| Issue #31, October 27, 2006 |
BETTER A FILM FESTIVAL THAN A HARLEY FESTIVAL
By Dan Rattiner
Ever wonder what would have happened to the Hamptons if twenty years ago Joyce Robinson had been in the motorcycle business? Our story would be very different. And I will get to that.
Fortunately, however, Ms. Robinson was in the filmmaking business. She and her husband had a house in Los Angeles, an apartment in New York City and a summer home on Skimhampton Road in East Hampton. And Mrs. Robinson worked as a casting director for some of the big Hollywood studios. Then they got a divorce. And Ms. Robinson got the house on Skimhampton Road, where, as luck would have it, she would have to raise their small child. What would she do? She was too far to commute to New York City to do her work. So she thought maybe she could bring the work to the Hamptons.
Wouldn’t the Hamptons be a perfect place to have a Film Festival? You bet. And so she started one, ran it for a year or two as a little bitty thing, and then, as it grew bigger and bigger, got involved with the politics of running it, which included, as the main creation, the film festival board she had created, which, in a matter of two years, pushed her out.
Today, for four days, the Hamptons International Film Festival featured 17,000 filmgoers and about 5,000 filmmakers and hangers-on. We had people in sunglasses and gold chains running around in hot pink t-shirts and we have limousines, celebrities, more than a hundred films being shown in six movie theatres at the same time, and conversation that more often than not was about distribution rights, auditioning, choreography, acting studios, production facilities and marketing.
This army of people in the film business, standing around talking on our various Main Streets, wore badges on chains around their neck that denoted their status at the festival such as STAFF, PRESS, FOUNDER, SPONSOR, FILMMAKER and so forth and so on. All the badges have four starfish on them, the logo of the festival.
Then there were the parties and the events and the lectures and the roundtables. They were all over the place in the Hamptons and at them you would have found Alec Baldwin and Ellen Burstyn and Robert Altman and Roy Scheider, sometimes separately and sometimes together.
And then there were the awards. There were awards for Narrative Feature Films, Narrative Feature Films in Competition, Documentary Feature Films in Competition, Short Films in Competition, Films of Conflict and Resolution, and Student Film Awards.
As for the films themselves, here are some of the liner notes from the big, two pound, glossy program.
“This powerful drama offers a brutally honest depiction of life as a junkie.”
“……Then Harold starts hearing a voice in his head. When she mentions Harold’s imminent death, he knows it’s time to seek professional help.”
“……Jake, who would like to start a family, tries to bond with Allegra’s two adopted children, while intermittently taking care of his sick father……”
“Lucien runs a kickboxing school in the Netherlands……”
“Shot with an almost documentary-style grittiness, the German film The Red Cockatoo follows Siggi as he first meets the bohemian Luise, a poet and factory worker, and falls for her instantly. Luise, however, is married to the rebellious and often drunk Wolle, and the three soon become inseparable.”
“When Robert Fabry comes to the rescue of a drunken prostitute in a hotel bar……”
There is not, this year, a film about the tragedy of strangely docile polar bears adrift on an ice floe off Greenland. But the committee did, I’m told, consider one.
All of which, amidst the windmills, old New England Villages and beaches, lent a wonderfully intellectual, woolly and creative air to the Hamptons in the autumn.
Which brings us to the Harley Davidson Motorcycle Festival and Rallye, a bullet which we just dodged.
Had Ms. Robinson taken that turn, today, the day after the festival, we would be remembering the thousands of motorcycles and riders and girl friends who descended on the Hamptons from all over. The army would be wearing helmets and leather jackets and headbands, and most of the events, such as drag racing, gang wars, fistfights and drunken brawls would have taken place at night. A pall of oil and gas fumes would be still be hanging over the community as the cleanup committee went around picking up all the beer cans, yoo hoos, whiskey bottles, condoms and other assorted trash.
Would we call it a success? Probably. With no frame of reference, we’d be counting our money and thanking our lucky stars for a convention of something, anything, in the off season.
Thank you, Ms. Robinson, wherever you are, for making it the movie business.
DAY ON FIRE
On Saturday afternoon at 3 p.m., my significant other and I put our FOUNDER’s passes around our necks, got in the car, and drove to the East Hampton Cinema to see I AM THE OTHER WOMAN, scheduled for showing as part of the Film Festival in Cinema 3 at 3:30 p.m. A big crowd was out in front of the theatre standing around like at a cocktail party, or standing in long, straight lines with ropes and signs at the front. We found the FOUNDERS line for I AM THE OTHER WOMAN, stood in it and started talking with some other people in the line. There seemed to be about eighty FOUNDERS. This was the big hot-shot line and the people on this line would be allowed into an empty theatre first, and then the TICKETS line would follow and then the RUSH line, for people who had no tickets but at the last minute would like to go, if there was room.
I honestly was not enthusiastic about seeing I AM THE OTHER WOMAN. The program said it was about a woman who was a prostitute by night and a partner in a law firm by day. But my significant other seemed enthusiastic. It was a chilly but beautiful day. I would have preferred to be outside. This seemed like it might not be a guy flick.
Anyway, looking around on the FOUNDERS line, I saw all manner of high end Hampton powerhouses, almost all of who were not FOUNDERS but had paid to be declared FOUNDERS. I, on the other hand, had earned my stripes by being around at the founding and unceremoniously rejected after being nominated to the first Film Fest Board.
There was a Chairmen of Fortune 500 company on the FOUNDERS line, there were three famous Broadway stars, there was the CEO of a chain of national brand clothing stores. We all wore our big FOUNDERS passes proudly. I chatted up Mickey Straus, the chairman of Guild Hall. The movie was scheduled for 3:30.
