After a fair bit of kerfuffle over its rejection from the SXSW Film Festival, Paul Schrader‘s The Canyons has managed to snag a distribution deal from IFC Films. Deadline Hollywood passes along word that the already-controversial film, penned by Bret Easton Ellis and “starring” porn star James Deen and perennial tabloid fodder Lindsay Lohan, will be getting quite the fancy release from the distributors, including a theatrical bow, a digital release, and a “Special Presentation” at the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York City sometime this summer. Snark aside, if you’re in Gotham this summer, mark your calendars now, this sounds like it’s going to be the cinematic event of the season. Schrader has described the film as “cinema for the post-theatrical era,” and the project utilized a bevy of crowd-funding techniques to raise both funds and awareness (a campaign we’ve covered here, here, and here) so it is, at the very least, an innovative project that will be interesting to track even on the most basic of financial levels (i.e. is this thing going to make money?). The Film Society of Lincoln Center event will include a chat with Schrader and Kent Jones, Director of Programming of the New York Film Festival, so we’ll keep an eye and ear out for those details to pass along to all our New York Rejects.

Paul Schrader’s next film, The Canyons, was written by famed author Bret Easton Ellis and stars Lindsay Lohan and some male porn star, which earned the project some hype right from the very moment it was announced that held straight through its production. But, despite all of its marquee talent, the movie put out a weird teaser trailer that didn’t seem to have any actual footage from the film and was mostly just a bunch of abstract images shot around L.A. Well, now the film has released a full trailer, and instead of being street photography stuff that doesn’t feature Lindsay Lohan, it’s…something else that’s completely weird as well. It would seem that either The Canyons was shot in black and white, its images have been altered to make this vintage-style trailer, or what we’re looking at still isn’t actual footage from the film. Which of these possibilities sounds most believable?

With all the time Bret Easton Ellis spends on twitter voicing his unpopular opinions, it was a bit of a shock to discover he found even more time to develop a project with Paul Schrader. That movie, The Canyons, we now have a first look at, and in a nicely unconventional way as well. Schrader’s film earned its financing via Kickstarter, so it’s an appropriate marketing choice to sell the movie as a down and dirty indie. Take a gander at the iMovie effects-ridden teaser for The Canyons (via The Playlist):

Over the course of its pre-production, The Canyons has established itself as being something of a poster child for modern filmmaking. Besides its casting of a couple of recognizable names, like tabloid star Lindsay Lohan and porn star James Deen, the film searched for much of its talent through Facebook auditions. And instead of relying on studio backing to raise funds, the traditional way, its writer, Bret Easton Ellis, and its director, Paul Schrader, raised money through a Kickstarter project, that offered up a bevy of ridiculous prizes backers could win. So what have been the fruits of all of their ultra-modern labors? It’s still kind of hard to tell. A two-and-a-half minute trailer has been released, but it doesn’t seem to contain any actual footage from the film it’s supposed to be promoting. Instead, it just gives us a montage of images shot around L.A., set to a Dum Dum Girls song; no Lindsay, no James Deen, no nothing. Despite the film’s apparent tagline of “It’s not The Hills,” this promo looks like it could very much be the credit sequence of some sort of reality show shot in the city.

The staff here at FSR have been tracking the development of The Canyons pretty closely. The reportedly microbudgeted film directed by Paul Schrader from a script by American Psycho/Less Than Zero novelist Bret Easton Ellis and guided by indie producer Braxton Pope, The Canyons has gained notice for utilizing social media outlets like Kickstarter to help finance it and Facebook to cast as-yet-undiscovered talent. Now, it appears that legendary acting veterans James Dean and Elizabeth Taylor porn star James Deen and postmodern performance art project Lindsay Lohan will star in the film, which ComingSoon describes as a “contemporary thriller that documents five twenty-somethings’ quest for power, love, sex and success in 2012 Hollywood.” Lohan is best-known for her starring roles in The Parent Trap, Mean Girls, and the Los Angeles district court. James Deen is best known for his roles at Jimmy Olsen in Superman XXX: A Porn Parody, Moe in Simpsons: The XXX Parody, and Egon Spengler in This Ain’t Ghostbusters XXX.

