Stars Posing with Ponies? The Unexpected Oscar Power of a Regional Film Festival
Inside the ground game as I hit horsey Middleburg, Va. and Christopher Rosen movied-it-up in Montclair, N.J.
If you went out looking for Team Ankler this past weekend, you’d have a lot of traveling to do. While many of my colleagues posted up at the Montclair Film Festival in New Jersey, I made my first trip to the Middleburg Film Festival in Virginia, where I got to witness Oscar hopefuls mingle with a miniature horse named Cupcake, among many other marvels.
Spending four days in Middleburg gave me a lot of time to think about the roles these regional festivals play in awards season, and how much you can learn — and what you can’t — from spending time in these cinephile summer camp environments. It is definitely weird that, say, acclaimed Iranian It Was Just an Accident director Jafar Panahi spent part of his weekend walking around a resort hotel in Virginia horse country. But for the awards strategists who obsess over these festivals, and the local audiences who flock to them, it’s all worth it.
I’ll have more to share about Middleburg on Tuesday’s podcast, which will also feature the live conversation I had with Nouvelle Vague star Zoey Deutch following that film’s Middleburg premiere. But first, I’m going to hand things over to Christopher Rosen to share his dispatch from Montclair. He and our colleagues Sean McNulty and Richard Rushfield were busy hosting panels with a range of film world luminaries — including Under the Influence Productions’ Ryan Hawke, WME’s Jamie Pillet, Kino Lorber’s Lisa Schwartz and Bleecker Street’s Tyler DiNapoli. But Chris also made time, like I did, for a second viewing of Jay Kelly. These festivals may happen in wildly varying parts of the country, but when the theater lights go down, it seems they’re not so different after all.
Dispatch from Montclair
It didn’t take long for Jersey pride to show its muscles at the Montclair Film Festival. On Friday, before the opening night screening of Jay Kelly (there’s that news van again), Montclair Film board president Evelyn McGee Colbert (wife of a certain late-night host) and vice president Mary Anne Vaughn named New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy and First Lady Tammy Murphy as the Montclair Film Festival’s honorary chairs, the first time in its 14-year history that MFF had granted that honor. Saturday night brought a special Visionary Award tribute to Warner Bros. co-chair and CEO Pam Abdy, who was born and raised in the Garden State and invited lots of family members to the presentation hosted by Montclair Film artistic director Tom Hall. “Growing up in New Jersey prepares you for the movie business; us folks in Jersey know how to hustle,” Abdy said after recounting her years in the business, from her early days at — appropriately — Jersey Films, to her work as producer of Garden State, to her incredible year co-running Warner Bros. with Michael De Luca thanks to original hits like Sinners, Weapons and One Battle After Another.
Just a short train ride from New York City (“short” being a relative word since New Jersey Transit is infamously awful), this year’s Montclair Film Festival leveled up, not just in terms of its guests and programming, but its size and scope. Montclair Film, the nonprofit that operates The Clairidge in downtown Montclair, also reopened the town’s historic Bellevue Theatre over the weekend. Richard and Sean and I hosted our respective panels in the Audible Lounge at the Montclair Mezzanine, and we were among the lucky few to join a small dinner for 20 on Saturday night to honor WB’s Abdy at Sam’s Table that included Evie and Stephen Colbert, Bugonia screenwriter Will Tracy, writer-director Richard LaGravenese, Anchorage Capital’s Kevin Ulrich and Ankler executive editor Alison Brower.
Still, a festival is only as good as its movies, as Katey will explain ahead, and we’ll discuss together this week on the Prestige Junkie podcast. Hall and his team programmed several great films on this year’s lineup, including Bugonia, Wake Up Dead Man, Sentimental Value, Nouvelle Vague, It Was Just an Accident and The Testament of Ann Lee, and little gems like Bleecker Street’s Rebuilding. “My job is to love movies, and try to find a reason when I watch them to connect them to an audience,” Tom told me during my Sunday panel, Audiences, Awards, and the Future of Movie Marketing, where he was joined by Tyler DiNapoli, President and CMO at Bleecker Street. “We’re trying to get these movies over the line and draw attention to them and be part of the conversation together.” — Christopher Rosen
Take Me Home, Country Roads
Thanks, Chris! Before I get into Middleburg, I’ll start with the fullest of full disclosures: I was a guest of the Middleburg Film Festival this weekend, which meant not just a press badge that got me access to the films and a series of welcome parties and receptions, but a room at the unbelievably luxurious Salamander resort, which serves as home base for the festival. The experience was a little bit like going to a lovely wedding jam-packed with events, except the grand finale is crying through Hamnet instead of watching anyone get married.
To say this is the nicest film festival I’ve ever been to is a dramatic understatement. But you don’t have to be living out your Grand Budapest dream, staying in the hotel, to feel the magic, and with individual event tickets going for around $15 and day passes for $125, Middleburg felt like a remarkably accessible festival given that it takes place in the literal wealthiest county in America.
After months of hearing buzz from far-flung locations like Telluride and Cannes, the regional film festival season feels incredibly democratic, catering to cinephiles of so many different stripes all around the country this month. Here’s what I learned after spending most of a wonderful fall weekend sitting in dark rooms.
