Posting will be light here this afternoon and tomorrow, as I’ll be en route to the Telluride Film Festival. In keeping with tradition, the official Telluride schedule will be kept under wraps until tonight, but whisperers are already whispering. Click through the jump for notes on what I’ve heard. If you’ve got your own details to pass along, please post them in the comments, or, if you want to protect your identity, send an email to karina AT spout-dot-com and I’ll post it anonymously.

In Variety, Anne Thompson says we can expect to see Werner Herzog’s Antarctica documentary Encounters at the End of the World, Cannes winner 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Margot at the Wedding, I’m Not There, Rails & Ties (directed by Allison Eastwood and starring Kevin Bacon and Marcia Gay Harden) and Tamara Jenkins’ The Savages, which premiered at Sundance and which stars Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney. I’m speculating that if Schnabel’s going to make the trip up the mountain with the French-language drama Butterfly, he might also bring along his Lou Reed concert film, which is scheduled to debut at Toronto.

Most enticingly, Thompson also says we can expect some “early footage” from There Will Be Blood, Paul Thomas Anderson’s long-awaited Upton Sinclair adaptation, starring Daniel Day-Lewis. Both Jeff Wells and Bill Husted of the Denver Post say Telluride’s planning a major tribute to Day Lewis. The latter indicates the tribute will include a full screening of Blood; the former says the film isn’t ready and speculates that if “a longish Blood reel is shown, it will be like those product-reel showings of Gangs of New York, Lord of the Rings and World Trade Center at Cannes, and therefore the first time that Telluride — the most pure-minded, far- from-the-madding-crowd film festival around — will have screened a portion of a film solely to spread word-of-mouth to benefit a distributor.”

So that’s one of the festival’s expected three major tributes; according to SF360, the second tribute slot will be filled by Indian filmmaker Shyam Benegal. SF360 also predicts that Bruce Conner will be the subject of a planned “salute to a Bay Area experimental filmmaker” curated by Edith Kramer.

Back at the Denver Post, Husted says we can also expect screenings of Into the Wild, directed by Sean Penn; and a reformatted print of Richard Lester’s second Beatles flick, Help!

This Times of India interview with Bollywood star Tannishtha Chatterjee says the actress will be on hand in Telluride for a screening of Brick Lane, directed by Sarah Gavron.

Total speculation: the last time a Michael Moore film played fall festivals, it began its run at Telluride. Moore’s Captain Mike Across America is set to debut at Toronto, so I wouldn’t be surprised to see it on the Telluride schedule.