A money clip autographed by Robert De Niro and given to Paul Schrader on the set of Taxi Driver. A pitch meeting with the producer currently making a Schrader feature penned by Bret Easton Ellis. An autographed hardcover copy of every Ellis book. I’m sorry, are you some Hollyhood hot shot? No? Just a Kickstarter backer? Sure. We’ve written plenty about the Schrader-directed and Ellis-penned The Canyons, thanks to its inventive use of participatory cinema (including casting for roles on Facebook) and our exclusive debut of the film’s poster, but now the team behind the film (including producer Braxton Pope) have gone one step further when it comes to making a crowd-influenced film: they’re going for crowd-funding. Per the film’s new Kickstarter page, “Pope, Ellis and Schrader are partly financing the film themselves through Pope’s new company Sodium Fox in order to maintain complete creative control of the distinct source material…The Canyons team has realized the Kickstarter is indeed a part of this new independent change, and is seeking to connect with our fan base even further with this campaign.” The Canyons team is currently looking to raise $100,000, and to meet that end, they’re offering some of the most jaw-dropping backer rewards that I’ve ever seen for this type of campaign (you know, like those I listed up top). After the break, check out twelve unbelievable items currently available as backer rewards on The Canyons‘ Kickstarter page. If financing indie films means that Bret Easton Ellis will review your novel or Paul Schrader

Yesterday, our own Landon Palmer dedicated this week’s always-astute Culture Warrior to emerging participatory cinema, films that hinge on the involvement of outside audiences to not only finance them, but actually cast them and get them to the screen. Landon paid particular attention to director Paul Schrader and screenwriter Bret Easton Ellis‘s The Canyons, one of the most tantalizing and high-profile projects out there that is relying on participation from others to get made. The pair, along with producer Braxton Pope, are relying on submitted auditions from all interested parties to form their cast, using their Facebook page and their LetItCast page to choose possible rising stars to fill out the  five major roles in the film. While we don’t know much about the film, we do know that it’s “about youth, glamour, sex and Los Angeles, circa 2012″ and that the five main roles include “Christian, a trust fund kid, power player and major manipulator, who is a film producer that enjoys filming his own three-way sex sessions; Tara, his girlfriend and former model; Ryan, a bartender and young actor who is angling for a role in Christian’s horror movie; Gina, who works for Ryan and is in love with him and is also looking for a role in the horror pic and finally, Lindsay, a former actress turned yoga instructor who is sleeping with Christian, and falling in love with him.” (Thanks to The Playlist for those descriptions.) Both Schrader and Ellis have distinctly dark worldviews, so it’s

Veteran filmmaker Paul Schrader, notorious author Bret Easton Ellis, and indie producer Braxton Pope want you to audition for their new film. They’re assembling a microbudget feature for the digital distribution market called The Canyons, and they’re looking for some fresh new faces to star in it. Is your lack of an agent or non-Los Angeles residence preventing you from getting a fair chance at auditioning for legit films? There’s no need to worry, for we live in the 21st century my friend. The Canyons is holding its audition process through Facebook. On the one hand, The Canyons‘s unique production process makes complete sense. We are no longer, after all, in 2006 when studio producers had an overinvested, experimental Snakes on a Plane-level-interest in Internet culture. In this case, even on a small-budget independent film, the visible gatekeepers still possess power over the participants within the supposedly “democratized” framework of social networking. For a while it seemed that cinema – largely an object particular to 20th century logic – could not adapt to the boundary-destroying, power-shifting implications of the 21st century. Now this seems to no longer be the case. Web distribution (which was little more than a fantasy or an overblown threat to theatrical cinema’s hegemony just over a decade ago) is now seen as a conceivable and potentially profitable alternative to traditional film exhibition.

Is there a chance that current Hollywood it boy Ryan Gosling could be working with super weird Argentine director Gaspar Noé (Irréversible, Enter the Void) on his next project? If you listen to author Bret Easton Ellis (“American Psycho”), there is. Here’s the story so far: Ellis has been working on a screenplay for a while, it’s called The Golden Suicides, and it’s about the true story of artist couple Jeremy Blake and Theresa Duncan, who killed themselves back in 2007, allegedly after harassment from the Church of Scientology. Originally Gus Van Sant was meeting to come on and direct Ellis’s screenplay, but that fell apart for one reason or another, so eventually the job went to Noé. Now that there is a director in the bag, it’s time to find a leading actor, and Ellis seems to have his sights on Gosling. Recently he’s been taking to his Twitter account to tease followers about the fact that Gosling is close to signing on to the project. Last week he was saying things like, “Ryan Gosling is going to have to wait this year out and then win the Oscar for playing Jeremy Blake in The Golden Suicides,” and this week he’s been tweeting details of a meeting he, Gosling, and Noé had at the Chateau Marmont. In addition to talking about how good Gosling looks eating an apple, Ellis also stated, “Ryan came to meet Gaspar Noé who is directing The Golden Suicides. The 25 year-old broke up with

