When one considers what’s going on technologically and commercially, he said, there’s a real question about whether festivals “are going to be obsolete in a decade, because people won’t find them valuable anymore—they won’t be the platform from which people need to operate.”

Above, from a story in the Village Voice by John Anderson pegged to tonight’s opening of the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival, Geoff Gilmore sells the biggest event associated with his new employer by theorizing that it, and all festivals, may be on a long slide towards obsolescence.

Coincidentally, earlier this morning I watched the below video by JJ Lask, whose directorial debut On the Road With Judas premiered at Sundance in 2007, toured the country last year on the Range Life Roadshow, and is now available on DVD. “Don’t expect too much,” Lask says. “I’ve never had a girl come up to me after a show and say ‘I want to blow you,’ … I’ve never had a distributor come up to me and say, “Hey, I want to buy your movie … and blow you.’”  Lask goes on to suggest that the real values of the film festival experience are the free wine and the cushy hotel rooms from which to work on a follow-up screenplay in peace.

If that’s all filmmakers are getting out there on the circuit, it would make a certain sense for the people paying for that wine to be eager to declare the model broken. Call me an optimist, but I know one or two people who have gone to a festival and met people who wanted to buy their movies and/or blow them, so perhaps it’s best to keep hope alive for just a little while longer.