Todd Rohal here, checking in -- and Independent Film Week is underway, obviously.
My writing partner Craig got into town on Saturday and we began the IFW events early Sunday morning with a breakfast welcome reception. I was expecting to see a small collection of filmmakers gathered in a corner discussing their projects and looking as if they had just crawled out of bed…what I found instead was a bit overwhelming: hundreds of filmmakers empowered and ready to talk about their new movies for the first time. Just seeing the amount of people in the room put a face on a number for me…all of these filmmakers, all of these scripts, all of these films – and here we all are – eating free eggs like nobody’s business.
After re-connecting with some friends, I was happy to see that there were other filmmakers I already knew with projects attending:
Matthew Porterfield has brought his new script
Metal Gods,
Jesse Sweet’s new work-in-progress documentary
Class of 2023 (screening today at 4:15), and
Damien Lahey’s new horror script
Child In the Dark. We had all spent the past year in front of our computers brewing up these new movies and were now moving into the next phase.
Most of the IFW events take place at F.I.T. this year. Craig had seriously thought that we were at M.I.T., which is funny because 1. It’s the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology and 2. Fabric sales probably aren’t big weekend events at M.I.T. But yeah…wow…mixing F.I.T. with IFP is a really wonderful way to shake up both the film and fashion worlds. The administration was probably bombarded with student's protests about hordes of shlubby guys in T-shirts walking around with tote bags scaring off next year’s potential freshmen.
We began our meetings right away yesterday (Monday) morning. We had a list of 15 companies to speak with over the course of 4 hours, rotating from one table to the next every 15 minutes. This is the core of the Emerging Narratives program – meeting and discussing our script with as many different people as possible. Within each 15 minute period, we could connect with each person long enough to establish a reason to set up another meeting, send our script, send a different script…and on and on. It was easy, it worked well and it saved us from having to stand around at a film festival party wondering why we can’t be the kind of people who can identify and chat up business executives. Plus, the people at these meetings CHOSE to meet with us, so for 15 minutes we don’t need to feel like we’re bothering someone from
Merchant-Ivory with a story about two little boys who find a man’s butt. (If Merchant-Ivory types are listening, I do have an idea for a movie called
A Time Before Boats – no story yet, but the tagline will be “Don’t Expect Any Boats”). We continue these meetings for the next two days.
I’ll save details of this for the next update, but the response we’ve had so far has been really wonderful. Sure, we’re pitching a comedy that, once discussed as being anything other than a comedy gets into some weird territory, but we feel like we’re making a good case for our movie and getting better at it as we go. And, so far, only one person has asked us if our script is a comedy..........
In a nervous moment, I asked Craig to imagine how
Ralph Bakshi would have handled coming to IFW and pitching
Fritz the Cat to these companies in 1972, and Craig said, “Ralph Bakshi did this?”
# posted by Todd Rohal @ 9/16/2008 08:03:00 AM
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