Fine, maybe you didn’t ask for it, but someone did! Incidentally, the person who wrote the film and wants to direct it! Weird, right? Commercial director (and second unit director for The Social Network) Noble Jones reportedly pitched a new take on Bret Easton Ellis‘s American Psycho (which of course already has already has its own, very fine, cinematic adaptation from Mary Harron, starring Christian Bale in one of his best roles, which hit theaters in 2000) to Lionsgate a few months ago, followed that by turning in a script within the last few weeks, and is now seeing an uptick in interest thanks to the entertainment industry’s insidery tracking reports. Thanks, assistants at WME who run these things, thanks a lot. Now that we’ve got all the bile out of the way, who the hell is Noble Jones and just what does he want to do with Bret Easton Ellis’s classic villain, popped-collar investment banker serial killer Patrick Bateman? Well, Deadline Rochester calls Jones “a Fincher protege,” which is most certainly not a bad thing. His take on the material moves the action to present day, taking it out of the gloriously yuppie-fied ’80s world that the novel and Harron’s film both lived in (which was sort of, oh, I don’t know, essential to the meat of the story). The film is deemed as “a down and dirty new version” and will reportedly by a low budget affair. The film has not yet been greenlit, but is in “early

Can we all take a moment and be thankful that Paul Schrader – the man who wrote Taxi Driver and Rolling Thunder and Raging Bull and Mosquito Coast and wrote/directed American Gigolo – is still pumping out films? His recent work doesn’t belong on the sky-high pedestal that these names do, but Adam Resurrected was a pretty solid movie, and his lack of retired status means he can team with Bret Easton Ellis to deliver Bait. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Schrader is going to work with Ellis on the script (and direct the film) which sees a young man taking revenge on the wealthy by weaseling his way into a yacht club, snagging a boat, and taking a few fat cats out to the deep end where hungry fish await. It’s unclear what propels the revenge, but this pairing is a dream come true. Don’t expect this one to be PC. Or pretty.

What is Movie News After Dark? It’s a nightly column chronicling all that is good and true(ish) in the world. But enough gay banter, its author caught the new trailer for The Muppets this evening — it’s attached to Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides — and it was adorable. Not Pirates, that wasn’t great, the Muppets trailer. Speaking of Muppets, here’s something sad… 21 years ago today, Jim Henson passed away. Our friends over at /Film are remembering him by posting a wonderful documentary called The World of Jim Henson. It’s worth your time, as you might imagine.

Hayden Panettiere (whose name of course means “Bread of the Earth”) has signed on for a role in the long-in-gestation Downers Grove that sees her playing a high schooler. There’s no surprise there, but instead of trying to break her own limbs to see if they grow back or psychologically torturing a nerd with her good looks, she’ll be doing something far more grisly. Fortunately, famed novelist Bret Easton Ellis (“Rules of Attraction,” “American Psycho”) is writing the screenplay from the Michael Hornburg novel about a young girl with a sex-crazed mother, a sex-crazed best friend, a heroine-addicted brother, violence, the prospect of someone always dying of unusual circumstances just before graduation, and all the destruction of the American family landscape that you might hope for. In other news, the greatly talented Rebecca DeMornay is involved as is Thirteen and Twilight star Nicki Reed (who should definitely not be confused with Nicky Reed when you don’t know how to spell her name and type the normal spelling of her name into IMDB). Panettiere will be seen next in Scream 4, but this Downers Grove role seems to be a complete departure from her normal bubble-gum aspirations. That’s not always a good thing, but it’s always interesting. [MTV]

Remember that hot chick from Pineapple Express, Amber Heard? Well, not to be gossipy, but I have it on high authority that she spends most of the duration of her upcoming movie The Informers in the nude.

I can see it in my head now – a blood spattered line dance of Patrick Batemans, leg kicking with chainsaws in hand to the sounds of “Hip to Be Square.”