Charles Band is the most prolific filmmaker you've never heard of. In his three decades in the movie business, the 53-year-old Angeleno has been involved in the production of over 250 films. To a person weaned solely on cookie cutter googolplex fodder, his filmography will at first glance read like some sort of jape, stocked with B-schlock titles like Galactic Gigolo, Sorority Girls In The Slime Bowl-O-Rama and Creepozoids. Look a little bit closer, though, and you'll find his name attached to guilty pleasures like From Beyond, Trancers and the cable TV staple, Ghoulies.

The son of late veteran filmmaker Albert Band and the brother of composer Richard Band, Charles Band has built an empire, quite literally. In 1983, Band started Empire Pictures, a low-budget studio based in Italy, which he sold in 1988, necessitated by the collapse of the lira. Then, however, Band regrouped to form the entity that is most closely associated with him today -- Full Moon Pictures. The direct-to-video (DTV) production house provided horror fans with a steady supply of product, which the major studios were either unwilling or unable to provide. Titles like Puppet Master, Dollman and the aforementioned [Empire-produced] Trancers provided fertile seed for perpetual sequelization, keeping the company running past the dawn of DVD in 1997 and through the present.

Band launched Wizard Entertainment earlier this year, and announced plans to personally direct six films for it annually, including the 35mm feature H.G. Wells sequel, Dr. Moreau's House Of Pain. To promote his efforts, he is going all Kerou-wacky starting October 5 with Charles Band's Full Moon Horror Road Show, an interactive fan experience that will touch down in 18 cities and end with a big Halloween show in Philadelphia. With another 60 dates already planned for next year, Band says of the road(show) ahead, "I'll learn geography quite well."

• Not one to be outdone, Sin City (and upcoming Sin City 2) director Robert Rodriguez is already started on his next project, Grind House, but that's not what I'm here to report: The Austin Chronicle has it rumored that Rodriguez might take on Conan the Barbarian. Yes, but what will the Governator think?
• Matt Dentler is all over SXSW Presents, the TV show that airs on KLRU (our little public network here in Austin). Dentler hosts the series, and it's in it's second season right now, wrapping up on the first couple of days of on-location filming at Top Notch and other nostalgic spots.
• If you've been meaning to submit work to Cinematexas's Terra Cognita film festival, you'd better hurry. The deadline for the competition, which "reclaims public space with moving image installations" is July 1st.
• Tonight I'm going to see Citizen Kane. What are you going to do? Well, on the tail end of the DVD release of the Complete James Dean Collection, you should go see our rebel boy at the Paramount Theatre this weekend (17th-23rd), and follow up with Dennis Quaid in September, 30 1955.
• Richard Linklater's Slacker comes back to the big screen on June 30th at the Harry Ransom Center's Summer Voyages Film Series. Wait, Top Notch and Slacker? Is this a Linklater revival or what?

As a part of a new summer series here at Cinematical, I'll be going over the films showing at Austin's Paramount Theatre's (ain't it beautiful?) Summer 2005 Film Classics series, running from June to late August. There's a wealth of the oldies-but-goodies making it to the big screen: from This is Spinal Tap to 70mm prints of Lawrence of Arabia. In conjunction we'll do reviews after each screening, and keep an eye out for any recent DVD Special Editions of the films.

• In the unsubstantiated rumor mill, I went to a party recently only to bump into an animator working in Richard Linklater's A Scanner Darkly. Cinematical recently mused on the whereabouts of Bob Sabiston, who was integral in putting together the complex animations of Waking Life. Well, drunk as my animator snitch was, he said not only did Sabiston jump ship, but he took a whole crowd with him, and now Linklater's left with half a staff. Hey, that rhymed.
• Local rag The Austin Chronicle has all the updates on upcoming film The Cassidy Kids. In producer mode, Bryan Poyser takes a shot at a sequel to Dear Pillow, about a 1980 murder solved by a rag-tag group of kids. Also making news: the Independent Feature Project (IFP) gets a chapter in Austin; vampires start filming the low-budget Insatiable in June; and if you love Star Wars but fear the light-saber, you can drive to Taylor, Texas to see the show for a mere 4 bucks. Robert Rodriguez's The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl premieres 5 days early for Austinites, on June 5th. The rest of the nation has to wait until the 10th. Ha.
• Matt Dentler wants to know: with all this film-musical-film craziness going on (he just saw The Producers in Austin, the musical based on Mel Brooks' film, which is about to be turned into yet another film) will Hollywood ever get around to making original musicals again? Note: Moulin Rouge does not count.
• The Austin Film Society starts up it's Essential Cinema Series this June with Shattering the Narrative: European Cinema 1960-1972. Showing at Alamo Drafthouse Downtown, it'll kick off on June 7th with Breathless, and close appropriately with Satryicon on July 27th.