Reel Stars
By Beth Schwartzapfel
June 2007
OUTSIDE NEWPORT'S JANE PICKENS THEATER, a line is forming. It stretches down Touro Street, past a bed and breakfast and a tilting 1801 green clapboard house, to the corner. Inside, the theater is like something from another time. A soaring archway with elaborately decorated molding frames the stage, which is fronted by a pipe organ. But when the lights go down, and that unmistakable clack-clack-clack of a film reel starts up, you know exactly where you are. You’re at the movies.
This warm June evening in 2006 is the opening night of the ninth annual Newport International Film Festival. The house is sold out, and the audience is chattering with excitement. The opening night film, Quinceañera, won both the audience award and the grand jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival, and tonight’s showing is the New England premiere. The directors are here, as is one of the actors. Later, they will answer audience members’ questions about the making of the movie. But right now they’re hunkered down in their green-upholstered chairs like everyone else, waiting for the curtain to rise.
The first reason that most festival attendees are here is for films like this: films by independent filmmakers, films too quirky or off-beat for widespread distribution, films you can’t see anywhere else. The second reason is far more basic. The people here just love movies. “I’ve been going since I was eight years old,” says Jane Dyer, a compact silver-haired woman with bright eyes and rimless glasses who is in the audience with her daughter and a small army of friends. “I saw Snow White and the Seven Dwarves when it first came out in 1937.” Dyer says that during the festival she sometimes closes her downtown Newport shop, Cadeaux du Monde, earlier than planned in order to attend up to three films a day. “Then I can’t take it anymore,” she adds with a laugh.
Film festivals serve many purposes. For independent movie-makers, they are important opportunities to make connections, share their work and gain name recognition. For those in the industry, they are a chance to cherry-pick the hottest new movies to distribute and the brightest new talent to finance.
The big name venues, known as market festivals, are primarily a way for filmmakers and distributors to connect. What gets lost in their mad rush of hobnobbing and cocktail schmoozing is the everyday audience member, the film-lover who drops everything to take in that foreign flick or those series of animated shorts.
At Newport, it’s different. “I think the essence of this festival is bringing the people of Newport together with the film community,” says Ryan Harrington, who runs A&E IndieFilms and is a juror at the 2006 festival. Laurie Kirby, the festival’s executive director, agrees: “Our mission is not to be a market festival. Our mission is to be an audience-based festival.”
Quinceañera turns out to be a lovely film. Following the life of a fourteen-year-old girl from L.A.’s Echo Park neighborhood through the travails preceding the coming-of-age ceremony that will mark her fifteenth birthday, it’s also about the impact of gentrification on working-class communities, acceptance, forgiveness and family. And though Sony Pictures Classics will distribute the film to art-house theaters later in the season, those in the audience tonight will have seen it here first. Plus those in the audience will have heard the filmmakers’ stories about how the movie was shot (in their houses and those of their neighbors), cast (their cleaning lady and her family are all featured in the film; filmmaker Richard Glatzer says of Emily Rios, who plays the lead, “the top of her resume was that she had played Cleopatra in her school play”), and vaulted to success (filmmaker Wash Westmoreland says, “We never imagined we’d win both the audience award and the grand jury prize. It was better than sex, the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”)
“The audience felt like a warm embrace,” Glatzer says later, at the opening night party at the Newport Colony House. “You really do make your film to be seen. It’s nice to see it with a different audience that isn’t L.A. It’s really a nice festival.”
Geographically speaking, the Newport International Film Festival is largely based in Newport’s Washington Square. The event’s two main venues, the Jane Pickens and the Opera House theaters, are both on Touro Street. The panels, parties and events, held at places like the Newport Art Museum and the Newport Blues Café, are all a short walk away.
The 2006 festival features ninety-six films that fall into one of three categories: narrative features, documentaries and short films (shorts, which run anywhere from three to twenty-eight minutes, are shown either in clusters at a single screening, or individually, preceding a full-length film). The selections cover a wide range of genres, from comedy to drama to anime to mockumentary, from films about family to films about love, about small towns, the environment, immigration.
Some two dozen films play each day at different venues. Tickets for most screenings and events cost $10 (festival passes range from $50 for five screenings to $300 for twenty, plus three event vouchers and various goodies). Most films run on two separate occasions, and executive director Laurie Kirby estimates about 75 percent of them are followed by a question and answer session with the filmmaker, a cast member or director. “That makes it so much more of a rewarding and interactive experience,” she says. “It’s the icing on the cake, to see an incredible movie and then get to ask the director about it. It’s such a treat.”
Each day there are also panels and events. For filmmakers, there are how-tos, like “Get it Made the Legal Way,” and “The Distribution Game”; for audience members, there are events like “Live Comedy Improv,” featuring cast members from “Saturday Night Live.”
