The "Premiere" Conundrum and the Race to Be Number 2

Anthony Kaufman had a great piece at indieWIRE the other day looking at the issue of festival premieres and the pressure premiere status places on filmmakers.  As Kaufman writes,

When the Tribeca Film Festival begins this week, the event will unveil 75 world premieres, five international premieres, and 30 North American premieres. That's no easy feat during the spring and early summer months, which see a dozen high-profile regional festivals around North America, from SXSW to Los Angeles, all competing for new films. But "this ridiculous concern for premiere status," as one festival programmer calls it, puts excessive pressure on filmmakers, limits their ability to generate momentum on the festival circuit, and arguably runs counter to the broader mission of film festivals in the first place: to showcase good films and cultivate cinephilia.

Kaufman also notes the contortions that some filmmakers and festivals have to go through in order to show films without jeopardizing their status at the more premiere event.  In order to still be in competition at the upcoming Los Angeles Film Festival, SXSW award winner Billy the Kid's screening at Full Frame was kept secret - so much so that I had botched my own coverage.  The filmmakers had told me that they were screening at Full Frame, I put it up on my blog post, then later retracted it when I didn't see Billy the Kid listed on the Full Frame schedule.

Similarly, at least one upcoming Tribeca premiere* had a secret screening in February at True/False, a festival that has no qualms about playing the premiere game if it allows them to show the films they want.  As indieWIRE's Jonny Leahan wrote last month:

Although the festival eschews the idea of world premieres, they offer many "sneak peeks" as well as works-in-progress. "We're taking this stand for a number of reasons," festival Co-Director David Wilson wrote in a recent email to indieWIRE. "But chiefly because we feel like the attention paid to premieres and premiere status is drawing focus away from the films themselves."

I wrote about this issue last fall when I pondered the linguistic contortions necessary to claim that certain films were having their world premieres at Toronto:

(T)his seems to be high season for the annual "you say premiere, I say preview" shell game.  It seems that nothing actually screens at Telluride - even though anyone can attend and members of the press and distribution companies are out in force.  It's treated as if it's a press screening, I suppose, or even a cast and crew screening that happens to be open to the public and followed by a press conference...

But at some point, all the maneuvering over premieres and previews of all shapes and sizes (international, European, North American, east coast, west coast, southeast, et al) gets to be a bit maddening for us filmmakers.  Without getting into specifics, one European festival wrote us to say that they were very interested in showing our film, that there was a good chance that they would program it, that if we hadn't played any other festivals in Europe there was a possibility that they would put it in competition, that if we played another European festival before their festival then we could not be in competition but it was very possible that they would still program the film.

Kaufman's article goes the extra mile on this topic by noting that the introduction of Tribeca has turned what used to be a somewhat friendly rivalry into a no holds battle for films.   If you play Tribeca, you can't play Los Angeles.  If you play SXSW, you likely won't play Tribeca - at least not in competition.   And with the battle to become #2 (behind Sundance) is an ever increasing monetary prize for competition winners.  Tribeca's narrative jury winner will receive $50,000, matching what Los Angeles gives to both its narrative and documentary prize recipients. 

But is this better for filmmakers in the end?  After all, if the same small group of films were in competition at Sundance, Tribeca, Los Angeles and SXSW, wouldn't that squeeze out a lot of worthy films?  Sure.  But something else has been lost, as noted in Kaufman's piece by Hot Docs programmer Sean Farnel:

"It's like opening weekend," says Farnel. "You get your one shot, and if you don't get it, you're buried, because there are so many films and at the next festival, everyone's looking for exclusivity."

Farnel, who used to program documentaries at the Toronto International Film Festival, fondly remembers the festival run for "Spellbound," which premiered at SXSW, screened at Tribeca and other regional festivals, and then eventually at the Toronto fest where it finally broke out. "But that can't happen anymore in the current context," he says, "because Tribeca doesn't screen films from SXSW, and Toronto doesn't screen films from Tribeca."

"It's better to give films a critical mass and a momentum through the festival circuit, and that's happening less and less," continues Farnel, who believes that Sundance, Berlin, Cannes and Toronto have earned the right to insist on premieres. "But I think every other festival that does that is prioritizing their own interests over the filmmakers."

*Clarification: I had previously named one of the films that was shown at True/False but have taken down the title after being told that the information had been embargoed from other outlets.  As I have reported in this same article on Full Frame's sneak screening of Billy the Kid and as I have written about Alex Gibney's Taxi to the Dark Side, which also sneaked in Durham prior to its official premiere at Tribeca,  I am not entirely confident in my decision to remove the name of the film.  My instinct is that removing the name of the film facilitates the same unfortunate "premiere status" frenzy that I dislike.  And frankly, it goes against the tone of the rest of the piece.  Further, just taking down the name and changing it to "one upcoming Tribeca premiere" goes against my own rules for how I want to manage my writing and reporting on this blog, so I wanted to disclose that I had done so and that I was not sure that it was the correct decision.

Comments

[Tom]

I agree 100%... Anthony quoted me in that piece, and my hopeis that people don't read that rticl and think "sour grapes"-- Our festival will play any film regardless of premiere status that we think matches our programming sensibility. End of discussion. I feel that all festivals would be well served to adopt this philosophy, provided that they have a broad enough range to be highly inclusive.

