Towleroad notes that President Bush, taking questions after a speech today at Kansas State University, was asked by an audience member if he had seen Brokeback Mountain. The following is an exact transcript of the exchange (video available at Brad Blog):

My Name Is Earl has just shut down production, because its star, Jason Lee, has come down with a highly contagious case of adult chickenpox:

With a lukewarm reception at the box office and snubs in virtually every awards race (it lost in both in its Golden Globe nominated categories best director and best screenplay to Brokeback Mountain) Steven Spielberg's Munich is left to wipe the snot from its once promising nose, wondering when and how it lost its way. Some are blaming its controversial point of view, which seemingly wants to have its Mossad revenge killing cake, and, in depicting Palestinian terrorists in a sympathetic light, eat it too. Screenwriter Tony Kushner took to defending the film in a recent LAT op-ed piece:

What may at first seem like a staged-for-the-cameras, all-girl, snow bunny Sundance slut-a-thon, is in reality the "wee hours" late-night bidding war for festival favorite Little Miss Sunshine we noted earlier. Pictured are acquisition executives from Focus, Lionsgate, Fox Searchlight, and Miramax (Paramount Classics, who recently saw a sizable percentage of its female staff downsized, was not in attendance). Negotiations were tense, but amicable, with studio representatives using creative strong-arming tactics such as suggestively biting into giant, stemmed strawberries, and pouring oversized bottles of Kettle One down each other's throats. In the end, it was Searchlight in the white bikini who came away with the prize, with the filmmakers particularly impressed with her plans for a robust, double-barreled TV and internet marketing push leading up to its wide release.

It's a toss-up really, which version of Kiefer Sutherland's existence is more exciting: His day-to-day life or his fictional exploits as CIA CTU agent Jack Bauer on Fox's addicting 24. Both feature substance abuse, intrepid globetrotting, high body counts, and destruction on a massive scale. We'll give it to 24, however, which is currently at the start of a particularly strong fifth season. To help you keep track of Jack's killings and goings around LA and beyond, Gawker Media's guide to the urban galaxy, Gridskipper, has compiled what could well be the most exhaustive, technologically astute web-based 24 guide in history: The Jacktracker.

· We have our first official big-buzz Sundance hit: Little Miss Sunshine, an ensemble comedy starring Greg Kinnear, Toni Collette and Steve Carell, was snapped up by Fox Searchlight for $10 million after an enthusiastically received premiere and a bidding war that went into the "wee hours." Look for a huge release next year, followed by disappointing box office take when it is completely eclipsed by a Norwegian documentary about sea lion reproduction. [Variety]
· As we mentioned earlier, Brokeback Mountain earns the Producers Guild's top honor. Larry H. Miller reacts by banning any movie with a producer credit from screening at his theaters. [Variety]
· Fox orders a half-hour sitcom based on former NBAer Paul Shirley's blog, "My So-Called NBA Career." The blogification of Hollywood begins, with agents adapting first: Goodbye Armani suits, hello soiled boxers! [Variety]
· Tommy Mottola has optioned the book Queens Reigns Supreme: Fat Cat, 50 Cent and the Rise of the Hip-Hop Hustler, with plans to develop a series. Industry watchers are touting it as the next Designing Women, just with bullet-riddled gangsta rappers sitting around trading saucy quips instead of southern belle interior decorators. [Variety]
· Ron Howard's The Da Vinci Code will open the Cannes Festival in May, to be immediately followed by crowds of French cinema elitists doing their weird-sounding version of booing. [THR]

An ABC series you won't be hearing Steve McPherson complain about any time soon is Lost, that rare show which manages to remain both a huge critical (it just won the Golden Globe for best dramatic series) and ratings hit. And in much the way salary allotment works in your workplace, Lost's entire cast has just been rewarded for a job well done with a huge pay increase:

As our one-man news gathering team continues to grapple unsuccessfully with a satellite dish installation at Sundance's media tent city, only to throw the frustrating piece of telecommunications hardware junk to the ground and head to the nearest "Indie Skinema Wet T-Shirt Contest" in order to "discover" some new "talent," we offer you a compendium of his Sundance coverage thus far. (And no, your computer is not malfunctioning. Mark is so drunk, the posts are almost universally blurry.)

The great circle of network television life continues, with the recent loss of two underperforming series: Lumbering giant and one-time king of the primetime jungle The West Wing has finally succumbed to a long stretch of low ratings and the death of one of its leads. But like a lame-legged baby zebra struggling to keep up with the herd as a pack of predatory executives stealthily approach it from all sides, the cancellation of the heavily-promoted ABC comedy Emily's Reasons Why Not after just a single episode airing seemed particularly barbaric, and prompted a justification from ABC network head Steve McPherson:

Like a mother sparrow dropping worm segments into the hungry, outstretched beaks of its screeching baby brood, we regurgitate for you the weekend's box office numbers. Nourish yourselves.

