• Is it too “gory,” or did the filmmakers want too much money? This Variety story offers both as potential reasons for why the Amy Adams/Emily Blunt Sundance comedy Sunshine Cleaning, which was pegged before and during the festival as an almost sure-thing candidate for a sale, is only now closing a distribution deal with Overture Films.
• In other sales news, Film Movement has picked up Argentinean teen hermaphrodite drama XXY. It won two awards at Cannes last year, and it’ll screen next month at New Directors/New Films here in New York.
• No Country For Old Men will “almost double” its screen count this weekend, in order to best take advantage of the profile boost offered by its multiple Oscar wins. It’s probably also smart counter-programming against Semi-Pro, which will be the only film to open this weekend on over 2,000 screens.
• Fireman’s Fund Insurance Company is looking to cash in on a potential SAG strike by offering policies to film productions scheduled to coincide with the union’s summer contract negotiation deadline.

Baghead, which was acquired by Sony Classics towards the end of the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, is getting a lot of praise for taking the elements of mumblecore–stripped down cinematography, unpolished performances, an extreme interest in the minutia of behavior at the expense of action–and ambitiously pairing them with the tropes of mainstream shlock horror. But Baghead is never convincing as a horror film, and I don’t think it needs to be, and I’m not sure it even wants to be. What it really is, is a comedy (of horrors?) about ego, which the Duplasses and their actors convince is scarier than any kind of contrived fright.

Four friends, all wannabe actors and all frustrated to different degrees by the film festival success of a pretentious cheeseball aquaintance, head to a house in the woods to hammer out a script for the project that will give them their big breaks. The gang includes Matt, a charismatic idea man; Chad, Matt’s schlubby”funny guy” friend; Catherine, Matt’s orange-tan cliche of a sometime girlfriend; and Michelle, the adorable younger woman who brings out the worst in the rest of the three.

The only one of the four who seems really committed to the careerist angle of the endeavor is Matt, with the other three seemingly going along solely as the means to advance their respective romantic agendas. Chad loves Michelle, who loves (or, at least, lusts for) Matt, who tells Chad everything is over between he and Catherine but is still clearly susceptible to her late-night advances. As each “friend”s real, purely selfish intentions become apparent, trust breaks down and each member of the quarter becomes (not unreasonably) paranoid that another is out to get them.

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Sundance doesn’t technically end until Sunday, but I’m already half-way home from Park City, where the general sense last night seemed to be that the bulk of the buyers weren’t exactly in a hurry to close deals before closing night. But as our deal chart shows, Sony Classics managed to sneak in two quick, six-figure buys at the end of the week, first nabbing the contentious Frozen River, then closing the pick up of the Duplass Brothers’ mumble-horror comedy Baghead late last night. Check out the full chart here.

Wow. About three and a half hours ago, I posted this story about how there hadn’t been any deals in two days. Then I went to a screening. By the time I came back, three features had landed multi-million dollar deals. The hugest of these is the $10 million Focus paid for the Steve Coogan comedy Hamlet 2. That’s Little Miss Sunshine money. That’s insane. Also off the maket: Mark Pellington’s Henry Poole is Here, which went to Overture for $3.5 mil, and Choke, which sold to Searchlight for $5 million. All of the above have been added to our comprehensive Sundance deal chart.

A note about the chart itself: yesterday I removed the $$$ column, as up until that point there had been minimal information released about how much distributors had actually paid. But all of today’s deals have had dollar values clearly attached–– I guess nobody spends $10 million on ANYTHING without making sure that someone knows about it–so from here on, I’ll append dollar values if applicable in the Rights column.

We made the most recent entry to our Sundance deal chart late Sunday, and since then, there just hasn’t been anything firm to report. In fact, from Sunday to Tuesday, I think there have been more “why aren’t movies selling” think pieces in places like Variety and the New York Times than their have been actual deals throughout the course of the festival. Of course, nobody really knows what the problem is, but everyone’s willing to hazard a guess.

In her writeup for Variety proper, Anne Thompson said buyers are holding out for “that magic combo of an easy-to-market movie that will earn great reviews”; on her blog, she said buyers “are looking for love. And some may not have found it yet.” David M. Halbfinger’s NYT piece suggests that buyers are holding out in the hopes that prices wold drop. He also manages to find a way to blame bloggers for the sluggishness, with a quote from Sony’s Tom Bernard:

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Two new updates to our Sundance deal chart: Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired has landed US distribution via HBO, who may or may not release the film theatrically; and ESPN has acquired the soccer doc Kicking It. Interesting that it’s day four of the festival and, with the exception of Ballast’s deal for international representation, a) the only films with announced deals are documentaries, and b) no one seems to be talking about how much money they’re putting on the table. Check out our full Sundance 2008 acquisitions chart here.

Neither the press nor public screenings have yet begun, but indieWIRE reports that there have already been two sales here at the Sundance Film Festival. Up the Yangtze, a much-buzzed-about documentary by Yung Chang about the construction of a super-sized hydroelectric dam on the the ancient river and its effects on the lives of those living alongside it, has been acquired by Zeitgeist for release in April. Meanwhile, the festival’s closing night film, the Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young concert film CSNY Deja Vu, has been picked up by Fortissimo.

