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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