Nearly six months after a euphoric Sundance debut, Douglas Tirola’s Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Story Of The National Lampoon has been acquired by Magnolia Pictures, presumably for release this year. The doc was hands down one of the best assembled, most entertaining, totally wowser films I saw at Sundance last January. And it’s about something that nearly everyone understands or identifies with to some degree, which is the seed and birth of anarchic, counter-conventional, ultra-outlandish comedy, which everybody takes for granted today but was an entirely new thing when it popped out of the National Lampoon in 1970. So it’s really quite the cultural landmark in a sense. I was thinking it would sell immediately when I saw it in Park City last January. What was the hold-up? I’m guessing that John Sloss‘s Cinetic Media was looking for terms that distributors couldn’t accept and so there was a months-long Mexican standoff…something like that. All Sloss would say was that “sometimes the right deals take a long time to fit together.”