Most of the feature-length movies are culled from other festivals. Programming director David Nugent attends upwards of a dozen each year, picking out the ones he likes best and lobbying the filmmakers and production companies to bring them to Newport. Many of the name-brand, glitterati festivals, such as Sundance and Cannes, require what is known in the industry as premiere status. They only show a film if it’s the world premiere or the national premiere. This helps to create buzz, but it’s less important here in Newport.
“It’s a local community audience,” says Nugent. “They don’t care if they’re seeing the premiere of the film; they just want a good film… . So what I’ve done for this festival is, in addition to getting some premieres, I’ve found what I think are the best films that have been playing at these festivals, and I’ve brought them here.”
About 10 percent of the feature-length films shown, as well as almost all of the shorts, were submitted directly to the festival by independent filmmakers. In 2006, that totaled more than 700 films. In the months before the festival, Nugent assembled a screening committee of about a dozen people in the industry. Committee members watch ten to twelve films each week, enter their reviews into a database and meet once a week to discuss what they saw. Then they whittle down the pool to about 150 finalists. Nugent watches every one of these, and then makes the final decisions. There were a few films that didn’t make the cut, which Nugent says he agonized over, including one called Colma: The Musical, an Asian-American teen musical romantic comedy.
Given its, um, underwhelming premise, he expected to be disappointed. Instead he grew quite attached to it. “There are a lot of factors that go into [the decision-making process],” he says. “It’s not just going to be all of my favorite films. There’s a lot of things I’m trying to serve –– different audiences, different ages.”
THE IDEA FOR THE NEWPORT INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL was born in 1997, when two friends, Nancy Donahoes and Christine Schomer, were meeting in New York for weekly lunch dates. Donahoes was working in theater at the time, and Schomer, a Barrington native, was working on the David Letterman show. The two were kicking around the idea of making a movie together when Schomer came home for a visit with her parents. Director and Pawtucket native Michael Corrente was in town filming, and the movie Meet Joe Black was being shot in Warwick. Steven Spielberg’s Amistad, which was made largely in Newport, had just wrapped, and people were still talking about it. At their next lunch date, “Christine said, ‘You know, there’s a lot of film going on in Rhode Island,’ ” says Donahoes. “ ‘Don’t you think Newport is a great spot for a film festival?’”
And so it was. The two spent that first year visiting as many festivals as they could. At the Sundance Film Festival, which is held in Utah in January, they distributed handmade flyers with lush pictures of Newport. “Frost bitten?” read the flyers. “See you in Newport!” The idea was to get a sense of how it feels to be a regular audience member at the big-name events.
As it turns out, “we found some of them quite impenetrable,” says Donahoes. “We never felt comfortable. You really did need to know how to work the system in order to get tickets to things.”
Even industry insiders sometimes find these festivals to be less than user-friendly. Kirby says, “What the filmmakers tell me is that Newport’s a very intimate, accessible festival. Many of them say they’ve been able to watch films here that they wanted to see at other festivals but couldn’t get into.” David Nugent adds, “At Sundance, you spend half your time just trudging through snow, or on shuttle buses to get different places. The parties and the screenings are very hard to get into. And it’s just sort of tougher to get to meet people.”
Newport’s small scale means that meeting people here is easy. A short conversation in Washington Square Park with Nugent can be punctuated by filmmaker sightings and chats with other audience members. “There goes a member of the jury,” he says, pointing, and later, “there’s the star of The Last Romantic walking across the street. Did you see that film?”
Because of the city’s appeal as a tourist destination, many people make a vacation out of a visit to Newport during the week of the festival. Casey and Linda Roe, for example, were waiting in line to see the documentary 51 Birch Street. They had traveled from their home in Philadelphia for what they describe as a “springtime weekend getaway.” The walkable distances between venues make the festival feel low-threshold and easy-access.
In all, it’s a welcoming place for audience members. Nancy Donahoes should know. She passed the torch to executive director Kirby some years ago, so now she comes just for fun. “This year, I had a great time just watching movies,” she says.
The major market festivals on the circuit are Sundance, Cannes, the Berlin International Film Festival, the Toronto International Film Festival, and, to a lesser extent, New York City’s Tribeca Film Festival. For filmmakers seeking distribution, these are what New York-based independent filmmaker Alex Karpovsky calls the crown jewel festivals. “The best thing to do, if you can do it, is to try to get your film into one of the top three or four festivals,” he says. “When I say top, I don’t mean necessarily in terms of the content of the films, but in terms of industry and media presence.”
