Crawford, David Modigliani’s documentary about George W. Bush’s adopted home town, becomes available today for free streaming on Hulu, with downloads to come via Amazon VOD and iTunes. Hulu is billing this as their first movie premiere, which hopefully is an indication that the site, a co-venture of super-mainstream media companies NBC and Fox, are prepared to showcase additional films straight off the festival circuit in the future.

The Texas company has become a name-brand over the past year or so for their film festival websites, which allow attendees to program their own schedules and rate the movies they’re seen, thereby allowing other attendees (and festival programmers, distributors, etc) to gauge a given film’s “buzz” in real time. B-Side has worked with festivals (Fantastic Fest, most recently) in the past to stream their films off of the festival’s own site, and has previously seen films from their Choice Indies slate premiere on IFC TV, before coming to iTunes.

But Crawford is, as far as I can tell, the first B-Side film to go directly from the festival circuit to a major onlie video portal. It looks like a smart move, not least because Crawford, unlike other Hulu features, is embeddable, and thus can easily serve as fuel for political blogs. Watch it above, or grab the code for your own blog here.

• Chris Holland of B-Side weighs in on that whole Jonathan Marlowe-sparked State of Distribution to-do. There are a lot of fine takeaways here, but here’s an especially good one: “Gear up the marketing machine and pack those [festival] screenings, because the more people who see your film now, the more people who will buy it on DVD later…This sounds obvious and simple, but some filmmakers behave as if exactly the opposite were true. They fret about piracy (you should be so lucky!)…”
• “One of the things that has always nerdily bothered me about Star Wars is all the bespoke weaponry,” John Carney writes. “You know, all those weapons narrowly tailored to the specific environment in which the action is taking place.” Apparently, the latest Clone Wars vid doesn’t seem to make the situation any better.
• Anne Thompson visited the charred wreckage of the Universal Studios backlot and took a few surreptitious pictures.
• Filmmaker/Hollywood Babylon author Kenneth Anger has allegedly “put Satanic death curses” on the authors of the recently-released Hollywood Babylon: It’s Back!, who used the title without permission.