We’re halfway through the 10-day Toronto International Film Festival and most of the more than 100 films that needed distribution deals when they got here still have none.

The stars are walking the red carpets, the fans are clamouring for pictures and autographs but the New York Times says that off screen there is distress. The Times reports that festival co-director and chief executive, Piers Handling, said in Thursday’s opening-night address that “economic calamity” had informed this year’s film selections.

Thus far there has been no massive bidding war like the one that went down last year over ‘The Wrestler’ and saw Fox Searchlight victorious.

Dean Zanuck, a producer of ‘Get Low’ which stars Bill Murray and Sissy Spacek did tell the Times there are “a handful of interested parties at the table, and there are still people who haven’t seen [Get Low].” But he said the “days of the overnight deal are gone.”

Meanwhile, there is plenty of buzz about other means of getting a film out there, such as do-it-yourself distribution and underground guerilla marketing. These methods are nothing new to many independent film makers but the affluent Hollywood community is perhaps a bit less accustomed.

In a previous article on the subject from August, The Times refers to one relative success story of this approach, Sacha Gervasi’s documentary about Canadian metal band, Anvil.

Gervasi, who wrote the script for Steven Spielberg’s ‘The Terminal,’ began filming ‘Anvil! The Story of Anvil’ (not showing at TIFF) with the hopes of finding a distributor the easy way but after screening at Sundance 2008, offers were low, though praise was high. Gervasi continued to throw his own money, upwards of a hundred thousand dollars, into the project, distributing through Abramorama, a small company, and selling the DVD and television rights to VH1.

The aging rockers of Anvil played for theatre audiences. Famous fans like Courtney Love (an extremely avid Tweeter) started chattering about the movie online. And a Web consultant recruited an army of “virtual street teamers” to flood social networks with raves.

“Anvil!” had earned roughly $1 million worldwide at the box office in August, said The Times. Chump change for a Hollywood bigwig but the bigwig is playing with larger numbers to begin with.

So, those in the film biz may have to get creative and adapt to a more meager situation.

One might ask how meager it really be when this summer’s box office broke sales records to the tune of $4.17 billion but the reality of the situation is that actual ticket sales were the lowest recorded in over a decade.