I also want to take Esther Robinson (who I admire very much) to task for her quote at the end of the piece; I've written extensively at my own blog about the unreasonable shift and burden of trying to make a profit for film on the back of non-profit festivals, but her final quote gets it all wrong. Festivals need to unite on this front and stop screwing the marketplace by playing this stupid game.

--Tom Hall

[AJ Schnack]

In case you haven't clicked over to Anthony's article, the quote that Tom refers to is:

"But a far more difficult and painful question," adds Robinson, "is what does this mean for most movies where the festivals are their release strategy? Premieres or no premieres, what the system needs is fewer film festivals and those that survive to be better funded so they can pay rentals, because for the bulk of these films that will be their only source of income."

[david]

Well, I guess we're called out. :)

It's a perceptive and incisive article, AJ, and a great companion to Anthony's piece.

The one exception that I take is to you saying that we "have no qualms about playing the premiere game."

We have plenty of qualms. I don't like it, and think that many mid-level fests have taken on similar policies to the big "premiere" festivals - policies which I think are unwarranted.

If anything, True/False has opted out of the game. From 2006 forward, no film that ever plays here will ever carry with it the tag of "premiere" nor will we make that part of our festival marketing. We're simply not that sort of festival.

The reason we do the secret screenings and sneak previews is to preserve, for the filmmakers, the chance to premiere at a larger, more media and industry filled festival. It certainly doesn't help our attendance numbers.

I appreciate your willingness to help maintain our press embargo on those screenings. In both cases, the request came from the filmmakers, not from Tribeca, and we have worked to honor their requests. I don't like that we are put in a position where we have to make requests like this, but, ultimately, I'd rather be able to treat my audience to a great film than say after the fact that we showed it.

It's hard to imagine any solution to this growing problem, short of some sort of governing association for film festivals that would set up rules for premieres, sneaks, etc. I've had lots of long conversations with other festival programmers and directors in the last year, and though some were fruitful, almost all involved laughable exercises in negotiating the language and details of what it means to be the first or second public screening of a film.

That some of these conversations were about the fourth or fifth public screening of a film is proof that this system (such that it is) badly needs to be overhauled.

thanks for your writing on this AJ, it's badly needed.

[AJ Schnack]

Saying "no qualms" was sloppy on my part. What I meant to convey was that True/False doesn't really play the premiere "game" and has no desire to start. I think that my initial post on your comments to Leahan were more to the point:

"Of note is T/F programmer David Wilson's statement regarding the out-of-control requirements regarding festivals and premiere status - something that True/False has chosen to rebel against"

To the point of the secret screening, I think that you raise important points, particularly to the contorted language that everyone engages in to try to preserve the "specialness" of their line-up. It is to True/False's great credit that your audience does not seem to require this sort of thing.

I think that my main issue with retracting the information wtih the film in question is to ask how long should this information remain secret? Is it free to disseminate after the Tribeca screening? After a longer festival run? After the film plays in theatres or on television? Certainly at some point (and my initial thought was that we had reached that point) the information no longer has the currency - or the threat of handicap - that it once did.

[Brit Withey]

Good God, I've been waiting for this discussion to come up for years. I tried to bring this up at the first Film Festival Summit in New York several years back and it was squashed pretty quickly.

I remember being taken to task by a critic a few years ago about the programming of the Denver Festival as being “raked over the coals” since the films had screened in other festivals. Well, yeah, they were raked over the coals for a couple of our local critics who attend Telluride and Toronto and they were brand new for the 40,000 other people who came down to the festival to see them. It's ridiculous. I have to say, though, that I also don't necessarily agree with the idea of screening a film in a festival as some sort of “sneak-peek” and not listing it in your program, not putting it online, basically pretending you are not screening it in order for some other festival to have the “premiere.” I think that perpetuates the problem, and AJ and I have had this discussion if he wants to comment…but if a film doesn't want to actually, truly BE a part of your festival, why screen it? There are lots of films out there. I could go on and on about this forever….

[david]

Well, I think that you make some good points Brit, but I also think that there's another way (or ways) of looking at this problem.

At T/F, we serve two audiences. One is our local crowd, who are wonderful and extremely enthusiastic, but tend to be pretty ignorant about the esoterica of documentary film. (most couldn't name three documentary directors, much less what the hottest new projects are.)

Our other audience is made up of filmmakers and invited guests - much smaller in numbers, but equally important to us. For them, we think we do a service by offering fresh films that they might not have had a chance to see yet.

And, from a programmer's standpoint, I just want to show the best films that I've seen. Period. So when I see something that's brand new, or has been promised to another fest, I'm going to try and figure out if there's a way to make everybody happy.

So far, I think we've been pretty successful with that. The filmmakers don't seem to feel slighted that they're not in the program or are listed as a "secret" screening - instead they're really thrilled to be somewhere without the pressure of a premiere - somewhere where they can just revel in their accomplishment with an energized audience.

Would I rather that we didn't have to play the premiere game at all? Absolutely. It would make my life TONS easier. But it's there, and it's not going away, and so we've all got to make do with what we've got. And I guess I really don't see it even being within our power to "perpetuate" anything. We're a tiny fest and what we do or say is a pretty small splash in the pond.

But I really appreciate your thoughts, Brit, and I'm glad you had the courage to bring this up at the FFS (even if you didn't get much response). It bears more discussion and debate and maybe we'll all get to a place where we can show movies without overwhelming restrictions.