Ever since word broke at Toronto that IFC had picked up Steven Soderbergh’s Che for US distribution, there have been conflicting rumors as to how the company, known for its day-and-date theatrical and VOD releases, would handle a film of this length, scope, and potential Oscar cachet. At yesterday’s NYFF press conference, Soderbergh talked a bit about the “roadshow” concept, through which the entire two-part film will first hit theaters.

He confirmed that in each market the film enters, it’ll screen for just one week, on one screen, with ticket buyers paying a premium (probably $25 each, including full-color printed program) for the experience. “I think that’s the ideal way to see it,” the director said, although he acknowledged that “it’s a lot to ask of an audience, to throw away an entire day.”

A source told me last night that IFC is banking that a lot of people are going to want to throw away their days on Che.

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Our friend Kevin Kelly was at that Mark Cuban panel at the TCA featured in the vague WIRED post mentioned earlier, and he sent along some further context––and quotes!

Apparently, the panel’s essential purpose was to promote Humboldt County, a SXSW vet and now a Magnolia release which will debut on VOD three weeks before hitting theaters in September. Also on the panel was Humboldt co-star Peter Bogdanovich, and talk about an odd pairing. On the one hand, you’ve got mogul Cuban making his cocky techno-evangelist pitch about how business travelers held captive in hotels are dying to charge their corporate cards $12 for the chance to see films like Flawless and Finding Amanda.

Then there’s old Pete, still an active theatrical patron himself (“Sex in the City was amazing because it was all women. I was the only guy in the theater, and the women loved it, and I loved that the women loved it”), but conscious that it’s an experience that’s diminishing for a reason (in part because trailers are “unbelievably violent, fast, crazy, noisy garbage.”) And he acknowledges that even if, for him,  nothing’s going “to replace the experience of seeing a movie on the big screen with an audience,” alternate philosophies of distribution “seems to be working in terms of getting people to see the films.”

I wish I had been there. Excerpts from Kevin’s transcription of the even follow after the jump.

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Consider this WIRED story more than loosely related to yesterday’s back-and-forth on theatrical distribution, and maybe sort of possibly related to today’s rampant speculation on Che. At the Television Critics Association conference yesterday, vertically integrated movie mogul Mark Cuban announced that he’s going to start selling Magnolia’s theatrical releases on HDNET’s On Demand cable service––BEFORE they debut in theaters.

I *think* the news nugget here is that this reverse day-and-date roll out wil now apply to ALL Magnolia releases, because otherwise, it’s not really news at all––Cuban’s companies have experimented with this tactic before, and box office grosses would suggest that it didn’t work so well for Redacted. Unless it’s the Cuban-as-cowboy quotes––such as “Landmark is the only national theater chain that will support HDNet’s Ultra Sneak Previews” and “I don’t care what the MPAA does.” But then, that’s not really news, either.

Since the conversation about internet and day-and-date distribution really started to heat up in 2005, the alternatives to theatrical distribution have seemed to only multiply and evolve, while the general perception of public exhibition has remained about the same: filmmakers like it, but in terms of bottom line, it’s only useful as an extended commercial for ancillaries such as DVD. But is that perception changing? Two related quotes of note popped up in the feeds this morning.

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Apple has reportedly struck a deal with several major studios to release downloads of their films on the same date the titles are released on DVD, and I can’t tell whether or not Jeff Wells is being facetious when he says that this plan will “obviously…really hurt DVD retail, which will in turn diminish the sense of community we all get from going to DVD stores and poking around the aisles and talking with the checkout guys.”

This is not a facetious question, I actually want to know: Is that an experience that anyone has had recently? Assuming you don’t live in New York and frequent Kim’s? It’s been my understanding that for awhile now, most people get DVDs from a) Netflix; B) a chain store like Best Buy, Virgin or Borders; or C) any number of online retail sites. So the idea that this could damage an existing sense of DVD store community seems wrongheaded, because that hasn’t that “community” already long ceased to exist?

As for the idea that this will hurt DVD sales considerably, the Apple downloads will carry Apple DRM, meaning they’ll only be playable on iPods, Mac computers, and AppleTVs. There are an awful lot of home theater junkies who will refuse to watch movies on computer screens, and I’m just not convinced that most of those guys own AppleTVs. I am the only person I know who owns an AppleTV.

So Wells had to be joking, right? To quote Chris Matthews, as Wells himself has been known to do: “Ha!”

• The Rome Film Festival is shaping up to be quite the Coppola family reunion. Francis Ford has long been scheduled to unveil his long-awaited Youth Without Youth at the event; now Variety reports that his wife, Eleanor Coppola, will debut a new documentary there, a follow-up to Hearts of Darkness called Coda: Thirty Years Later. With mom and dad already on the bill, fest organizers are apparently “hope to get the whole Coppola family, including children Sofia and Roman, onstage” as well.
• IFC First Take has acquired two, semi-high-profile projects: Savage Grace, starring Julianne Moore; and Finishing the Game, a “Bruce Lee mocumentary” by Better Luck Tomorrow director Justin Lin. “Because each film sports bankable actors,” writes The Hollywood Reporter’s Gregg Goldstein, “IFC might test whether exhibitors resistant to day-and-date releases will book films also available on VOD.”
• 10,000 famous actresses have joined the remake of The Women, which is apparently shooting already in Boston.
• Vague “schedule” problems have led Disney to postpone the production and release of their third Narnia movie. Luckily, something called G-Force was standing on the sidelines, waiting to take over the May 1, 2009 release date.

