California film festivals fight for audience face time

• Some say there are too many festivals now
• Festivals don't guarantee more distribution deals
• Organizers compete with each other for premieres

When Sonny Bono's 1987 film festival planning committee was exploring themes to attract critics to Palm Springs, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association suggested a focus on foreign films.

After the collapse of the Los Angeles Filmex event the previous year, it felt Southern California needed an international film festival to fill a void.

More than a quarter of a century later, it's hard to imagine Southern California ever had such a void. Even the executive director of the California Film Commission says she doesn't know how many hundreds of film fests now exist in the state.

In Southern California alone, there's the Southern California Business Film Festival, Burbank International Film Festival, Reel Rasquache Art & Film Festival and Hero Fest.

There are three African-American film festivals in Greater Los Angeles plus the San Diego Italian Film Festival, the Los Angeles Greek Film Festival, the Red Nation Film Festival, the Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival, and the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film & Video Festival. There is an International Family Film Festival and LGBT fests with very different definitions of family.

"There are just so many film festivals," said Marc Halperin, owner of the Magic Lamp Releasing distribution company, who arrived early for Thursday's opening of the Palm Springs International Film Festival. "I could spend my entire year just going to film festivals."

Unfortunately, he says, most of them do nothing to advance the art of cinema.

"Maybe there are 10 festivals in the state of California that have some kind of credibility," said Halperin, who helped establish the credibility of the Sundance Film Festival by releasing "Sex, Lies and Videotape" there in 1989 as the general sales manager of Miramax Films.

"The L.A. Film Festival and the AFI Film Festival are the two really big discovery festivals. Then you've got Newport Beach, San Diego, San Francisco, Mill Valley and maybe another few. Palm Springs. There are at least one or two film festivals every single week in California. So I'd say 90 percent of the festivals really don't have any interest to anybody outside of the local community."

Plenty of niche fests

Palm Springs has its own plethora of niche festivals, including the Arthur Lyons Film Noir Festival, the American Documentary Film Festival and the LGBT event, Cinema Diverse. But Palm Springs International Film Festival executive director Darryl Macdonald doesn't view niche fests as competitors or events that aid the advancement of cinema.

"I'm not one who is of the persuasion that there needs to be a Polish film festival, a Jewish film festival, a gay film festival, because to a certain extent I feel that is ghetto-izing films," Macdonald said. "That being said, I recognize that there are different perspectives and also positive reasons for starting those kinds of festivals, i.e., serving those particular communities and hopefully being able to expand the audience for those films beyond those particular communities."

But the exponential growth of ethnic and international film festivals hasn't led to more U.S. distribution deals for foreign films. In fact, industry people say foreign language films receive fewer U.S. distribution deals now than when there were fewer film festivals.

The main reason for that, Halperin said, is there are fewer foreign language films in festivals with broad commercial appeal. A greater trend is to remake even the most commercial foreign films, such as Sweden's "Girl With the Dragon Tattoo."

The few breakout foreign films are often subject to intense competition by festivals seeking exclusive screenings. That competition ultimately doesn't help most foreign films get U.S. distribution deals.

"I think it's counterproductive," said Macdonald.

David Anson, artistic director of the Los Angeles Film Festival, said he can understand competing for films with other festivals in his time period such as Tribeca in New York and South By Southwest in Austin, Texas. But he recently became viewed as competition to the huge Toronto International Film Festival, held almost three months after his June fest.

"There was a movie we showed — we had the world premiere — and they were basically told by somebody at Toronto if you go to L.A. we won't show you," said Anson, a Newsweek movie critic for 30 years until 2008. "They had made that threat before and were kind of bluffing, but this year they actually didn't show this movie. To me, it does a disservice both to the filmmaker and to the audience. Why are they playing hardball? They don't need one more premiere. They're getting all the big fall releases."

"That is the story of film festivals at large: competition," said Macdonald. "Everybody who works for (major) festivals is in it for the same reason: not just the discovery of talent but bringing audiences together with astounding new talent and introducing audiences to new films and creating possibilities for those filmmakers and the world of cinema. In other words, expanding the audience in general for great international cinema.

"The irony is we wind up fighting each other over premieres, over who's got the biggest audience, the most premieres, the most stars coming to the festival. That boils down to, I guess territorialism. But, when you're allied to a cause, it's like football or baseball: you want your team to win!"

Macdonald, who co-founded the Seattle International Film Festival, which ranks with Toronto and Palm Springs as North America's largest film fests, recalls being stung by a competitor while launching the Hamptons International Film Festival in Long Island in 1993.

