No film festival celebrates the screenwriter quite like Austin's. Yesterday, I spent the morning in a ballroom at the Stephen F. Austin Hotel, listening to screenwriting powerhouses John August and John Lee Hancock discuss the merits of what makes good dialogue. By the afternoon, I was in a chair-less room at the Victorian Balcony, joining 30 writers sprawled on the carpet, worshipping almost literally at the feet of Lawrence Kasdan, himself reclining on the floor with a microphone. Friday morning, I sat in on intimate roundtable discussions with development execs and producers who rotated tables, speed-dating style, and answered questions from a rapt audience of aspiring scribes, most of whom sported badges denoting their status in the screenplay and teleplay competitions (Second Rounder! Semi-Finalist!) and who seemed giddy at such unfettered access to Hollywood's gatekeepers, many of whom parted unhesitatingly with email addresses and business cards. As one writer told me, "They tend to weed out the panelists who don't provide access."
Unlike the majority of film festivals, where you're lucky to get a ten-minute glimpse of talent at a post-screening Q&A, intimate contact with producers, writers, and showrunners is what the AFF is all about. The film program isn't too shabby either - 67 features and 49 shorts in competition, and prestige titles like
W,
Slumdog Millionaire, and
Synecdoche, New York, with Oscar aspirations. Only last year, Jason Reitman took home the Audience Award for J
uno. But for at least the first four days here, the films seem almost incidental. For anyone with a script or idea to pitch, AFF's raison d'etre is the Conference, four days of intensive screenwriting boot camp, pitch fests, and networking opportunities.
Most of the action takes place at the stately, 122 year-old Driskill Hotel. This weekend, even the rabid Texas football fans, in town to see their Longhorns annihilate Missouri, took a back seat to the throngs of writer, producer, and actor wannabes roaming the halls and lining up for panels. In one room, Shane Black regaled an intimate gathering of devotees with war stories from the Hollywood front. In the cavernous Driskill Ballroom, writers could participate in Q&A's with A-listers like Jeff Nathanson and Boaz Yakin, and take part in discussions with such titles as, "What Gets Producers Excited" and "Building A Script".
Of course, these types of seminars-with-the-stars are packaged in Hollywood with mind-numbing regularity. In Austin, however, the panelists don't get to jump into their Priuses and their Beamers and cruise on home, leaving the unwashed masses in the dust. And they can't hit the slopes, as they might if this were Sundance. Here, with everyone on the same party circuit, they're remarkably accessible, so a writer who spontaneously pitched a romantic comedy with aliens to a development exec might well see that same exec at a barbecue or screening later in the day. At the roundtables, it was not unusual to hear execs inviting writers to "stalk me later" if they wanted a follow-up.
Most importantly, as several writers have already confided, there's an esprit de corps among the writers that isn't always found in L.A. Everyone's competing, but everyone seems to be pulling for each other as well. And while there've been a few grumblings about stand-offish buyers and agents not taking on new clients ("What are they doing here?" said one writer), the prevailing sentiment here is that the buyers are sincere about finding new talent. For at least this weekend, the dreams of hundreds of aspiring screenwriters felt just a bit closer to being realized. If the film and TV execs who held court in Austin were only here to hand out false hope, then it was a performance in the best tradition of the illusions that define Hollywood.
Film Report: What happened to Oliver Stone? I went to see W, the Festival's opening night premiere, hoping to see the same edgy paranoid conspiracy theories that made JFK and Nixon so riveting. Instead, I got a plodding two hour-plus film that was less revelatory than your average TV movie - and about as interesting. Where were the subversive leaps of logic, the twisted POVs? Josh Brolin (pictured at left) does a fine job of humanizing Dubyuh, and James Cromwell is stellar as Bush 41, but it's as if Stone made the film under sedation, or with a gun held to his head by Dick Cheney. I am not a political junkie by any means, and I know the same facts that anyone who reads the New York Times or watches CNN knows. So if someone like me can watch a film on Bush and feel like I've learned nothing new, that's a bad sign.
A more apt title for Mark Wahlberg's silly new action thriller, Max Payne (pictured at right) would be Max Payneful. An endless collage of bullets exploding in slow motion, rising body counts, and unintentionally funny set pieces, it's the latest in a line of video games brought to cinematic life. I loved Wahlberg in films like The Shooter and Invincible, where he played blue-collar Everymen. Here, as a moping cop hellbent on revenging the death of his wife and daughter, he grimaces and sulks his way through the movie, like an actor hellbent on finding which producer got him into this mess.
Graham Flashner is a screenwriter, producer and journalist whose work has appeared in Creative Screenwriting, Variety, Fandango.com, and others.
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