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.
Woah. indieWIRE is reporting that Geoff Gilmore, a key player at the Sundance Film Festival for almost two full decades, is leaving that festival to take a job as Chief Creative Officer at Tribeca Enterprises, the New York organization that, amongst other things, is responsible for mounting the Tribeca Film Festival.
It seems too soon to assess What It All Means, but obviously, beyond each Festival’s assorted trials and tribulations, Sundance and Tribeca have had very different identities. Sundance is primarily associated with a certain type of actor-driven independent drama; Tribeca, in its brief history, has been most successful at unearthing international gems.
Of course, this is not the first sign that Tribeca has an interest in moving in more of a Sundance direction. In late 2007, Tribeca announced plans to streamline in the hopes of becoming more significant as an indie film market. At the time, Nancy Schafer lamented, “we haven’t had our Sex, Lies & Videotape yet. That’s what we want, and that’s what the industry wants.” Tribeca 2008 was my favorite installment of the festival yet, but beyond Jury Prize winner Let the Right One in, which was not a world premiere, it came and went without a breakout narrative hit. In light of this, the luring of Gilmore seems like the next logical step towards Tribeca’s long-ago stated mission.
It was only a matter of time before some journalist tied Barack Obama to the outlook of this year’s fest. In the Toronto Sun, which says to “call it the Obamafication of Sundance,” festival director Geoff Gilmore is quoted as saying “A lot of the work seems to be putting us into another world — I don’t know if it’s escapist, but it is about fantasy and the future, and there’s animation we didn’t see in the past … Whether that’s a reflection of the times we live in, or just an aesthetic trend line of the moment, I don’t know.”
While the fest has been called “subdued” this year, some non-film nonsense will still be occurring this weekend as Ashton Kutcher and Digg co-founder Kevin Rose co-host an interactive online game show in Park City called 24 Hours of Sundance and viewable at Qik.com.
Stu Van Airsdale, at Defamer, meanwhile predicts bidding wars for five films: I Love You Phillip Moris; An Education; The Greatest; Cold Souls; and Bronson.
I haven’t watched The Simpsons regularly in years, but I got a couple of text messages alerting me that last night’s episode, which follows Lisa (whose talent President Skinner assesses equates to “as if Ingmar Bergman and Penny Marshall had a baby), as she makes a documentary called Capturing the Simpsons, and then takes the film to Sundance.
Matt Dentler points out that the entire episode is already up on my beloved Hulu, via which it’s now embedded above. It’s full of some pretty great festival-centric jokes. My favorite: Lisa’s film is chosen during a scene in which a character who looks a little something like Geoff Gilmore throws a can of film into what looks suspiciously like the fireplace in the lobby at The Yarrow, AKA Sundance press and industry homebase. Also good: Marge walks into a theater playing a film called Candyland under the assumption that “a great family game is now a great family movie”, only to find junkies on screen getting ready to shoot up. “Oh, I get it,” Marge says. “Every title means the opposite of what it means!”
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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