Earlier today, I was at the American Film Market in Santa Monica. If you’re not familiar with AFM, it’s the place where film buyers from around the world come once a year to buy movies and also pre-buy films in development. Simply put, this is where a lot of money changes hands in the film industry and it’s where many decisions about what you and I get to see are made. In an effort to try and raise a film’s profile or attract film buyers, many of the studios print up promo art for movies in development or nearing completion. Almost none of the artwork will ever see the light of day outside of AFM, but if you’re a film junkie like me, then getting to see all this stuff is Christmas. After the jump you can take a look at the first grouping of random promo posters and artwork from today. You can also see the first images from Rogues Gallery and The Experiment.

Now for the other bit of news: When I was walking around, I got to see even more awesome stuff. The first was the AFM only red band trailer for Hot Tub Time Machine! To say it looked painfully hilarious would be a huge understatement. The other thing I saw was a promo poster for Robert Rodriguez’s Machete featuring Lindsay Lohan in a nun’s outfit while being very friendly to a firearm. Read more on the trailer, poster, and a whole lot else after the jump:

Virginia Madsen has joined the cast of “Father of Invention”, the indie comedy from Kevin Spacey’s Trigger Street Productions.  Spacey plays a down-on-his-luck inventor turned billionaire-inventor who once again finds himself down on his luck when an invention goes horribly awry - that Slap-Chop was always too good to be true.  Madsen will play Spacey’s wife in the film which is being directed by Trent Cooper (”Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector”).  “Invention” has already begun filming in New Orleans with co-stars Camilla Belle, Heather Graham, Johnny Knoxville and the great Craig Robinson.

In his book Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, Chuck Klosterman lays out what is essentially the unifying theory of Johnny Carson - the idea that the advent of cable and the home video market, not to mention the Internet, has splintered public tastes to the point that there’s no longer any such thing as a shared cultural experience anymore; according to Klosterman, the last patch of common ground was Johnny Carson, and once he disappeared from the airwaves, he took the last link in our pop culture chain with him.

Klosterman had a point, one which grows ever more relevant with each passing year - but every so often, a cultural event comes along with enough significance to achieve true water cooler status. Case in point: the long-awaited debut of Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace in 1999, a breathlessly anticipated extension of a film franchise that was virtually inescapable in its day. When George Lucas announced he was working on a prequel trilogy that would fill in the story behind the original films, pretty much everyone was at least curious to see what they’d look like - and the hardcore fans were on pins and needles.