Yesterday, TMZ breathlessly announced that they’d landed the tightly-guarded list of the cast and alternates for the upcoming season of ABC’s reality competition, Dancing With the Stars. Then the page view whores made us click through a maddening gallery to confirm earlier rumors that one of those alleged dancing stars is indeed Mark Cuban, the brash billionaire who owns the Dallas Mavericks and who, as owner of Landmark Theaters and Magnolia Pictures, is also at the forefront of the movement to close the theatrical/DVD distribution window.

I’m willing to bet that Mark Cuban is not on the final list, which is set to be announced on ABC’s Good Morning America tomorrow. My reasoning is three-fold: First, according to an interview that appeared late last week in Portfolio, Cuban is currently recovering from hip replacement surgery. Second, he already did the reality TV thing once, and it didn’t go so well. Third (and probably most compelling), today TMZ published a blurb covering their collective asses if the official cast list fails to match their gallery: “Well placed on-set sources tell us that execs, fearing someone would leak the cast to TMZ, gave the show’s staff and crew names that may or may not be 100% accurate.” Looking at TMZ’s list, Cuban and one of the two former Beverly Hills 90210 babes seem like the easiest names to scratch off.

So here’s the deal: If Mark Cuban is *not* on Dancing With the Stars, I win the satisfaction of being correct in my assumptions. If it turns out that the part-time movie mogul *is* on the show’s official cast list, as punishment for being wrong about this I promise to live-blog Cuban’s Dancing performance for as long as he manages to stay on the show. I’ve convinced myself that either way, I win on this — I mean, if Louis B. Mayer had entered a dance marathon, we would have wanted a document of it, right?

• In what Variety makes out to be the great underdog story of the year, Superbad overcame its R rating to make about $31 million in its first weekend. With its name-brand comedy pedigree, summer-long media blitz, and total lack of demographic competition, it really did have it rough.
• In a brief blurb of a piece from the same trade’s weekly print edition, Pamela McClintock implies that with several strikes looming, it’s actually in the studios’ best interest to downplay their successes. If they stick to pumping the stat that six out of ten films lose money, they might be able to get away with the bargaining stance that they “can’t afford to make many concessions.”
• Somewhat lost in the last week’s shuffle over IFC downsizing their distribution business (wisely? desperately?) was the news that they’ve acquired Catherine Breillat’s Une vieille maîtresse (the title has been alternately translated The Last Mistress and An Old Mistress) for day-and-date release. The film, which stars Asia Argento and which I’ve heard is the most mainstream thing Breillat has done in a while, will play the New York Film Festival next month.

I type this from the Cleveland Airport, where I’m heading into hour 3 of an indefinite layover, but I couldn’t wait to get out of purgatory to tell you about a press release I’ve just received. Joe Swanberg’s Hannah Takes the Stairs, the current hallmark of the burgeoning “mumblecore” wave, will screen in New York and on cable this August, courtesy of IFC’s First Take day-and-date program. The film, which you surely remember from Spout’s SXSW coverage and from the recent mumblecore episode of FilmCouch, opens August 22 at the IFC Center in the West Village; it should be available for on-demand rental several days later. As a huge fan of both Swanberg and the IFC In Theaters model, I think this is great news–this hyper-intimate character study is ideally suited to the on-demand experience.

If you made it to SXSW this year, you saw at least one of the Festival trailers, directed by Swanberg and starring the Hannah crew. My favorite is embedded below.

File this under wild speculation, but I’m hearing rumors that Paramount might be getting ready to announce a deal to make Michael Bay’s Transformers available on Comcast On-Demand within days of its July 3 theatrical debut.

If this is true, it would be a huge deal. Up until this point, Mark Cuban’s Magnolia has been the only studio to really embrace simultaneous distribution, and they haven’t exactly had tons of success with it, even with films by name brand directors like Hal Hartley and Steven Soderbergh. For a major studio to go this route with what is probably *the* mainstream must-see film of the summer? It would certainly be a gamble, but one could argue that Transformers is the perfect window-smashing test case: it’s such an event movie that anyone who had already planned to see it on the big screen probably couldn’t be deterred, and meanwhile the Comcast offering will reach an audience of home theater addicts that would be otherwise untappable for another six months.

So what are the odds that this could actually happen? The source of the rumor seems to be this post on the tech blog UberPulse, which doesn’t mention Comcast by name and quotes a price ($49) that’s a bit lower than what I’ve heard. On the one hand, it’s hard to believe that a less-than top-tier tech blog would be able to break news on the goings on inside a major studio like Paramount. On the other hand, a blog like UberPulse *could* have a contact inside the cable company.

Paramount could also be waiting to see how Transformers plays to crowds at the Los Angeles Film Festival next week before making an announcement. If buzz is of the “I want to see this movie again and again” variety, smashing the window may not actually hurt them.

Still, it’s hard to believe that something like this could be in the works so close to the film’s release date. If this is really happening, it’s probably been in the works for a long while, in which case, it’s odd no one has heard about it.

Again, this is just a rumor at this point. I’ll update this post if and when more details come in.