Inside: Are flashy festivals still a vital component of a film’s later success?
New York film critic says movies can still have a big impact at events
“Cannes is just a mediocre beach town with lousy food.” So pronounced a young European friend of mine in the early 2000s, when I mentioned that I had just completed my first tour of that town’s film festival.
She would know better than I, I supposed, but I was still a bit befuddled. For on an evening on the Croisette (that’s Cannes speak for “the main drag”), watching the light of the full moon dance on the ocean, and the kliegs and flashes of the Palais ahead of me, I was often dazzled, and understood why filmmakers and movie stars would be as well.
For your film to make a splash there meant making a mark internationally. The Cannes Film Festival competition represents a sort of apex of film art, and that competition occurs — or occurred — alongside one of the most wide-ranging and cutthroat film markets in the world. There once strode the holiest of holies — Kurosawa, Bresson, Tarkovsky, Welles — and, in more recent years, a posse of unwashed youths in body paint extolling the virtues of Troma shlock. And then there’s the red carpet.
Toronto doesn’t have the beaches (well, not that kind, anyway), but its film festival is especially beloved both by filmmakers and less cynical journalists because it’s an event largely meant to serve a movie lover’s town — a cinema celebration for the people. A simultaneous film smorgasbord and party. And this year, for the second time, because of COVID-19, it’s primarily virtual rather than in person. This has led a lot of people to wonder what’s the point and where is the fun supposed to be.
Berry Meyerowitz, co-president of Quiver, a Toronto-based producer and North American distributor, is among the disappointed. “Toronto is one of the best audience festivals in the world, talent loves coming here and it’s a good time to launch a movie for awards season,” he says. “So it’s a shame we’re having it in virtual form two years in a row.”
But it’s not uninteresting, allows Meyerowitz (whose inprogress projects include “Dead for a Dollar,” a Western written and directed by Walter Hill, and starring Willem Dafoe, Rachel Brosnahan and Christoph Waltz) because the COVID-driven closures coincide with a more aggressive push from streaming giants such as Netflix, Amazon and Apple to buy movies.
Adding to the excitement, or confusion, is the fact that more once-traditional studios are themselves becoming streaming giants. In the case of Disney Plus, the Disney acquisition of 20th Century Fox also absorbed Searchlight, the indie arm behind countless festival hits turned Oscar winners (“Birdman,” “The Shape of Water” and “Nomadland,” to name a few recent titles).
R.J. Millard, the president of Obscured Pictures, a New York movie marketing company, also thinks the notion that streamers are squeezing out more established distributors with less deep pockets is something of a myth. “On the festival market circuit,” he says, “there’s always a new buyer that comes in with a lot of cash. Finding ways to deal with that, to establish a strategy where a prudent caution comes into play, is part of the challenge of doing business. But it’s not as if this is some brand new thing.” But while
Millard misses the festival feeling, both he and Meyerowitz aver that they don’t miss the glitz.
These days it pays to look at things from a sober perspective, but let’s face it: glitz can be fun. TIFF was always, in my experience, a great environment for the kind of social interaction that can only occur at well-attended parties.
The now-defunct Premiere magazine (where I was on staff for 10 years) sponsored a party at TIFF that we considered the northern equivalent of the Vanity Fair Oscar party. I think I may have introduced David Lynch to Monica Bellucci at one of these affairs. I remember talking with Terence Stamp about Federico Fellini. I remember Richard Harris repeatedly chortling “Jimmy Webb! Jimmy Webb!” after I mentioned that I had chatted with the writer of Harris’s hit song “MacArthur Park” at the LaGuardia Airport food court earlier in the week. We all want to get back to that part of festival glitz, I reckon.
In any event, Millard says, “inperson festivals remain vital to launching a picture, and giving audiences and filmmakers a chance to see and interact with each other. Desire to see a film is strongly facilitated by festivals, which means there’s a strong need for them to exist. The theatrical, communal sense of discovery is more of a connection than turning on a streaming service.”
That’s not entirely what Denis Villeneuve, the director of the upcoming “Dune,” meant when he lamented to Total Film magazine in August that “to watch ‘Dune’ on a television, the best way I can compare it is to drive a speedboat in your bathtub. For me, it’s ridiculous. It’s a movie that has been made as a tribute to the big-screen experience.” This condition, it should be noted, has little if anything to do with film festivals themselves; Warner Media made the decision to launch its entire slate of 2021 releases on its HBO Max streaming service, sometimes with theatrical exposure as well, back in late 2020. As it happens, multiple IMAX screenings of Villeneuve’s film are slated to be among TIFF’s special events.
As for the so-called “cultural conversation” surrounding festival movies, every (motion) picture tells its own story.
At 2021’s virtual Sundance, Apple purchased the heart-tugging family drama “Coda” for a head-spinning $25 million (U.S.). Apple TV premiered the movie in late August and, to judge by Rotten Tomatoes, the rave reviews it garnered were matched by audience reactions. And yet, to some, it feels like a movie that landed with a thud. Part of this has to do with the fragmented, not to say fractured, way we now assess “buzz.”
With social media, we pick and choose the voices we’re invested in hearing; for all a “Coda” skeptic knows, there may be a whole densely populated corner of Twitter devoted to the movie (although I wasn’t able to turn one up myself ). Since, as a rule, streaming services don’t release viewership information — which could function as box office numbers for those with a lust to analyze — mass impact is almost impossible to measure.
Except when it’s not. John Sloss, a principal at Cinetic, a New York-based media sales and advisory company, has a good story from this year’s Sundance.
“Yes, the festival this year was completely virtual,” he says. “From a sales perspective, you can’t really use that iteration of Sundance as effectively as you can a live fest. Sundance has always been a perfect live festival; it merges genuinely enthusiastic audiences with a real sense of industry urgency. The virtual festival doesn’t lack either but puts the enthusiasm in play in a different way.
“This year, we made the biggest sale of a documentary in Sundance history,” he continues. “And I have to say the movie benefitted from the new environment.”
That documentary, which sold to the Disney-owned (but still doing its own deals) Searchlight for $12 million (U.S.), was “Summer of Soul,” which by most of the metrics the smart set leans on is the most talked about movie of the summer, if not the year. In one of what will become, I think, many divideand-conquer moves, Disney placed the film on the streaming service Hulu (which it coowns) in the U.S. All three of the industry executives I spoke with say that they are all about getting their movies in front of as many eyes as possible. They still believe festivals can help accomplish that goal.
But, of course, the festival spotlight isn’t everything. And it certainly isn’t forever.
I have often recounted this anecdote (once to writer Brian Raftery, who put it in his excellent book “Best. Movie. Year. Ever.: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen”): I was at the 1999 Sundance Film Festival, where all anyone could talk about was “The Blair Witch Project,” a movie that went on to become a big hit but did not ultimately make stars of its creators.
Amid all the buzz, which went on for days, I boarded a nearly empty bus and ran into a director and producer who had a film at Slamdance (a kind of underground offshoot of Sundance also happening in Park City, Utah). They were hoping that their offbeat thriller, “Following,” would continue getting the good word-of-mouth that had started the previous year at TIFF. Because of “Blair Witch,” that wasn’t happening and they were a bit down in the mouth. I gave them a little pep talk. The filmmakers were producer Emma Thomas and director Christopher Nolan — you know, the team behind “The Dark Knight Rises.”