Movie News: American Psycho Is 20; Watch SXSW Pilots; Frightening Al Pacino

In today’s Movie News: We talk to Christian Bale and many more about American Psycho turning 20; you can watch some great SXSW pilots right now for free; and the Oxford Film Festival is doing something we really like. Also: Stephen Graham has a story about Al Pacino.

Watch SXSW Pilots: Filmmakers for the 2020 SXSW Episodic Pilot Competition — who didn’t get to go to SXSW, for obvious reasons — have launched a SXSW 2020 Pilot Showcase on Vimeo. You can watch here for free, anytime. Coral Amiga and Nicole Hartley, co-creators of one of the pilots, Bored, said they wanted to pivot the films online because “connection feels more important than ever.” We were hooked from the first seconds of Homecoming: A Journey of Cardboard, which begins with a young man who traveled from Japan to Florida to Dumpster dive for some sweet, citrusy Sunshine State cardboard.

American Psycho Turns 20: We interviewed Christian Bale, Bret Easton Ellis, Mary Harron, Guinevere Turner, Willem Dafoe, Chloe Sevigny and Matt Ross for a deep-dive oral history of one of our favorite movies, American Psycho, for the winter issue of MovieMaker Magazine. The film’s 20th anniversary was yesterday. Our little story is as packed as Dorsia on a Friday night 8 with details like what the ending really means, how Leonardo DiCaprio almost starred, and what Patrick Bateman might be doing now.

Weekly Fest: The Oxford Film Festival just unveiled plans for a Weekly Virtual Film Festival series showcasing films programmed for the 2020 edition of the beloved Mississippi fest. Starting April 24-May 1, the Oxford Film Festival will roll out a different series of films each week, and festival programmers, filmmakers, and special guests will moderate Q&As following the screenings. Best of all, the festival will split revenue from ticket sales with the filmmakers themselves. “It is important for festival organizers to adapt in this pandemic to do what is best for their filmmakers as they are our partners and the only reason our industry exists,” says festival director Melanie Addington. Please visit here or the Oxford Film Festival for details.

‘Did You See That, Marty? He Frightened Me!’: Stephen Graham has a pretty terrific story about knocking over Al Pacino’s ice cream while filming The Irishman. It’s at the end of this feature about Graham’s excellent work in the new miniseries The Virtues. (Also, we want to apologize for how much “Frightening Al Pacino” sounds like the title of a 1997 indie rom-com.)

Checks Arrive: $600-a-week bonus unemployment payments have started to arrive for California entertainment industry workers who lost work in the shutdown, Deadline reports. Another bonus: they won’t have any wasted ink.

Animal House: After widespread Valence Media layoffs, owners of The Hollywood Reporter and Billboard, a few irate employees enacted Animal House-related online retribution, Gizmodo explains. We’d love to nerdsplain this joke in the most tedious way possible but we’ve actually never seen Animal House. Mostly we want to send our respect and support to everyone who is out of a job, and also suggest: Now is the time to start your own thing, however small, even if you can’t get paid for it yet. May we dream of a day when no journalist works at a journalistic endeavor not run by journalists.

Bret Easton Ellis Recommends a 1933 Movie: With his latest podcast, the American Psycho author has completely sold us on seeing the pre-Hays Code Jimmy Durante musical Footlight Parade, now available on the Criterion Channel.

And now a little something we like to call “yesterday’s movie news.”