If You Build It, They Will Come
The Middleburg Film Festival is the brainchild of Sheila Johnson, the co-founder of BET, who not only built the Salamander resort in the early 2010s but also created a film festival to host within it. Before the opening night screening of Jay Kelly, Johnson shared the story of how she visited the future location of the resort in the company of Robert Redford, who knew a thing or two about showing movies in a beautiful location. According to Johnson, Redford insisted to her, “You have to put a film festival here.”
Like the resort itself, built in the Revolutionary-era style that’s common in this historic region, the film festival feels much older and more established than its 13 years. Johnson, who also has produced films like Lee Daniels’ The Butler and Questlove’s Oscar winner Summer of Soul, partners with documentary filmmaker Susan Koch to run the film festival, and the two drew on their extensive film industry connections — both in the D.C. area and in L.A. — to bring the crowds to their pocket of paradise. Studios willing to get their movies and talent to the festival are a massive part of the equation, but so are the moviegoers. As one attendee based in Los Angeles told me, Middleburg is a heck of a lot easier to get to than Telluride, and with equally great movies on deck.
Yes, “They” Includes Academy Voters
Wherever you find a regional festival, you’ll find a solid number of Oscar voters who live nearby. In Middleburg, that number is around 45 but swells during the festival thanks to members of the festival’s board — composer Kris Bowers, an Oscar winner, was in town accompanied by his parents — and the people traveling with their own awards contenders. This year, for the first time, there was a reception explicitly hosted for Academy members, but since I was not invited — I’m still waiting for the branch that will accept me! — I can only imagine what I would have heard as a fly on that wall.
After seeing songwriter Diane Warren and composer Nathan Johnson sitting just a few rows in front of me for Hamnet, or Wicked editor Myron Kerstein in line to see Wake Up Dead Man, I realized the value of these festivals not just for the awards voters who live nearby, but also for the ones who find themselves visiting too. I shared an airport shuttle ride on Sunday with a PGA member who relished the opportunity to catch up on a few titles before the screener deluge began. I’m right there with her.
Where the Real Shop Talk Happens
Most festival screenings everywhere ideally will end with a Q&A, where a moderator or the audience asks questions of the filmmaker that hopefully shed light on the sheer miracle that is any film getting made at all.
But let me tell you, if you really want to learn how the sausage gets made, eavesdrop in on a conversation where KPop Demon Hunters star and songwriter EJAE and composer Lesley Barber trade notes on how to engineer a Zoom recording session. That’s what happened during a luncheon honoring Women in Film on Friday, where D.C.-based diplomats mingled with the likes of Rose Byrne and casting director Nina Gold, and literally everyone was starstruck by the presence of the miniature horse Cupcake (as a female horse, she was obviously the guest of honor).
In addition to having time to see movies, the contenders visiting Middleburg seemed to relish the opportunity to actually catch up with each other, something that’s much harder at a busy festival like Toronto. I often marvel at the end of awards season at the seemingly genuine connections that develop between people from different projects who simply found themselves in the same room over and over again for months. At Middleburg, I think I witnessed the beginning of multiple beautiful friendships.
Ok, So How About the Movies?
Unlike Toronto, where nearly everyone I talked to circled back to Hamnet being their favorite film of the festival, it was much harder to determine a clear winner out of Middleburg. (The festival’s audience award winner hasn’t been announced as of this writing.) The response to Jay Kelly on opening night seemed warm, but faded a bit as the festival went on (something Chris told me he noticed at Montclair as well). Meanwhile, Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, which got a critical drubbing in Venice and Telluride, played through the roof in Middleburg, even with no talent in attendance to amp up the wow factor. (If you’re a Prestige Junkie After Party subscriber, you no doubt already knew we had clocked the Frankenstein resurgence; sign up now for just $5 a month.)
As I would have predicted, Cannes standouts Sentimental Value and It Was Just an Accident played well with this sophisticated crowd, many of whom have international relations backgrounds in D.C. I was gratified to hear multiple people express surprise at how entertaining and even funny It Was Just an Accident is; director Jafar Panahi’s decades of resistance against the Iranian regime are an essential part of that film, but so is its incredible entertainment value.
Meanwhile, I was bowled over by one of my final films of the festival, Is This Thing On?, and clearly should have paid more attention when Chris raved about it out of the New York Film Festival last week. With his third film as a director, Bradley Cooper has established himself as one of the cinema’s best-ever chroniclers of relationships, with this film far more focused on the marriage between Will Arnett and Laura Dern’s characters than the world of stand-up comedy that Arnett’s character finds himself becoming part of. Every scene is full of rich texture, from stellar supporting performances (from Cooper as well as Andra Day and Ciarán Hinds) to the perfectly deployed presence of two unruly dogs. Walking away from that Sunday morning screening, I talked to many other moviegoers who loved it — and are now wondering just how many more Oscar nominations Cooper could add to the 12 he already has.
I’ve joked on the podcast this season that I’m going to make T-shirts that say “You know what I really loved…”, because that’s the assumed response Oscar voters have when they look at their ballots and vote with their hearts. At Middleburg, the answer to “You know what I really loved…” varied an incredible amount from person to person. It suggests that we’ve got a lot of great movies on our hands this year, and not a lot of clear winners in a race that has now really and truly begun.