

"I think vampires are richer veins than penguins," Reilly said. "There's only so much you can do with penguins. They're cute. They can't fly. They live in snow and ice."

Vampires benefit from modern fans' hunger for fantastic stories. Otherworldly tales once were aimed mostly at specialized horror, science-fiction or fantasy audiences, with a "Star Wars" or an "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial" occasionally breaking out to huge crowds.

Movie-goers today besiege theaters for out-of-this-world stories, from "Harry Potter" and "The Lord of the Rings" to the latest adventures of Batman or the X-Men.

"We're at a supernatural height right now with superheroes and science fiction. I think it's all being embraced, with 'Battlestar Galactica' being a critical hit and 'Iron Man' being a huge mainstream hit," said Meredith Woerner, whose book "Vampire Taxonomy: Identifying and Interacting With the Modern-day Bloodsucker" hits stores in early November. "It's a great time where people are ready for some magic."

Vampires have been hardy souls on screen for ages, dating back to 1920s and '30s classics such as "Nosferatu,""Vampyr" and the original "Dracula," with Bela Lugosi. Dracula has been played by countless actors, among them Lon Chaney Jr., Christopher Lee, Frank Langella and Gary Oldman.

Movies and shows such as "The Lost Boys" and "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" transfused teen power to vampire tales, helping to open the current vein of hip, pretty young dead things in the genre.

"What's particular about them now is it's coinciding with the optimum market for TV and film. It's that young market, it's kind of the 'Dawson's Creek' thing," said Michael Sheen, who co-stars as the vampire Aro in the "Twilight" sequel and played a werewolf in the "Underworld" vampire franchise. "Whereas in the past, I don't think that has been the case. The symbol of vampires has never quite hit that marketing gold."

Along with "True Blood," recent TV bloodsucker sagas include "The Vampire Diaries,""Blood Ties,""Moonlight" and Britain's "Young Dracula" and "Being Human."

Among recent and upcoming big-screen stories are "Blood: The Last Vampire," the horror comedy "Transylmania," Ethan Hawke's vampire armageddon thriller "Daybreakers" and foreign-language vamp tales such as Sweden's "Let the Right One In" and South Korea's "Thirst."

"Twilight" leads the way, its love story between an immortal vampire stud (Robert Pattinson) and a sensitive school girl (Kristen Stewart) proving irresistible to teen and older audiences alike.

So far, fans seem willing to devour as many vampire stories as Hollywood can dish out.

"The truth is, you can't have too many vampire movies, just like you can't have too many zombie movies. Each movie is capable of being allegories for different things," said "Cirque du Freak" star Reilly. "Ours is this whole other universe for vampires that have nothing to do with Dracula or good-looking teenagers making out. It's this crazy underworld that exists, more like 'Harry Potter' than 'Twilight,' because the regular human world doesn't even know they're there."

While their popularity may ebb and flow, vampires always will have a place in the audience's heart, said Nicolas Cage, who starred in 1989's "Vampire's Kiss" and was a producer on 2000's "Shadow of the Vampire."

"The vampire is always going to be fascinating," Cage said. "It's like the vigilante cop, or it's like the cowboy or the Western. It's part of the fabric of society."

I have a soft spot for the old favorites like 'Dracula' and the newer flicks like 'The Lost Boys.' What could be better on a Holloween night while awaiting young trick-or-treaters?

- Paul  

LOS ANGELES (AP) - Fans scrambled to see 3-D movies such as "Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs" in theaters this year and new 3-D televisions could soon have home viewers feeling as if they're surrounded by a spaghetti hurricane on their couches.

The initial price of such sets is expected to be high - perhaps 20 percent more than normal sets of the same size. But costs should come down in the coming years.

Depending on prices, 3-D-ready TVs could be in 28 million to 46 million homes worldwide by 2013, predicts Alfred Poor, an analyst with GigaOM Pro. He estimates that next year, as many as 2.5 million sets worldwide will be sold with 3-D capability.

"We're raising a whole generation of kids who expect to see this effect for their movies at home," said Poor. "I think people want 3-D. I just don't think they're going to want to pay a whole lot more for it."

The sets themselves will require relatively minor upgrades from today's models, but the glasses will cost more, raising the price of the overall package.

There's no question 3-D movies are popular.

For hits like Disney/Pixar's "Up" and 20th Century Fox's "Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs," more than half of ticket revenues came from 3-D screens, despite accounting for far fewer showings, according to research firm Screen Digest. Those screenings tend to fill up, and moviegoers are willing to pay a few dollars extra per ticket.

Making these 3-D movies hasn't been cheap, and so far there hasn't been an adequate way to recoup those higher costs in the home video market, which brings in far more dollars to studios than the theatrical release.

"We think for 10 minutes or so, it's a fun experience, but it's not a great experience for an hour-and-a-half or two-hour-long movie," said John Batter, DreamWorks' co-president of production for feature animation.

Meanwhile, Universal Studios Home Entertainment released the stop-motion animated movie "Coraline" in July both in 2-D and 3-D with the cardboard glasses, but director Henry Selick said he was disappointed with the result.

As more living rooms are equipped for movies in 3-D, studios will have stronger incentives to release them for home viewing especially as 3-D movies are expected to spend less time in theaters.

With about 30 3-D movies headed for theaters next year and only enough screens to show one major picture at a time, the average theatrical run will shrink to less than two weeks in 2010, down from nearly nine weeks in 2008, according to Charlotte Jones, a senior analyst with Screen Digest.

That could put more emphasis on recouping filmmaking costs on the home market, she said. But the home market is also coming under pressure.

Tom Adams, president of Adams Media Research, said 3-D videos could be the shot in the arm the industry needs, especially because it will take a lot longer for 3-D TV signals to reach people's homes by cable or broadcast.

"Among the early adopting crowd, they're going to go out and buy practically everything that comes out," Adams said. "It could be pretty lucrative for studios even if it's fairly small in terms of the number of households."

Cable networks are experimenting with 3-D, too. Last month, ESPN hosted test screenings of a USC-Ohio State football game in four U.S. cities, following similar events put on by technology provider 3ality Digital LLC.

Many technology companies are banking on a 3-D-at-home boom.

RealD, the leading provider of 3-D systems in theaters, is preparing to expand production of "active shutter" eyewear.

Sony Corp. has plans for a range of new 3-D products, from Blu-ray players and TVs to PlayStation games. Meanwhile, Sony Pictures Animation's latest 3-D feature, "Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs," was an unexpected box office hit, and it could make its way into homes in 3-D once the technology catches on.

With standards being finalized and demand for 3-D content booming, "2010 is definitely the year for us to start the 3-D business," said Hiro Kawano, senior vice president of home products for Sony Electronics Inc.

'Paranormal' slays 'Saw' franchise

Oct 25, 1:23 PM (ET)

By DAVID GERMAIN

Changes are underway @ www.adventurelandvideo.com. Our friends @ www.bravenet.com said we had outgrown their free service. So I'm shrinking things like any tightwad would.