The Long Goodbye: SXSW Film

The press agents have packed up and gone home; the restaurants and bars have mercifully cleared out; the cell phones have been retired as fashion plate accessories. The festival may be gone, but it isn't forgotten: Check out this page and more for our SXSW 02 Film and Interactive wrap-up, and go online (austinchronicle.com/sxsw/02/) for our daily festival coverage, featuring SXSW film reviews, panel highlights, and pithy musings from the likes of Jeffrey Tambor, Roman Coppola, and Donovan Leitch.

1. "Some would say that Texas was made for my pure need to be more and more famous. That is not necessarily correct," mugged Austin's adopted son, Russell Crowe, who introduced Texas, the documentary about his band 30 Odd Foot of Grunts, at the Paramount Theatre.

2. "I'm thinking something along the lines of Cannibal the Musical. Perhaps some sort of soup?" Troma Films president and founder Lloyd Kaufman on what his company might have planned for Disney's famed Mickey Mouse had the character's copyright not been artificially extended under the pro-corporate Copyright Law of 1998. (That's Web-head Harry Knowles' unruly mane on the right, Troma mainstays Toxie & Sgt. Kabukiman in the background.)

3. Filmmaker Guillermo del Toro (left) answered questions with actor Ron Perlman at the Saturday night Paramount premiere of Blade 2. Del Toro on Art versus Action: "So many times we artists complain about action movies, but we never do anything to make them better; I said I would do [Blade 2] with as much care, visually, as an art film, make it as beautiful as I can, and then make it as kick-ass as I can, too."

4. Ethan Hawke's visual tone poem of a directorial debut, Chelsea Walls, has netted mixed critical opinions thus far, but there was little but love for the man (who apparently wears the same black-with-rose-motif Western shirt to every Austin premiere) at the Q&A for Chelsea Walls' second SXSW screening.

5. Producer and conference panelist Maggie Renzi (Lone Star, Matewan) reminisced about Return of the Secaucus 7, her first collaborative effort with longtime partner John Sayles, which screened as part of SXSW's John Sayles Retrospective: "We didn't know anything, really, so we kind of made it up as we went along." Visit www.sxsw.com/coverage2002/index.php for video excerpts of Chronicle Film Editor Marjorie Baumgarten's interview with Renzi, and other clips from the fest.