I am not 100% sure what to make of Geoffrey Gilmore exiting Sundance after 19 years to go to the never-quite-stabilized Tribeca Film Festival.
As a fan of the Miami Dolphins, I am amused to see him becoming "Chief Creative Officer," which like Bill Parcells seems to mean that he will be hiring staff in his image, as opposed to doing all of the heavy lifting himself. The big difference is, to get to the pros, professional athletes have already achieved a certain standard and can be coached to work better together as a team, even without the best talent. At a film festival, the movies are what they are and will not get better with coaching from festival programmers.
Since Tribeca was launched, initially on the claim that it would help Tribeca recover from 9/11, then turning itself into a for-profit enterprise, then expanding well beyond Tribeca itself, they have faced the same basic problem that any film festival with Top Tier fest ambitions faces... they are not needed. Sundance in January, Cannes in May, Toronto in September. In addition, Berlin in February and Venice in August. Plus, non/soft-market fests SXSW in March, San Francisco (America's oldest and the one Tribeca most poaches from) in April/May, Seattle in May/June, LAFF in late June, New York in October, and AFI LA in November.
Where does Tribeca want to fit in?
A great local festival is a beautiful thing. But Tribeca isn’t funded at 10 figures to be a great local film festival. It is funded to have a national presence. And the festival, in its early years and still, has paid cash money to try to buy that presence. And it hasn’t worked.
But every film festival I know right now is having a funding crunch or out and out crisis. The money that drove the festival boom is now dried up. And festivals of any significant size are not funded by ticket sales, but by sponsorship money and in-kind services that make up the very sizeable difference.
Meanwhile, the need for market fests is becoming less and less with the ability to screen digitally in 2 or 3 or 5 cities at the same time without having struck that many prints and with the feeding frenzy of fests subsiding. In other words, with the backing of Tyler Perry and Oprah, couldn’t Cinetic have sold Push for $6 million or more to some studio with an interest in the black market? Was it Sundance that made the difference or was it Oprah and her value as a DVD frontwoman, if nothing great theatrically? And shouldn’t WM and CAA and Cinetic, now partnering as salespeople of a majority of the festival movies, really be reconsidering the fest strategy in light of the weak sales ($s, not number of titles) at the last two Sundances and last year’s Cannes?
But I digress…
What will Tribeca be under Gilmore? Is this really a big step or is it Mr. Gilmore leveraging his brand to get a contract that pays him double what Sundance was paying, fully aware that the next generation at Sundance was coming up behind him, regardless of his remarkable history? Is there a new idea for him to built on or is it just a new coat of paint for that house that had a great location but whose land was worth more than the house that was built on it?
We’ll see. I fear that we are going to see more music events and more digital shorts online. But I truly wish him luck. And I wish him brilliance. I hope that Gilmore has some true insight into what the Next Festival will look like and that he will succeed beyond my wildest expectations.
Read the complete post at http://www.mcnblogs.com/thehotblog/archives/2009/02/gilmore_goes_tr.html