LOS ANGELES — ShoWest has named Abigail Breslin ShoWest “Female Star of Tomorrow,” it was announced today by Mitch Neuhauser, co-managing director of the event that will be held March 10-13, 2008, in Las Vegas. Breslin will be presented with the ShoWest Female Star of Tomorrow award at ShoWest’s closing night ceremony on Thursday, March 13, at Bally's and Paris Las Vegas.

Apparently, ShoWest has always been a place for studios to throw big extravagant presentations and parties for their upcoming films, but clearly the most elaborate one of this year's show was New Line's presentation for Hairspray, which started with a dinner of comfort foods like meatloaf, fried chicken, mashed potatoes and fries and concluded with an amazing multimedia presentation that brought the song and dance from the movie musical onto the stages of the Paris Ballroom.

Anyone who's been griping about ShoWest and how it's not pertinent or relevant anymore probably didn't expect the 7th largest studio/distributor in terms of market share to throw the most impressive shindig, but that's exactly what Lionsgate did on Day 2 of ShoWest, teaming with AMC, Dolby and MySpace to hold a luncheon presentation for exhibitors where they could show off their upcoming movie slate. But this wasn't just a bunch of clips and trailers, as they somehow were able to amass one of the most impressive arrays of talent at this year's show, including Tobin Bell of the Saw movies, Jason Statham, Dane Cook (who was presented with the ShoWest Breakout Performance of the Year), Eli Roth and the clear star of the show, Larry the Cable Guy, who did a 15-minute comedy routine that had the hall in stitches.

If there's any doubt left that Michael Bay's Transformers is going to be a huge deal for Paramount/DreamWorks this coming summer, it's probably been squashed by the amount of Transformers everything that can be seen at ShoWest this year. Besides the banner ads all over Bally's Paris, Paramount actually brought the vehicles used in the movie to the ShoWest exhibition floor to give the theatre delegates a chance to see the Transformers in car and truck format up close. The Paramount booth was pretty packed, making it difficult to take clean pictures of the vehicles, but you can get some idea what these things look like here.

UPDATE: Before the screening of DreamWorks' Disturbia, which also stars Shia LaBeouf, Michael Bay came out to introduce and present footage from Tranformers. While it was mostly the same footage that was shown at Toy Fair, some of it seemed to be extended. You can read more about the new footage below.

After the Disney presentation kicked off ShoWest's Opening Ceremony, next up was an address by Dan Glickman, Chairman and CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), and a bit of a controversial figure in liberal circles after taking over that role from Jack Valenti in September 2004. It was kind of a long speech with a few bad jokes, but it was certainly a stirring motivational speech that many exhibitors were on hand to hear, including a number of amusing facts about Glickman's own taste in movies.

Having owned the theatrical box office in 2006 with Cars and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, it seemed only appropriate that Walt Disney Pictures would kick off the opening ceremony of the 2007 ShoWest, held in the spacious Le Theatre Des Arts at the Paris Hotel. With Pirates producer Jerry Bruckheimer and Ratatouille creator Brad Bird on hand, it was very likely that they would be showing something from their 2007 summer offerings (as hinted at the previous afternoon at the international presentation).

The 2 1/2 hour International Distribution Marketing Presentations culminated with Disney/Buena Vista batting clean-up with an impressive line-up of footage and trailers, many of them having never been seen previously. It included never-before-seen footage from Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, Ratatouille, National Treasure: Book of Secrets, Enchanted and even a preview of The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian.

ShoWest officially starts tomorrow, but today was a special International Day strictly for the International Delegates attending the conference to discuss issues of importance to exhibitors and theatre owners outside the United States. Most of the day will be covered in separate pieces, but the big event of the day was the International Distribution Marketing Presentations when four of the major studios presented footage, trailers and marketing plans for their 2007 line-up (and previewing movies for 2008 as well).

It was an exciting two and a half hours where we were allowed to see some new trailers, new footage and some cool marketing ideas that will be used mainly outside of our shores. Since there's a lot of ground to cover, we'll start with Universal, who capped off their preview with an unfinished action sequence from Paul Greengrass' The Bourne Ultimatum. (Note: Before the presentation, the press attending were asked not to write about this event due to the amount of unfinished footage shown. Because of this, we won't discuss anything in full detail but just give the reader some idea what was shown with the disclaimer that what's described may not make it to the final films.)

Universal's impressive presentation was followed by similar deals from Sony and then Paramount, though neither of the two studios showed nearly as many exclusive clips or as much footage in their run-down of movies. Hence, they're combined together.

Although most of the awards at ShoWest will be handed out later in the week, a special luncheon was held on International Day to give out two very special awards for international achievements. Isao Matsuoka, Chairman of Japan's legendary Toho Studios, was presented with the International Lifetime Achievement Award, and filmmaker Alfonso Cuaron was given the International Achievement in Filmmaking Award.

We have added a new gallery of posters and displays from ShoWest which you can check out here!

For the next few days, a mysterious thing called ShoWest is taking place in Las Vegas. It wouldn't even be mentioned on ComingSoon.net if it didn't have something to do with movies, though it's not a film festival per se, as much as a way for the studios and technology companies to wine and dine exhibitors and theatre owners and give everyone a headstart on the summer movie season, which is less than two months away. This shindig will take place at the Paris Hotel on the Vegas strip, and one can expect that everyone's going to be putting their best feet forward to try to impress the people on the frontline of the moviegoing experience, that being the people who actually book and show the movies we're all going to see.

A few years ago, I swore that I'd never go back to Vegas after a less than great experience there, and yet, here I am making the ultimate sacrifice for ComingSoon.net readers, breaking that promise to myself in order to try to cover as much as this fascinating convention as possible… though God only knows what exactly I'll be doing here.