The fact that many of the films at Newport have played at other festivals first does a lot to eliminate backroom-negotiating here. However, the Newport International Film Festival’s identity as primarily an audience-centered event does not prevent contacts from being established or deals from being made. Though Karpovsky’s quirky comedy, The Hole Story, did not get into any of the big market festivals, he was pleased to be included in the lineup at Newport. “It’s certainly one of the best regional festivals in the country,” he says, “probably in the top ten or fifteen national festivals.”
The handful of feature-length films which, like Karpovsky’s, made it to Newport not via other festivals but rather by submission, can offer distributors some pleasant surprises. In 2000, for example, a film called George Washington came through submission from an unknown filmmaker named David Gordon Green. One member of the jury was so blown away that he encouraged the programmer at the New York Film Festival to show it; it went on from there to distribution. The Boys of Baraka, a submission in 2005, also went on to distribution. “That’s one of the delights for critics, to find those rare gems here,” says Kirby. “We have a good track record for uncovering them,” adds Streich.
However, in the independent film world, success stories like Quinceañera’s, and, to a lesser extent, like Karpovsky’s, are relatively rare. “Ninety percent of the films we see at these film festivals will never get distribution,” says A&E IndieFilms’s Ryan Harrington. For the makers of these films especially, festivals like Newport are critical. “No one wants to make a film and have it sit in their closet and not get seen,” says Nugent. “So for them, it’s a chance to get in front of an audience.”
Just as the festival organizers do their best to make the audience feel welcome, so too do they welcome independent filmmakers with open arms. When Kirby or Nugent commits to screening a film, that means the festival is also committing to transporting the filmmaker to and from Newport, housing him, entertaining him and feeding him for the duration of the event. There are parties every night where food and drink flow freely. “Generally our goal is to bring the filmmaker here, house them and stuff them with food and liquor,” says Kirby with a laugh. Festival manager Nina Streich agrees, “Good parties. Good camaraderie. Lots of filmmakers to hang out with.”
At the sweeping stone entrance to the opening night party, for instance, is a statue of a minuteman –– no, wait, a man, painted all in brown, like a statue –– who turns slowly to ring a bell in greeting each time a guest arrived. A band performs Ella Fitzgerald and Harry Connick Jr., and wait staff make the rounds with trays of appetizers of ahi tuna with wasabi on sesame rounds. There are five different kinds of tequila, beer, margaritas and other mixed drinks, free shot glasses and a sculpture of a film projector carved from ice. Glatzer and Westmoreland, the makers of Quinceañera, are there with actor Jesse Garcia, as are many of the festival’s other filmmakers, jurors, and industry guests. Glatzer chats with his old friend, Kelly Reichardt, whose film, Old Joy, is on the schedule for later in the week.
Whereas other venues will only cover expenses for feature-length filmmakers, Newport pays for the ones who make shorts, too. “It’s a very non-hierarchical festival,” says Streich, who herself is a filmmaker, “so everybody interacts on the same basis. It’s a very peer-to-peer film festival, and people really react to that.”
These expenses can add up quite quickly, and as the only full-time, year-round staff member, Kirby spends a large portion of her time fundraising. In-kind donations almost double the festival’s small $500,000 budget. Amtrak and Delta have provided free travel vouchers to bring the filmmakers here. The Newport Harbor Hotel and the Chanler, as well as many other local hotels and bed-and-breakfasts, have donated free rooms for housing and venues for panels and events.
Filmmaker Alex Karpovsky ultimately found some success here. “In fact, of all the festivals that I’ve been to, the most success that I’ve had from distributors has been at Newport,” he says. “It’s really exciting.” He met a distributor who agreed to distribute The Hole Story on DVD. Short of theatrical distribution, says Karpovsky, the DVD-rental website Netflix is “the most accessible way to get a movie into the world,” and the deal he signed with a woman he met here will get The Hole Story onto Netflix and into film lovers’ homes.
Including Laurie Kirby, the festival employs about thirty people, from a part-time development director and a part-time director of operations, to people like Nina Streich and David Nugent, who work full-time for a few months out of the year. There is also a crew of what Kirby calls itinerant festival workers, projectionists and others who travel from festival to festival and make sure all the crucial cogs in the wheel run smoothly. “Each year we become more, for lack of a better word, institutionalized,” says Kirby. “We really have systems down.”
However, no matter how many systems are in place, there is always the element of surprise. “I used to say, because my background is in theater, that it was really like putting on a performance or a show,” says founder Nancy Donahoes. “You could have the infrastructure going on, but the flavor of it wouldn’t happen until all the people arrived. Which is what makes a film festival more unique than just going to the multiplex and going to a movie.”
Casey and Linda Roe, the visitors from Philadelphia, wrinkle their noses at such a thought. “If it’s so popular that it’s playing at a multiplex,” says Casey, “we probably wouldn’t like it.” “We like the vibe of a film festival,” agrees Linda. “We’ll never go to a multiplex.”
