What’s going on with Steven Soderbergh’s Che? Heard anything recently? I haven’t seen any hard news published in any half-way reputable outlet since Cannes (aside from this report from IndianTelevision.com that Che will soon premiere on––wait for it––Indian television, but the film’s international release has never been in doubt). But that hasn’t put an end to the speculation.

On June 14, Jeff Wells did a post based on a conversation a friend of his had with some other guy who’s “familiar with the comings and goings of” Wild Bunch, the sales agency who funded Che and have been looking for a buyer for it since Berlin. The gist, as Wells passes it along through the various degrees of distance, is that Wild Bunch has given up trying to sell the current cut to a U.S. distributor, and Soderbergh’s too busy shooting his next movie to worry about refining his cut, and everyone’s just sort of shrugging their shoulders and cutting their losses.

I didn’t come across this story until today, when I finally decided to do some digging on a rumor I heard about the film last month when I was in Las Vegas. It would have been the night after Wells published that post (which, again, I didn’t read until today). En route from one bar to another, a filmmaker pulled out his Blackberry and commented aloud on an email he had just received, claiming that HBO had struck a deal to broadcast Che as a six-hour miniseries. I’m not saying that you should that that story to be any more legit than Wells’ game of telephone (or even IndianTelevision.com’s scoop); personally, I assumed that if there was anything to it, it would have made it to Variety by the end of the week, which it didn’t.

But it is interesting that Wells’ post extensively discusses the pros and cons of just such a deal, an ultimately concludes that the ” solution, it seems, is that it has to be sold to HBO, but that its value will be diminished if it doesn’t first compete in the [awards] derby. Which means that someone — Mark Cuban? - has to put it out theatrically before 12.31.08.”

There’s no reason to assume that Cuban would be interested in shouldering the film’s hefty price tag––other than the fact that his production company has an outstanding deal with Soderbergh, and he’s not exactly hurting for cash––which I guess is maybe reason enough to assume that there’s no reason to assume that he *wouldn’t* be interested.

Regardless: if another crack at the critics is what Che really needs, there’s currently reason to believe that it might get that shot at the New York Film Festival come September. Last night, I was browsing the online version of the July/August issue of Film Comment (like NYFF, a production of the Film Society of Lincoln Center) and on the issue’s index page, there was a preview of the magazine’s September/October issue. For whatever reason, if you go to that page today, the preview no longer exists, but since it’s still in the Google cache, I was able to screencap it:

Assuming this is still a correct indicator of the content of the issue, there are two things worth pointing out:

1) It would be virtually unheard of for Film Comment to put a film with no chance of a U.S. exhibition future on the cover of their magazine;

and

2) The cover of the September/October issue of Film Comment has not been not given to a film set to play the New York Film Festival since 2004. That issue’s cover was given to I Heart Huckabees, a film which premiered immediately before NYFF at Toronto. Last year and in 2005, in a sensible act of synergy, the Sep/Oct issue was fronted by the film set to open the festival.

So is some version of Che going to play (or even open) the New York Film Festival? Like I said, if you’ve heard anything, let us know…