On Film Festival Premiere Requirements: Who’s It Good For?
Watching a presentation by Brian Newman, CEO of Tribeca Film Institute, I took note of a discussion on the value of having a film screen as a worldwide, nationwide or regional premiere at a given festival. Newman says he believes the social experience of a festival screening renders the requirement unnecessary, even when a film is fully and freely available online, though his colleagues at the Tribeca Film Festival disagree.
It’s been a few years since I submitted a film to a festival, but I remember it being a miserable process. It’s hard enough to deal with deadlines, trips to the post office (do people do that anymore?) and all those fees (a nasty debate in itself), but I found the premiere requirements practically crippling. Since then, I’ve attended many festivals and have even helped program one, so I have a different understanding of how these things work.
Below, I examine the issue from the perspective of different groups involved and see how each is affected by premiere requirements. I encourage anyone with more experience or a different take to post a comment.
Filmmakers
At a minimum, premiere requirements limit the number of times and places you can have your film exhibited. If you include restrictions on other media, it also eliminates opportunities to build an audience or earn money by having a film available online with advertising revenue or for sale as a download or DVD. But it can stop a filmmaker even before getting to festivals. Filmmakers often have to adjust their post-production and release schedules to the annual cycle of festivals and their deadlines. Premiere requirements can force a producer to pass on one festival in favor of a later, more prestigious festival. If they don’t get accepted to that first choice, they’re forced to wait a whole year to try again at that second choice. By that point, they’ve lost time, audience, relevance and money, and they’re submitting year-old film.
It could be good for filmmakers in that it keeps more screening slots open for more films, but I’m afraid this is not always the spirit in which these rules are in place. And it doesn’t help at all in the case of platform exclusivity.
Festivals
In a short-term way that doesn’t involve too much thinking, premiere requirements are great for festivals, which is presumably why they are still in effect. It can help attract press and industry to a festival, assuming these people are already convinced that the films in question are worth the trip. More simply, the requirements give festivals a lot of power over filmmakers. Lots of other companies use exclusivity as well to raise their negotiating power. (More on that here.) When a filmmaker is forced to put all their eggs in your basket, you can make them beg, and it’s harder for them to ask for concessions like a screening fee or help with a flight and hotel room. The top festivals can use this as a tactic to affect a first-look right for themselves.
Having been a programmer, however, I’ve observed first-hand that great films are precious, so it seems silly to turn away a good film because it’s playing a thousand miles away the week before.
Also, if festivals are to stay relevant, and I believe they can, they need to improve upon and emphasize the value they add as social events. Relying on exclusivity is decreasingly effective and distracts from that.
Audiences
I’m hard pressed to think how premiere requirements are anything but bad for audiences. In my experience, most non-industry festival attendees are local. Very few people can afford to take a week off and spend money on travel for a film festival if it’s not for work. Even locally, film fans don’t have time to run out of films to see. While it is nice to know you’re seeing something before everybody else, you can retain most of that experience knowing that you’re seeing a film in advance of a wide release (if it even happens at all) and with the director and actors in attendance.
Gen Art is an example of a festival that consistently fills theaters with a local, non-industry audience without a strict premiere requirement. They even host year-round screenings of films the week before wide release, adding the value of an after-party and a post-screening discussion with the director and actors.
Newman speaks about the importance of curation. People have more entertainment options than ever. Acceptance into a prestigious (or not) festival is no guarantee that you’ll love a film, and even if it were, many festivals keep attendees too busy to see everything. Prior festival screenings give films time to build a track record of reviews, buzz and community that can help audiences do their own curation and even heighten the experience.
Press and Industry
For the most part, I think premiere requirements are pretty good for press and industry. I assume they were mostly put in place to attract these people. Distributors, festival programmers, journalists and bloggers go to a lot of festivals, so they don’t need to see the same films over and over again. But many of these people have access to screener copies of all these films anyway. While it does make a difference to see a film with an audience, that is not the way most people will see these films.
It appears that premiere requirements hurt more than they help, and they are helping the wrong people. Distributors are not acquiring many films right now, at least not for enough money to cover a production budget. Professional reviews are great, but they are not the best way to reach audiences. And industry professionals have other reasons to attend festivals – networking, panel discussions and free drinks. Film festivals are great at creating social experiences, and they are best suited to serving audiences first, filmmakers second and everybody else after that.
Premiere requirements seem to be based on the idea that a film starts with a certain value and then shrinks from there on out. This is the same idea that holds up the old model of windows, where a film starts with a big opening weekend, followed by decreasing box office and a chain of platforms, each offering lower cost and lower quality. I believe this model is obsolete, and that producers, audiences and the industry can benefit from giving films a chance to grow.
To see the relevant part of Brian Newman’s talk, go here, click on the “menu” button in the upper-right corner of the video player, and select the fourth section, titled “Conversation.”
This entry was posted on Thursday, April 30th, 2009 at 1:32:49 am and is filed under Movies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
on Friday 05.01.09 at 11:26:46 am Gabe wrote:
I find it ironic that certain festivals (Tribeca and CineVegas to name a few) are requiring premiere status in an era when, as you rightly point out, fewer distributors are acquiring films right now. The oft discussed issue of premiere status has become a point of contention within organizations (as evidenced by Brian’s open dismissal of TFF’s policies) and within the community itself. When SXSW announced it was opening Joe Swanberg’s ALEXANDER THE LAST day and date with IFC On Demand, some folks thought the sky was falling. It is not.
