SXSW consistently schedules enjoyable low-budget documentaries, and The Last Western is no exception. I confess I decided to see it because I was already planning to see a later movie at the same venue and didn't want to rush from theater to theater. Fortunately, the film turned out to be worth seeing.

The Last Western is about an odd leftover from the days of B-movie Westerns: Pioneertown, California. Investors in the late 1940s decided it would be fun and profitable to build a Western-themed town that also could be used for shooting the Old West on location. A number of Gene Autry movies and TV shows were filmed in Pioneertown until the mid-1950s, when the town started its slow decline. Pioneertown became a hub for the Hell's Angels in the 1970s, then settled back into small-town desert life. Many of the Old West-style buildings became residences; some were boarded up and neglected for decades.

The few people left in Pioneertown—250 or so—tend to have "no regard for rules," as former resident and Concrete Blonde lead singer Johnette Napolitano notes. The film focuses on a few of the more colorful residents, intercutting their stories with appropriate scenes and music from Westerns that were shot in Pioneertown.

The crystal ball over here at Cinematical Headquarters is on the fritz, but even without it, I'd be willing to bet that the issue of runaway production will be to 2006 what The Slump was to 2005. Don't believe me? Then why is Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger (yup - it still hurts) talking about resurrecting an already-proposed, already-unpopular bill that would pump $100 million of state funds into keeping production from fleeing California? But according to the Hollywood Reporter, he's unlikely to have much luck at it. Though the money for the program, unavailable in last year's budget, now exists, there's a massive financial black hole on the horizon. When Schwarzenegger gives his State of the State speech on Thursday night, he's expected to present a plan to overhaul both the state budget, and the entire California infrastructure, at the possible cost of up to $50 billion. Pundits suspect that the production incentives will likely get lost in that shuffle. It's interesting that Schwarzenegger would bother to resurrect the same old bill at all – since protecting the local entertainment industry is vital to the state's economy on the whole, one would imagine that the Governor would take it upon himself to incorporate that order of business into the state's massive overhaul. But I suppose one would imagine a lot of things...

As light dawns on the glorious new year of 2006, the California paparazzi involved in The Incidents we heard so much about last year will suffer much greater penalties for any damage they cause (or, more accurately, are found in court to have caused). Starting yesterday, photographers who find themselves involved in lawsuits related to their efforts to get pictures or information on the celebrities we so love to see in compromising positions will "now be liable for three times the damages they inflict, plus lose any payments their published photos might earn." In addition, publishers who elect to print photos taken in lawsuit-related incidents are now also liable for damages, should they be taken to court.

The punishments are certainly potentially big, but are they really going to stop anybody? As the seriously anti-paparazzi George Clooney told CNN a couple of years ago, if someone is told "I'll give you $400,000 for the first picture of  Madonna's baby," it's unlikely that even this new law is going to stop them. In other words, we probably won't be experiencing a shortage of Jennifer Aniston pictures any time soon.