3:30 came and went. Soon it was 3:45. Then 3:50. People on the FOUNDERS line looked at their Rolexes. What was going on?
At 3:55, one of the Film Festival people at the entrance to the theatre made a little speech to everyone on the three lines. The question and answer period for the film THREE MOTHERS was running overtime in Cinema 3. It would all sort itself out soon. And in would go the FOUNDERS, the TICKET HOLDERS and the RUSH people, in that order.
Five minutes later, as I was talking with a powerhouse Washington lawyer about Condoleezza Rice’s latest Iraq trip — he knew her personally — the TICKET HOLDERS line suddenly lurched forward and about a hundred and thirty people quickly stampeded into Cinema 3.
All conversation in the FOUNDERS line stopped. We were the FOUNDERS. We were supposed to go first. And then if there were seats left over, they could let in the TICKET HOLDERS.
Some of the FOUNDERS marched up to the entrance of the theatre and began to have words with some of the Film Festival people about why they didn’t get in. I was one of them. I thought it was funny.
“We’re more important than THOSE people,” I said, pointing dramatically to where the TICKET HOLDERS line used to be. And then I went back and hid behind my significant other.
Other FOUNDERS grumbled, expressed outrage, made comments about ineptitude, which would soon be reported, and so forth and so on and it got everybody nowhere. The FOUNDERS are forceful people, and used to getting their way and I feared soon they would rush in uninvited to grab some of the 130 TICKET HOLDERS and against their will bring them out to the street kicking and screaming. But they didn’t.
Now it was 4 p.m. And now the festival people informed the FOUNDERS, sadly, that the TICKET HOLDERS had, in fact, taken up all the seats, and there was simply nowhere else in the theatre for anybody to sit. It was at capacity.
“The least they could do,” a FOUNDER said, “was have a special showing for us.”
“If you want to go to another film,” one of the managers said brightly, as if this would make it all up to us, “there are two other films about to start, and we’ll be letting the FOUNDERS into the seats in just a minute. There’s plenty of room.”
“I came here to see I AM THE OTHER WOMAN. What an outrage. Half an hour in the cold out here. And then THIS is what you offer?”
I thought it was nice being on line at the FOUNDERS cocktail party. My significant other, a cheerful person, inquired what the two new movies about to be shown were. They were THE KILLER WITHIN and DAY ON FIRE.
“All right everybody, FOUNDERS for THE KILLER WITHIN, go on in to Cinema 4.”
A small crowd from a different FOUNDERS line on the other side of the entrance surged forward. A few FOUNDERS from I AM THE OTHER WOMAN joined up, but for the most part, the bypassed FOUNDERS line for this film stood still like deer caught in headlights. They were still hoping for I AM THE OTHER WOMAN.
“OKAY, TICKET HOLDERS.”
The KILLER WITHIN TICKET HOLDERS surged forward and into the theatre.
“Okay, now RUSH.”
There was no time to get a good look at the program. What did we want? KILLER? Or did we want FIRE, which was DAY ON FIRE?
I did a quick look at the program. KILLER. “Bob was bullied all his life and ‘snapped’ while in college and killed a classmate.” Yuck.
FIRE. “This artistically shot feature tracks a day in the life of several New Yorkers, showing how a Palestinian suicide bomber on an Israeli bus can unwittingly affect and connect them to each other.”
What?
“Okay, now FOUNDERS for DAY ON FIRE, Come on in to Cinema 5.”
And we were swept up into the herd from the DAY ON FIRE FOUNDERS line.
Thus, did we go in and sit down, leaving this pathetic band of FOUNDERS waiting for I AM THE OTHER WOMAN still standing outside, waiting for a moview that would never come, while inside, the lights dimmed and we began to see the most hideously horrible movie imaginable. The plot is that the Israeli woman in New York, who is very beautiful, has the corneas of her eyeballs cut out by a pervert doctor on a street corner in Soho one night because, he says “I know you want me to have them,” after which there are screams, and then the Palestinian woman, the same night, but not with her friend, the Israeli, but somewhere else in Soho, finds out by cell phone that her brother has just, moments earlier, blown himself up in a bus in Tel Aviv (which we see in graphic detail, with dismembered arms and guts and legs) killing himself and everybody else and becomes so distraught she jumps in front of an M3 Madison Avenue uptown bus, screams and dies. At the hospital where her body is taken, her corneas are removed and put in her friend’s eyes. It’s all done on the spot, in the emergency room — we’ll work out the paperwork later the doctor says — and then he turns to his nurse and says, “What sick human being would cut a woman’s corneas out? Well, whoever it was, they knew what they were doing.” You see the surgery up close, like, two inches from the eyeballs, the doc sewing merrily away. And for the last scene, you see the Israeli woman, recovering in a wheelchair, with her Palestinian eyeballs cockeyed but improving.
That movie made me physically sick, but having fought our way in to see it, or see SOMETHING, we stayed until the very end.
And then I went to the Men’s Room and tried but failed to throw up. As for the interview and question and answer period with the filmmaker, we left early enough when the lights came up so we did not see him, which is just as well, because we would have murdered him.
I mentioned to a friend later that it might have been nice, as a warning, for the festival to have rated the film disgusting and revolting, but then, as my friend said, about three quarters of the films at the Film Festival are, because that is what you see at film festivals.
“And if you want to see a comedy?” I asked.
“Check to be sure it is in French, with subtitles,” I was told.
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