For film festivals, it’s a calculated risk: Book one or two major-studio, commercial films and you can attract stars and get attention. However, you also run the risk of alienating the fans of smaller, independent films who are, after all, your main customers.
The Los Angeles Film Festival faced that conundrum on Tuesday, when it announced “The Twlight Saga: Eclipse” would screen at this year’s festival – or, at least, that it would screen in what artistic director David Ansen joked was a slot “adjacent” to the festival, an invitation-only premiere available to guests of Summit Entertainment and holders of the LAFF’s $1,000 “Fast Pass” and $600 “Industry Pass.”
No sooner had the announcement been made than the sniping began.
“Twilight? Are they serious?” wrote “Scytherius,” commenting on theWrap’s LAFF story. “Not a soul (well, outside of young teen girls) doesn’t think that series isn’t the personification of drek."
“Jim” added, “Gee, what an amazing independent film festival. Surprised Transformers 3 and Sex and The City 2 aren’t screening as well … Thanks for helping kill true independent film.”
At Hollywood Elsewhere, meanwhile, Jeff Wells said, “I spit on” the film, and used it as one reason he was reconsidering his plans to fly from New York to Los Angeles to attend the festival.
But the move isn’t all that unusual – in fact, it’s common.
The recent Tribeca Film Festival opened with “Shrek Forever After.” Cannes’ opening-night attraction this year is Ridley Scott’s “Robin Hood,” following in the footsteps of previous years’ screenings of such major-studio offerings as “Up” and “The Da Vinci Code.” Last year’s Toronto Film Festival showcased plenty of smaller awards-type movies, but it also showed mainstream studio productions like “The Invention of Lying” with Ricky Gervais and “The Boys Are Back” with Clive Owen.
In other words, in the world of film festivals – even fests that cater mostly to cineastes and book predominantly low-budget, independent films – screenings of broad-appeal, audience-friendly potential blockbusters are the norm.
”It puts an enormous spotlight on us in a way we hadn’t had before,” Rebecca Yeldham, the festival’s director, told theWrap. “We’re trying to grow the audience base for the festival, and for the filmmakers who are part of our festival family. And I think ‘Eclipse’ will put more eyeballs on some of these other films.”
The tradeoff is simple: Putting Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson and Taylor Lautner on the red carpet in downtown Los Angeles is going to attract attention, and in this climate – a climate in which the Gen Art festival shut down and other fests are suffering severe financial woes – you can’t dismiss any means of getting attention.
And if a lineup of almost 100 other features from 40 countries, few of them mainstream in any real sense, isn’t enough to counterbalance two big studio movies, then something’s wrong.
For LAFF, it was also important to put “Eclipse” in that “festival-adjacent” position, where it’s more of a sidebar than an integral part of the programming.
“We didn’t ask Summit to have the film open or close the festival, because it didn’t seem to mesh with our DNA in that way,” Yeldham says.
“And you can’t buy individual tickets to ‘Eclipse.’ Anyone who wants to attend the event can do so as part of the experience of the whole festival, because they’ll have a pass that entitles them to all the other screenings as well.”
Will many members of Team Edward decide to see a 53-year-old subtitled film by a long-neglected Argentine director, just because the same festival that premiered “Eclipse” also worked overtime to mount a Leopoldo Torre Nilsson retrospective? Of course not.
But Film Independent, which puts on the fest, has negotiated parking rates designed to encourage visitors to stick around, and hope springs eternal that the LAFF can take some of the mainstream media heat generated by a blockbuster or two, and transfer it to a slate of smaller films.
And one can hope, as David Poland does, that the festival will program a lot of good indie films the same night it premieres “Eclipse,” and somehow lure a few people who’ve come to gawk at the red-carpet action into a theater to see something smaller and riskier.
In a perfect world, perhaps mainstream bookings aren’t necessary. But in this world, at this time, they’re a tradeoff that’s worth making.
Besides, says Yeldham, even the hard-liners secretly want to see that teen vampire flick.
“Some of the biggest critics,” she says with a laugh, “were first in line asking for tickets.”