In other news, the Spout team is in Park City and ready, as our banner ads promise, to crash Sundance. We’ll start posting reviews late tomorrow, but check back later today for the first installment of our video coverage of the fest, produced by Ronnie Bronstein and Joe Swanberg of Butterknife.

• What started as a fight over 4 cents has become a debate over $100 million. The AMPTP says their residuals offer would net writers $130 million over three years; the WGA says the studios’ math is wrong, and by their calculations, the deal is worth only $32 million. Yesterday, in response to a WGA counterproposal that would peg online residuals to the number of streams, Variety reports “the studios and nets offered conceptual questions about structure and measurement of streaming usage — in other words, they didn’t reject the proposal out of hand.” The Hollywood Reporter’s optismism over these new developments is barely contained in the headline, “It’s a holiday miracle: Sides ‘actually talk.’”
• Scott Kirsner reports from the just-concluded International Film Festival Summit for Variety. My favorite takeaway is this dry observation: “Sessions on selling sponsorship and working with the media were packed with attendees. Less full was a session led by two independent filmmakers, who advised fest organizers to drop their entry fees, supply free travel and housing and make sure that filmmakers could gain entry to the best parties.”
• Lionsgate vice chairman Michael Burns gave a speech yesterday indicating that the company is interested in maintaining a financial standing that would allow them to acquire a content library, should such an opportunity present itself; this was apparently code for, “We wanna buy MGM, y’all!“

The most welcome film festival news of the week comes from The Hollywood Reporter, by way of The Reeler. In a bid to increase their profile as an independent film marketplace, the Tribeca Film Festival will cut the size of their feature slate by as much as 25 percent. A program of 120 films would put Tribeca in the same league, size-wise, as Sundance, which is clearly the intention:

“We realize our audience is getting a little overwhelmed by all of our titles,” said Tribeca co-exec director Nancy Schafer.

Last year, nearly 30 titles were acquired out of Tribeca, but many were bought by smaller distributors; with the new focus, the festival hopes to bring in bigger buyers and yield more high-profile deals. “We’ve had a lot of movies bought out of the festival but we haven’t had our Sex, Lies & Videotape yet,” Schafer said. “That’s what we want, and that’s what the industry wants.”

Steven Soderbergh’s 1989 film, of course, helped to cement Sundance’s status as the highest profile festival market in the States. The most successful titles to sell at Tribeca thus far have been Jesus Camp and Transamerica. Both were Oscar nominated, but neither really set the zeitgeist on fire, 90s style.

So I can only see this as good news. I’ve been bitching for years that Tribeca has been too big, and too unfocused. If these promised changes actually stick, I’ll be the first to congratulate the Tribeca team on a step in the right direction.

• It’s t-minus 16 hours until the all-but inevitable WGA strike, but the studios aren’t sweating as much as you might think. According to this story in Variety, the majors and indie arms have been preparing for this all year, and everybody has at least 5 solid scripts that they could put into production without the consultation or aid of a WGA member. Quoth an unnamed “veteran industry player”: “For now, it’s a television strike, not a movie strike.”
• Meanwhile, while New York indie players are generally optimistic that the strike will have little immediate negative impact on their productions, there is a fear that if the strike continues through January, it could make for a manic buying season at Sundance. “Because,” says Tom Quinn of Magnolia,  “If you can’t fill your slate with enough production titles, you’ve got to go out and get finished films.”
• Speaking of buying, the weakened dollar is making it a lot easier for foreign buyers to attend the American Film Market, which gets underway tomorrow in Los Angeles.  But the exchange rate is unlikely to spark irrational spending; as one foreign sales guy tells the Hollywood Reporter, “a lot of what’s at the AFM is very bad U.S. product — a lot of bad horror films and such.” That comment was presumably in regards to the finished films in the market; as Gregg Goldstein reports, this year’s market for as-yet-un-produced properties is full of star studded projects.
• David Wain is directing Elizabeth Banks, Paul Rudd and Seann William Scott in an untitled comedy about “party-hearty energy-drink salesmen forced into the roles of big brothers to fulfill a community-service obligation who end up bonding with their assigned kids.” Rudd and Wain wrote the script with Wain’s longtime collaborator, Ken Marino.

• The film will unspool in the States uncut and with an NC-17 rating, but Ang Lee has agreed to slash 30 minutes from Lust, Caution for its Chinese release. “The spirit of the film remains despite the cutting and the fluency will not be affected…for a viewer who has not watched the full version, the short version remains reasonable,” the director told Variety.
• Variety reports that the crush of serious issue films at the festival has led to a dearth of sales, and with so many films about Iraq, immigration and terrorism in the mix, lighter diversions such as Juno are hogging all the good buzz with audiences. “The question of audience fatigue is rearing its head before any of these pix have actually bowed in theaters,” write Ali Jaafar and Dade Hayes.  The Visitor, one of the films cited in that story as having “no movement,” did eventually sell last night to Overture Films.
  
• Other sales: Helen Hunt’s directorial debut Then She Found Me sold to ThinkFilm; IFC picked up the Icelandic procedural Jar City; and The Weinstein Company bought Boy A.
• IFC and B-Side are working together to acquire overlooked festival films for TV and online distribution. IFC’s Evan Shapiro says B-Side’s online community of festivalgoers is “like the world’s largest focus group”; B-Side’s Chris Hyams says the IFC partnership is aimed at combating a certain “perversity in the traditional upfront payment model.”