Oscilloscope Laboratories has acquired U.S. distribution rights to “Howl” and plans a simultaneous theatrical/VOD release in September.

The indie film, which stars James Franco as famous Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, had its world premiere opening night of the Sundance Film Festival in January. Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman (“The Celluloid Closet”) directed the movie, which focuses on Ginsberg’s groundbreaking poem and the obscenity trial it provoked in 1957.

The Gersh Agency has signed award-winning independent filmmaker Debra Granik and her writing-producing partner Anne Rosellini.

At last month’s Sundance Film Festival, Granik’s latest film, “Winter’s Bone,” won the grand jury prize in the dramatic competition. She and Rosellini were also honored with the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award for their adaptation of the Daniel Woodrell novel. Rosellini produced the dark drama.

Memories of Sundance may be fading away, but deals for many of its titles are only beginning to gear up. As overnight film-fest bidding wars become an endangered species, the indie film market is allowing buyers to take their sweet time choosing a higher quality level of film, with more coastal execs screening pics to be sure they’re the right fit.

It’s worth noting that last year’s biggest deal (and biggest hit) “Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire,” wrapped its Lionsgate distribution pact a week after Sundance ended. The 2010 iteration’s Sunday close had no effect on continuing dealmaking.

Even as Sundance wound down, glimmers of glamour and random acts of kindness still remained.

As I sat inside a mall housing the recently shuttered New Frontier on Main space Sunday afternoon, a guy walked up to a Mohawked, redheaded teen strumming a Telecaster on a bench near mine. “Hey, do you want a guitar?” said the passerby. “I wish,” the teen replied. “Here you go,” said the stranger, handing over an acoustic guitar and walking away.

“Dude, I just saw Jared Leto, and he gave me his guitar! The guy from ‘30 Seconds To Mars’!” he tells a friend on his cell. Turns out the 22-year-old recipient, Dakota Brock, had been looking for funds to get a new guitar for his local church.

Jeremy Konner and Derek Waters’ “Drunk History: Douglass & Lincoln” has won the jury prize in short filmmaking at the Sundance Film Festival. In the film, Will Ferrell and Don Cheadle perform a re-enactment as Jen Kirkman describes a historical event after downing two bottles of wine.

The festival announced its short film winners Tuesday night at the Jupiter Bowl in Park City.

My last Sundance screening of the 2010 fest turned out to be the horror-comedy “Tucker & Dale vs. Evil,” Wednesday afternoon at the Library Theatre. And what a way to go out.

Eli Craig and Morgan Jurgenson’s inspired twist on the kids-go-into-the-woods trope is clever and original and very funny. Alan Tudyk and Tyler Labine play the title characters, two sweet rubes headed into the woods to spruce up a new “vacation home” (creepy cabin). Soon after, a group of typically dim and entitled college kids stumbles into the area and quickly becomes convinced that Tucker and Dale are bloodthirsty psychos out for one of the girls, played by “30 Rock’s” Katrina Bowden.

Someone sitting near me at the Eccles Theater Monday morning was startled to see me reading a book prior to the 9:15 screening. He laughed. He saw this as a radical act since everyone else in the auditorium had heads buried in BlackBerrys and mobile phones.

I thought of this later that day when I took in the New Frontier entry “Utopia in Four Movements,” which its creators, filmmaker Sam Green and musician Dave Cerf, call a “live documentary.”

An interesting timeline emerged from two Sundance 2010 features — the Banksy quasi-doc “Exit Through the Gift Shop” and Tamra Davis‘ documentary “Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child.”

I caught a press and industry screening of “Basquiat” at the Holiday Village Cinema 3 Tuesday night, and it reminded me that the deceased artist first gained renown for his street poetry on the Lower East Side in the late 1970’s. Basquiat, working under the name Samo (for Same Old, Same Old), began spraying his oblique, pseudonymous poetry around Manhattan as a critique of modern art, before becoming a doomed, if fascinating, icon of the movement himself as a painter.

I have to question the wisdom of throwing a party for a Sundance film the night before it premieres, but then I’m not a public relations specialist.

Tuesday night, I swung by the Luxury Lounge on Main Street to check out the Skintimate shindig for Galt Niederhoffer’s “The Romantics.” The film is another ensemble comedy (see “HappyThankYouMorePlease“) about (relatively) young people struggling with life and love — in this case at the seaside wedding of two of the group. I haven’t seen it, mainly because the setup reads like a hundred other films I’ve seen and cringed through. But also because the film wasn’t scheduled to screen until today at 11:30 a.m.

While the major Sundance 2010 titles have been flirting with cutting distribution deals, some lower-profile films have been closing their own. Here’s a quick roundup of some of the off-the-radar dealmaking from the last few days.

The CEOs of Sony Pictures Classics, Michael Barker and Tom Bernard, have been busy not only in dark theaters but also hosting parties.

OK, so it’s a must to slip into at least one late-night Park City at Midnight genre screening each year. But that’s an absolute minimum. It’s a bracing (and essential) tonic to laugh or cringe through a “Black Dynamite” or “Dead Snow,” a “Buried,” “Splice” or, as I decided Monday night, “The Violent Kind,” from the Butcher Brothers, to cleanse and recharge from all the angsty indie dramedies.

And while I don’t regret the decision, since some trashy, thuggish-bikers-getting-their-asses-eviscerated-by-rockabilly-aliens-in-the-woods gore-comedy is always a nice break from the rest of the fest, I was still somehow let down. It’s fun and all, but, uh, randomly bizarre and way too long in places. It also lacks a protagonist with screen presence, since the actor who plays Cody, the conflicted antihero of the piece, would lose an audition to plaid wallpaper.