Film Fests Bring the Cash
by Steven Rosen

(This article ran June 19, 2008, on Variety's The Circuit Web site.)

Film festival awards, like those for the current Los Angeles fest, are about the honor and the exposure, true. But increasingly they’re also about the money.

Big money. In fact, there’s a lively emerging competition among domestic festivals like L.A. to see who can offer the biggest, coolest cash prizes to their award-winning films. And overseas, there’s even bigger money.

It’s taking place outside the flagship fests. Sundance resists such prizes for its competition winners, although they often “win” theatrical distribution. Toronto and New York have no juried competitions.

But a notch below these, money matters. “One way for a festival to get attention is a cash award,” says Waco Hoover, co-founder and president of International Film Festival Summit. “Instead of getting distribution, the filmmakers get money toward making their next movie. And there are always advertisers, sponsors and big corporate brands looking for alternate ways to connect with consumers.”

The Los Angeles Film Festival, which opens Thursday and runs through June 29, offers two sizable cash prizes, both worth $50,000 and sponsored by Target: the Filmmaker Award for Best Narrative Feature and the Documentary Award for Best Documentary Feature.

On the East Coast, New York’s seven-year-old Tribeca Film Festival has three $25,000 cash awards – Best New Narrative Filmmaker sponsored by American Express, an unsponsored Founders Award for Best Narrative Feature, and the Cadillac Audience Award Winner.

Currently, Indianapolis’ Heartland Film Festival promotes itself as having the largest single cash prize among U.S. fests, a $100,000 award for Best Dramatic Feature funded by the philanthropic Max Simon Foundation. It doubled its cash prizes in 2006. The festival promotes “positive” films.

Directors of these festivals uniformly say the cash prizes have been good for all concerned. “The film festival has had tremendous growth,” says Los Angeles’ Richard Raddon. “Having high-profile cash awards helps in getting the best films out there.”

Nancy Schafer, Tribeca’s co-executive director, explains, “Filmmaking is an expensive endeavor and we want to support filmmakers. We’d love to give them more.”

For Heartland, which has been in existence 17 years, cash prizes were a way to establish credibility for a festival devoted to “positive” films. “There are a lot of festivals out there, so how do you rise above the pack,” says Jeffrey Sparks, president of non-profit Heartland Truly Moving Pictures.

But there is competition on the horizon. They include, among others, the San Antonio Independent Christian Film Festival, sponsored by Vision Forum Ministries and funded by a private foundation, which announced “the top cash prize in the world” at $101,000. It will go into effect at the fest’s fifth go-round in January.

Overseas, the Middle East International Film Festival, which will hold its second installment this October in Abu Dhabi, gives over $1.075 million in total cash awards.

“I can remember long, long ago when to say ‘we are a non-competitive invitational festival’ was something of a badge of honor,” recalls Ron Henderson, co-founder and senior program consultant of the 31-year-old Denver Film Festival, in an E-mail. “But times have changed and the intensely competitive, commercial culture of film festivals reflects those changes.”

Meanwhile, Raddon knows what he’d do with $1 million. “If anyone came to us with that, we’d tie it to the funding of a film,” he says.

Art Movies Might Be Struggling, But Opera Movies Are Thriving
BY STEVEN ROSEN
(from Cincinnati CityBeat; www.citybeat.com)

If you follow news about art/independent films, you know they're struggling. The "classics" divisions of the studios have been cutting back because of the softening economy, and it's the rare foreign-language and documentary title that grosses more than $1 million anymore.

On the other hand, the opera film is going gangbusters. The Metropolitan Opera, with its long history of live-radio broadcasts, began the trend with its "Live in HD" simulcast transmissions of productions to movie theaters for the 2006-2007 season.

Using the new high-definition digital-video technology, with upwards of a dozen cameras capturing the action, it was able to prove opera had an audience that -- while maybe not equal to American Idol -- was far more than an elitist blip on the pop-cultural charts. There were six live transmissions that season.

For the second season, which concluded in April, there were eight live transmissions at 600 theaters worldwide, including (Cincinnati's) Showcase Cinemas Springdale, where attendance was so good it sometimes reached capacity, and the less-crowded Regal Cinema in Deerfield Township.

Now the Met has announced the 2008-2009 season, and it's up to 11 HD transmissions, 800 theaters and 17 countries -- plus cruise ships. It begins with a special Sept. 22 presentation of the Opening Night Gala. There will be five new productions, including one -- Massenet's "Thais" with Renee Fleming on Dec. 20 -- with former Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra Music Director Jesus Lopez-Cobos conducting.

Were this not enough, two other opera companies have also started offering recorded live but delayed transmissions of their productions: San Francisco and Italy's La Scala. Rave Cinema's West Chester 18 offered both during the last season and plans to do it again despite spotty attendence. It's a way to bring new customers to the theater, says Jeremy Devine, marketing vice president.

The big question, really, is whether this explosion in access to the world's great opera companies will hurt interest and attendance in Cincinnati's own, which is starting its four-production summer season on June 11 with Puccini's Madame Butterfly.

Cincinnati Opera is the nation's second-oldest opera company after the Met, founded in 1920, with a long-deserved reputation for first-rate productions. Because it never had a summer season, Met performers often came here to work. (None of the movie-theater offerings occurs in summer so far.)

Evans Mirageas, Cincinnati Opera's artistic director, believes opera-at-the-movies can only help.

"I think it builds awareness for opera," he says. "Many of the people going are first-timers, taken by a friend to an atmosphere perhaps less intimidating than an opera house. You can eat popcorn.

"Yet there is also something to saying, 'If you like this, you need to see the real thing up front and personal.' And remember, these theaters hold 200 and under -- we seat 3,481. So it's not a threat at all. It's a wonderful plus. More opera means more opera and that's what we're here for."

Mirageas says Cincinnati Opera plans to work with movie theaters to offer information about it to those attending screenings. And Cincinnati, like most other professional opera companies, is considering future expansion into movie-theater and/or Internet delivery. But the expense of doing it right is a factor, he says.

Perhaps if the Cincinnati Opera wants to attract an international theatrical audience for its productions, it might consider staging at least an occasional production at the unique, legendary home for its first 51 years: the Cincinnati Zoo. Nobody else can offer that.

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Contact Steve Rosen: srosen@citybeat.com