In an effort to correct our egregious movie to party ratio, we're trying to see four movies today. Whether or not this is a good idea on three hours sleep is up for debate (early answer: bad idea). We feel like we should make up some kind of motivational fight song to help keep our spirits up, but fear we'd throw up the part of our brain that helps produce such things.

When we saw Al Gore (who has a movie at the festival) walk through the crowd at the Entertainment Weekly party at The Shop, stopping to chat with so many people that we thought he might be shaking them down to make sure they didn't have his missing Florida ballots, we knew that it wouldn't be long before he encountered some B-lister and created a genuinely surreal moment. We kept one eye on nearby ex-boy-bander Lance Bass, thinking it might be funny to see him corner Gore, but hoping that we'd be treated to a better collision of low-level celeb and politician. Our faith in the near mathematical certainty of a more satisfying pairing was rewarded a little later in the evening, when we saw Gore locked in conversation with Official Defamer Sundance Correspondent On The Public School System, James Van Der Beek. We were too far away to catch any of the exchange, but we imagine it went something like this:

Something is very, very wrong when a movie (possible SPOILER ALERT: Bobcat Goldthwait's Stay) that involves a woman admitting that she'd blown a dog doesn't have a prayer to win the Sundance Special Jury Prize for the Heroic Depiction Of Deviant Sex Acts. Destricted, a "spicy compilation of shorts by visual artists who are reinvigorating erotic film" by Gaspar "Irreversible" Noe, Larry "Kids" Clarke, and Matthew "Cremaster" Barney, already has the competition locked up. What could be worse than the discussion of canine fellatio, you ask? The graphic depiction of bulldozer fucking, we answer. We found ourselves standing in the parking lot of the Library Theater as the movie's premiere was letting out, watching people's stunned faces and hearing some muttered reviews as they filed out ("Oh, that was horrible..." and "I feel totally provoked."), but someone we knew coming out of the screening treated us to a pretty thorough description of the dozer-humping action. And all we haven't erased from our memory banks in the interest of psychological self-preservation was his fear that during the intercourse, the actor's "dick might get ripped off." As the kids are fond of saying, good times.

Coming out of Cafe Terigo on Main Street on Saturday at lunchtime, we caught Nick Nolte standing on the steps at the front of a restaurant; as anyone who's spent more than five minutes on Main can tell you, the sudden appearance of an individual with any level of fame instantly causes a mob of onlookers to form on the sidewalk. (A couple of hours later, about a hundred people clogged the sidewalk in front of the Premiere Lounge, gawky deer frozen in the headlights of a TV camera, just on the promise that they might be witnessing Somebody Important being interviewed. We heard seemingly dozens of people asking each other who they were watching, and once guy was visibly deflated when we explained it was Blow Out's Jonathan Antin. His hair, we should note, was magnificent, something between a pompadour and a shark fin.) So Nolte's brief stop at the top of the steps gave the rubberneckers a chance to see him clutching a cane and generally looking like a very frail version of Judge Doom from Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

Overheard on Main Street yesterday, a guy explaining the difference between Robert Redford's glamorous bitch and the keeping-it-real stepkids of Park City: "We slipped in the back door of Plan B last night looking for after-hours. Turns out it was a Slamdance party. Slamdance people are ugly."

OK, please bear with us for a moment and don't pass judgment on our sanity, but Robin Tunney is either stalking us or has flooded Park City with amazing lookalikes. Since landing in Utah late Thursday night, we've seen the actress at the baggage claim, saw her on the street and then ate lunch at the table next to her on Friday (coincidentally, we swear), attended the party for her movie, Open Window, last night (coincidentally, we double swear!), and then passed by as she ducked into the Hollywood Life House earlier today. Thus after a mere two days and change at the festival, Sundance 2006 has officially become the Festival Of Tunney in our minds. (And this post will probably become Exhibit A in the restraining order filing sure to follow.)

Overheard on Main Street late last night, a surprising, if maddeningly partial, mini-diatribe on public schools, courtesy of former Dawson's Creek star James Van Der Beek as he brushed past us: "The public schools in my district are so lame..."

In the initial installment of what will be a recurring feature during our festival coverage, we present our first One Sentence Film Reviews, which we've been soliciting from people at least as inebriated as ourselves.

Overheard at Sundance HQ, an impromptu crash course in Hollywood Dealmaking 101: "The key to dealmaking is making other people think you're giving up something."

We don't want to go into why we're posting this photo essay documenting our first run up and down Main Street on Saturday, but suffice it to say that overcompensating for the lower alcohol content of the Park City booze with volume made the midday hunt for WiFi seem a little less pressing. Can we call it "exhaustion" and move on?