On the Ground at One of Oscar Season's Early Proving Grounds
I take in the kickoff of the Montclair Film Festival, with 'Conclave' director Edward Berger, Sony Pictures Classics' Tom Bernard and its influential creative-class crowd
Greetings from New York City, where tonight I’ll be joining the flood of East Coast film writers seething with envy that Los Angeles had its big early screening of Gladiator II three days before we did. The moment has finally arrived, though, and my Ankler colleague Sean McNulty and I will be there to see if it really lives up to some of the hyperbolic tweets that came out of that Los Angeles screening.
Paramount is pulling out the stops for the New York screening, including flying in stars Paul Mescal, Connie Nielsen, Fred Hechinger and Denzel Washington for a post-screening Q&A. But it’s also being cagey about inviting critics, leaning more heavily on awards pundits and influencers — that’s right, we’re influencers now, Sean — who might fire off some enthusiastic tweets and leave it at that.
This is not an unheard-of strategy, and probably wise given that there’s nearly a full month before Gladiator II opens on Nov. 13. But after Joker: Folie á Deux was saddled with scathing reviews from its Venice premiere, six weeks before its theatrical bow, Paramount may be trying to learn from Warner Bros.’ mistakes. All signs point to Gladiator II being far more successful than the Joker sequel — but they’re avoiding any potential thumbs down all the same.
I’ll have more on Gladiator in Thursday’s newsletter, and whether the arrival of a brawny sword-and-sandals epic might set up an Oscar showdown between “boy movies” and “girl movies.” But first, some reflections on the spectacular fall weekend I spent at the Montclair Film Festival in New Jersey, sitting down with festival supporters Stephen Colbert and Evie McGee Colbert and watching another Oscar hopeful play for yet another wildly enthusiastic crowd. The Oscar buzz is building at festivals all over the country right now, and Montclair was a fantastic place to watch it happen in real time.
From Germany to Jersey
In the flood of well-dressed attendees outside Montclair’s Wellmont Theater — lots of sequins and shiny boots — it was easy to miss the man with the glasses and the slightly bewildered smile. On the small step-and-repeat set up outside, he had done a handful of interviews, but Edward Berger — the director of Conclave, the opening night film of this year’s Montclair Film Festival — was otherwise just part of the crowd.
That’s one part of the magic of these regional film festivals happening all over the country this month, where residents of such places as Montclair, Savannah, Middleburg, the Hamptons and Newport Beach get to experience Hollywood glitz on their own turf. The Germany-based Berger is already a veteran of the experience, having traveled to small festivals around the world with his Oscar-winning All Quiet on the Western Front two years ago. Now with Conclave, which stars Ralph Fiennes, John Lithgow and Stanley Tucci, he’s approaching festival season as a bit more of a Hollywood insider — but with plenty left to learn.
“Every screening is different somehow,” Berger told me backstage after his introduction for Conclave, telling the crowd that after the physical challenges of All Quiet on the Western Front, he owed his crew a few months in Rome for the next movie. “But in general you get a sense of, okay, this movie lands, and now it’s the audience’s. At some point you can just kind of say, well, it’s out of my hands.”
The Conclave scene in which Isabella Rossellini earned a mid-movie applause break in Toronto, for example, has been playing the same way in other cities and countries. The laughs, not as present in Berger’s overwhelming war epic All Quiet in the Western Front, have been there too. As Conclave makes its way toward its October 25 launch in American theaters, each successful festival screening tells Berger — as well as distributor Focus Features — that the film is landing with exactly the kind of audiences who you might expect to turn up for a film festival as well as a juicy drama about selecting a new pope.
I spent a few days in New York before arriving in Montclair, and caught up with an experienced awards publicist who reminded me of the power of social circles. It’s not just the people who show up for your screenings, but the people those people will tell; whether you’re a celebrity whose every Instagram post is parsed for meaning or a retiree making regular appearances at a coffee klatch, you’ve got influence.
I thought about that as I made my way through Montclair’s bustling opening night afterparty, with the seats from the bottom floor of the Wellmont Theater cleared to make way for a dance floor, and Conclave-themed cookies available near the bar. (I didn’t eat a frosted mitre and I regret it!) I have no idea how many of the people in the room were awards voters, save maybe Stephen Colbert, who paused near the dance floor alongside the festival’s artistic director Tom Hall to greet well-wishers.
But given the makeup of Montclair, long a haven for journalists and other artist-adjacent types, there were surely some Oscar voters — or, at least, people who would play pickleball with voters the next day and talk about how great Stanley Tucci is in his new movie. On Sunday afternoon, Colbert was hosting an onstage conversation with Ina Garten about her new memoir, and I spotted makeup icon Bobbi Brown, another Montclair resident, making her way to the theater’s back entrance. When you’ve got that much power just in the audience at your film festival, you know you’re doing something right.
Happy Talk
The morning after the Conclave premiere, I sat down in a podcast studio with Colbert and his wife Evie McGee Colbert, the president of the Montclair Film board of trustees. In our conversation, which you can hear on tomorrow’s episode of the Prestige Junkie podcast, Evie and Stephen talked about the kind of community they were looking for when they settled in Montclair more than 20 years ago, and how the festival, which launched in 2012, helped build that vision.
“This is a community that can appreciate the cultural aspects of film beyond the entertainment aspects of it,” Stephen tells me. “There's nothing like a popcorn film — but to have an opportunity to have 140 films, from the popcorn film to the most arcane arthouse film, it shows you the breadth of film culture. It educates young people who maybe don't know much about that, and opens their eyes to this as something you can do with your lives, not just something you can go to to entertain yourself.”
For the filmmakers, like Berger, who come to town with their films, it’s a chance to be part of a festival environment that’s a little less intense than the sales-heavy major festivals like Toronto or Sundance. “I think at the very first festival, I remember a filmmaker said to me, ‘This is amazing. We’ve never really had, like, a party just for us,’” Evie says. “We’re not a marketplace festival. It’s much more a place for an artist to show their work and, and find out what other artists and audiences think of their work and have those kinds of conversations.”
Conversations are a big part of the Montclair experience, particularly when you’ve got an expert interviewer as part of the family. Every year Stephen Colbert has hosted a major onstage conversation, with past guests including Steve Carell and Meryl Streep; this year’s guest is Jon Bon Jovi, a fellow New Jersey icon whom Colbert hopes will teach him “when he picks the opportunity in any song to grab the mic on the stand and then lean into the front row to all the screaming girls. Because I’ve never figured out when I'm supposed to lean into the screaming girls in my front row, or why there are no screaming girls in my front row.”
There were no screaming girls in the front row of my own onstage moment at Montclair, alas — maybe next year. But on tomorrow’s podcast you’ll also be able to hear my live panel conversation with Sony Pictures Classics cofounder and co-president Tom Bernard as well as two of my favorite awards season experts, Gold Derby’s Chris Rosen and Vanity Fair’s Chris Murphy.
We were able to get into so many aspects of awards season and how it works, including Tom’s insider insight on how to get movies in front of Oscar voters, how it can be harder than ever to know when a movie was a hit — and why he and his team were confident Anthony Hopkins would win best actor for The Father back in 2021.
Hear it all on the podcast tomorrow, and if you’re in the Montclair area, don’t go anywhere: Next weekend there will be two more Ankler panels as part of the festival, and a whole lot more great movies to see.