"I had my lineup practically together and a week before our announcement party in New York City, I had 12 confirmed films yanked from me, including some pretty major directors. After the first three or four I couldn't understand why the filmmakers were calling to say, 'Sorry, I couldn't be in the festival.' So I started asking. At about the sixth or seventh film, I finally got an answer: They had been told point blank by somebody at Sundance, 'If you play that film in the Hamptons Film Festival, don't even bother submitting it to Sundance.'

"I ended up going to war with Sundance and its then head over this very question of hegemony. We're all supposedly in this for the same reason. How could one festival try and stop another festival from getting a film? Who are you helping?"

Competition with other festivals

Palm Springs has lost the right to screen, or at least identify screenings of important foreign language films because Sundance has said it won't screen films premiering in Palm Springs. But artistic director Helen du Toit says that's changing.

"Sundance focuses on and is extremely good at American indies," she said. "A decade-and-a-half ago they added international films, but really the people who run there are looking for the next big American indie. So what happens, if you have a foreign language film at Sundance, you're not going to be a main dish. You're a side dish. The filmmakers who have international foreign language Oscar (submissions) who have been invited to Sundance have been saying for some years to Sundance, 'We want to go to Palm Springs.' If they insist on the U.S. premiere, we haven't been able to have it. But, for the past two years, Sundance has been quietly letting us have the foreign language Oscar submissions that have gone to them."

The fear of getting lost at a big festival like Sundance, which reportedly had 12,000 submissions last year, is one reason given for the emergence of so many niche festivals. Less expensive technology in developing countries and the proliferation of film school graduates has created a glut of new filmmakers seeking festival exposure.

Anson doesn't object to niche festivals, he says, because they're the only chance many people will have to see these filmmakers' work.

But Craig Prater, a former Palm Springs International Film Festival director now running niche festivals, says those events wouldn't flourish if they didn't generate a lot of money.

"Everything boils down to money," said Prater, who was a fundraiser before heading the 1994 Palm Springs International Film Festival. "Many, many people — cities, organizations, corporations and even individuals — want to start new film festivals. I am contacted at least once a week about starting a film festival. Film festivals have become a high-profile media industry with celebrities (instead of) a business to secure new films, encourage filmmakers to film in their area and to engage in the promotion of the art of film."

'Anybody can do it'

One reason film festivals have proliferated, Prater said, is because people see how successfully Palm Springs has generated tourism dollars.

"The growth was due to cities and sponsors feeling that the image of film festivals would bring tourism and increase economic development," he said.

Prater, who was instrumental in launching the Palm Springs ShortFest as a spinoff of the all-encompassing feature festival Macdonald helped start, now runs the Los Angeles Greek Film Festival and the Latino Film Festival in Phoenix. He says genre specific festivals are often easier to fund than large city events.

"Sponsors feel they are getting lost in the larger festivals unless the festival is already established with advertising benefits beyond a geographical area," he said. "The sponsors' other options are securing a sponsorship with a genre specific festival because they can target a certain demographic. Last year, the Greeks secured a national U.S. ice cream company that was launching a new Greek yogurt. Similarly, a major national insurance company wanted to target the Hispanic community. If these companies had gone to AFI, Sundance, Palm Springs or another large event, they would have been lost."

Ethnic festivals like Prater's Greek fest also often get nourishment from their mother countries.

"Greece has no money," Prater said. "They are broke. However, because the country puts value on promoting the arts, which includes assisting Greek talent coming to the USA, they find the money to do two things: 1) Sponsor a film festival in the film capital of the world and 2) Pay for their filmmakers to attend the film festival. Would the filmmaker rather be in Sundance or AFI? Yes, but with a focus on a Greek film and filmmaker verses getting lost in a larger film festival who is trying to do everything, they'll take the Greek Film Festival. The same applies to a Latino Film Festival or any other smaller, genre specific film festival."

Halperin rarely attends niche festivals because he doesn't often see films in their catalogs he can sell.

"Most of these smaller festivals have a hard time just getting people to show up," he said. "For some of these, having first-time filmmakers using home equipment with no stars and no pedigree, there's just no hope for them. But the festivals make money because of things like (the online liaison) Without A Box, which submit to them, and they get entry fees. A lot of these festivals have come into existence as a means for somebody to make a buck."

Macdonald says starting a film festival for the money can have negative repercussions.

"Everybody thinks this is a glamorous sexy thing — 'anybody can do it' — so they throw together a film festival," he said. "Filmmakers get burned, prints get ruined, the festival attracts no audience or generates no press for the filmmakers. Basically, they're there because of somebody's ego — somebody wanting to do something glamorous and maybe get some money out of sponsors. That's not a good thing."