We made the decision to program the film to screen at the festival despite its availability on local cable VOD systems precisely because the festival experience is unique–and this will likely mark the only chance of screening this significant work by a filmmaker with a history at our festival in this market, with an audience, and in a theatre.
The only place where premiere status really seems to matter anymore is press coverage–and to some extent– industry cache. (But this is an illusion.)
From the point of view of the industry, “important” premieres are a sign of credibility. You hold for a “big” premiere because the big fest can set the stage for a major release. However, as more and more films choose this route, and end up…where exactly?…such debuts are become less and less significant. As for press–or whoever is left–internet coverage and bloggers have rendered so much of this useless. Because everything is technically archived online, the timing of a review is of less and less significance. Conversely, being first to press is also less important since written pieces are now accessible long after tomorrow’s fish is unwrapped, eaten, digested, and feeding future schools of fish.
Since moving to April, the Atlanta Film Festival has repeatedly been “Premiere” blocked by TFF (and this past year by CineVegas) an unnecessary practice that places filmmakers in the uncomfortable spot of going with a bird in the hand or waiting to the promise of two in the bush. We’ve had accepted films pulled by anxious producers, even after they’ve committed, once they got news of the premiere requirement elsewhere. Contractually, the Without a Box contract would allow us to screen the film anyway, but we were gracious, and honored their request. Some directors have screened here anyway (against the wishes of producers, or perhaps without their approval) as a “work in progress” or a “sneak preview” in advance of their (presumably) divinely sanctioned “Tribeca World Premiere.” I hope the TFF audiences who saw these films didn’t think of the experience as any less special as a result…
As a general rule, Atlanta makes programming decisions independent of premiere status–keeping an eye first on quality, and on what is right for our audiences. We take the application process seriously, and we give all consideration to every submission. This allowsx us to discover great new works, and to find emerging voices. (To DQ a submitted film b/c it screened elsewhere is disingenuous.) That some of these films are accepted to SXSW, or Sarasota, or Nashville is inevitable. But their programming choices don’t impact ours. We came to the discovery independent of their choices. Our audiences care little that a film has played elsewhere. Are they going to fly to Austin, or Florida or Tennesse to see the film? I’d much rather screen a great slate of fresh films (some of which have screened in other markets within weeks of ours) than World Premiere a slate of films knowing that we passed on great works only because they had the fortune of being accepted to SXSW, or Sarasota, or Nashville. Why should we penalize our audiences, penalize the filmmakers, and challenge these other fests to a pissing match? This practice cripples a filmmakers’ ability to formulate a proper release strategy, and limits their options for which markets they’ll be able to reach.
For marketing reasons, festivals themselves ARE forced to enter the fray, if only to gain the attention of the press. IndieWIRE’s piece about the Atlanta Film Festival mentioned some, but not all, of our World and American premieres. We mentioned a few of them in our press release only because we knew they’d make the cut. Ironically, we don’t track the status as closely as we should because we are dubious of filmmakers who make such a big deal about it. (In fact, there were more than a few films that we learned were world premieres only when the filmmakers said so a the screenings themselves!)
Our opening night film “THE PEOPLE SPEAK” officially world premiered with us, despite the fact that it had played as a “work in progress” in about ten other markets (including a screening late last year in Atlanta!) That it screened elsewhere little effected the impact of sitting in the screening room with Senator John Lewis as his words were passionately reenacted by Danny Glover…nor did it quell the excitement of having Eddie Vedder, supported by his PJ band mates there just to watch the film, answer post-screening Q&A from adoring fans. Hearing Zinn, Moore, Robinson, Ealy, and Josh Brolin discuss the film in detail, and in person, is truly a life changing experience. That this particular screening *technically* marked the film’s premiere is a nice feather in our cap–but it in no way affected our decision to screen the film. Nor did it make one iota of difference to those in the auditorium watching the film, interacting with the cast, and experiencing the transformative magic cinematic transcendence!
As the importance of festival screenings (especially in urban markets like Atlanta) becomes more and more evident to producers and filmmakers in a film’s overall marketing plan, their impression of “premiere status” will change.
on Friday 05.01.09 at 2:45:17 pm Brian Newman wrote:
Gabe – let me be clear – I wasn’t dismissing the policy – I try to make it clear in the talk that certain festivals will need to continue to fight for premieres. When you are Sundance, Cannes, or are based in NYC or another major market your “audience” is much bigger than your local community. You are also much more dependent on press who still believe mightily in premieres. Until that changes, the big fests can’t change.
One of my points was that it doesn’t matter so much in many other communities. So, to take the argument to the extreme (and being only half serious here) – you should be willing to wait a full year if needed to show that film that turns you down for our fest or Cinevegas or whoever. If the film opens in your town anyway, then perhaps your audience is getting served without your help. If it doesn’t open for that year – it’s still new to everyone in Atlanta. I also think you could bring it the next year with the filmmakers in attendance and still get an audience even if it played on tv or is online, etc.
I think regional fests can play with these models more than the big fests, and that’s what will keep them most vibrant to their community and the field. A filmmaker has to consider where is the best place for a premiere, and has to make some hard decisions – that’s not going to change anytime soon. What I was also encouraging was for filmmakers to be more inventive – maybe you do premiere in a big fest and tell regionals that you’d love to play there next, but you’ll also be available for sale on DVD/online before their fests take place, so people are paying for having the filmmaker there.
on Monday 05.04.09 at 5:25:22 am Mike Hedge wrote:
Chirls, Gabe, Brian, great ideas here!