Lots of news at Actionfest in Asheville

Jason Sandford

Jason Sandford is a reporter, writer, blogger and photographer interested in all things Asheville.

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There was lots of news floating around ActionFest this weekend, apparently. From a hitflix.com blog called Motion Captured:

It’s been a genuinely lovely weekend in Asheville, North Carolina.  The area is gorgeous, the people were friendly, the food was good, and the movies were plentiful.  Not much more you can ask, and now, as I get ready to fly out in the morning so I can get home to my beautiful wife and my baby boys, it’s time to take a look at what’s been going on while I’ve been submerged in ActionFest.

It’s interesting how much information I’ve heard here at ActionFest that I can’t do anything with at the moment, genuinely big news that would get people fired if I printed it.  It gives me several jobs to do when I get back to LA this week in order to try to find secondary sources for things, but I have a feeling it’s going to be a frustrating race to pin the stories down before someone else publishes them, which is exactly what happened with the breaking of the news that Rutger Hauer has been cast as the title character in Jason Eisener’s feature film version of “Hobo With A Shotgun.”

If you don’t know the title, that’s fine.  When “Grindhouse” was being prepped for release, there was a contest for people to create their own grindhouse-style trailers, and the winner was Jason Eisener.  Since then, he’s also made a great short film called “Treevenge” that I reviewed at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival, and he’s been working to develop a feature out of the trailer that got him all that initial attention.  It’s been a long and frustrating process, but as of right now, the movie is actually shooting, and I think the casting of Rutger Hauer is absolutely amazing.  It’s frustrating because just before Quint broke the news over at Ain’t It Cool, we talked about it here at the fest, with the understanding being that we weren’t allowed to write about the casting yet.  Oh, well.  Good score for Quint.