CS Weekly Archive > Happenings > 5/12/06

The Festival That Roared:
Tribeca Film Festival 2006

By judd bloch

This year's Tribeca Film Festival offered people more movies, panels, celebrities, and free popcorn than ever before. But was it enough?

"And now, I'd like to introduce a man being talked about as the next Omar Sharif of Egypt!" says Andrew Lanter, the upbeat producer of the very downbeat Civic Duty, a post-9/11 thriller. "Khaled Abol Naga!" The tall Naga swaggers onto the stage of the Tribeca Performing Arts Center exuding the carefully calibrated modesty of a prospect. While Naga may very well go on to be the Next Omar Shariff of Egypt, and America, too, he has competitors, many of whom are in attendance at the 2006 Tribeca Film Festival. Like him, they're often playing terrorists, suspected terrorists, and even CIA agents in a steady drip of post-9/11 films.

Already onstage next to Lanter is first-time screenwriter Andrew Joiner, in a black kangol hat turned backwards and a black long-sleeve shirt. He looks very much like a New York screenwriter. He's not. He's an L.A. screenwriter whose New Jersey-set thriller has the early buzz at the festival. The film's paranoid premise seems plucked from the collective American mind: an unemployed accountant (Peter Krause) descends into dangerous paranoia when he begins to suspect his next-door neighbor is a terrorist.

Joiner says he came up with the idea shortly after September 11. "I was like everybody else," says Joiner, "reading everything I could, and I started wondering what would happen if I took it too far." In the Rear Window-esque film, Krause takes it way too far, ultimately holding the suspected terrorist hostage to force a confession at gunpoint.

It's Wednesday, April 26, the first official night of the Tribeca Film Festival. Last night, the unofficial first night, in a move one would expect more from Karl Rove than uber-New Yorkers and festival founders Jane Rosenthal and Robert De Niro, the festival premiered United 93. With other post-9/11 films like Five Fingers (thriller), The Heart of Steel (documentary), and The Falling Man (short) set to premiere, one has to wonder if the Tribeca Film Festival, now in it's fifth year, will always be the 9/11 film festival, or if it will become the new Sundance like it clearly wants to be? Over the next 13 days, 274 films from 40 countries are scheduled to screen and, in a move designed to reach as many New Yorkers as possible, the films will screen on theaters all over the city. Running parallel to the films are panel discussions with directors like Harold Ramis, Steven Soderbergh, and J.J. Abrams, and featuring catchy titles like "The Biology of King Kong" and "What Would Jesus Direct?" But to knock out Sundance and become the Mecca of North American Festivals, it will take more than movies, panels, distribution deals, and A-list celebrity sightings. It will take something intangible like…skiing.

Earlier that night, Jason Patric and Sam Shepard were on hand for Walker Payne, a film about a financially strapped father (Patric) who gets duped by a fork-tongued Shepard into fighting his beloved pitbull. The often wrenching dog-fighting scenes had some audience members sobbing. Matt Williams, the film's writer/director, is also the creator of the far more comforting Home Improvement and Roseanne, making him by far and away the most successful writer/director at the festival. Williams, who hales from Indiana where Payne takes place, wrote the script's first draft 20 years ago before taking a long, lucrative detour into television. "I'm not interested in comic books," says the silver-maned Williams. "All my sensibilities are indie. I dismantled my company to get back to being indie."

While Williams was busy razing his empire to recapture the uncertainty of his youth, Daniel Housman was waiting tables in Tribeca and adapting Daniel Menaker's novel The Treatment. The kind of smart, literate, neurotic script New York prides itself on, The Treatment is an occasionally surreal dramedy about a teacher (Chris Eigemann) seeing a Freudian shrink (Ian Holm) and wooing a widow (Famke Jansen) on the Upper West Side. "We [Housman and director Oren Rudavsky] were looking for a story about a shrink," says the scripter, who had never adapted a novel before. "We found a Roth book, but who wants to approach Mount Roth, you know?" Then novelist Melissa Banks handed them the Menaker book and they both flipped for the shrink. In the book, the Eigemann character hears his Cuban shrink in his head. In the movie, the now Argentinean shrink pops up and out at inappropriate times (during sex with Famke for instance) to bludgeon his patient with funny yet piercing non-sequiturs like "The penis has entered the vagina!"

On Saturday night, the non-sequitur that is Jeff Goldblum arrives on 68th and Broadway for the packed premiere of Pittsburgh. The not quite Being John Malkovich -- more like Following Jeff Goldblum - follows the eccentric actor as he prepares, against the sound advice of just about everybody, to do The Music Man with his fiancé in his hometown of Pittsburgh. Watching the casually meta, almost completely improvised film followed by the Q&A afterwards with a super-stylish Goldblum, one can't help thinking how easily it could have been Jeff Goldblum's head instead of John Malkovich's that John Cusack gets stuck in.

However, on the sixth day of the festival, Colour Me Kubrick, starring John Malkovich, premieres, and one is quickly reminded that Malkovich's head is actually the darker, stranger place to be. One of the most anticipated and probably the most original film of the festival, Kubrick tells the "trueish" story of Allen Conway (Malkovich), a con-man who sashayed around London in the early '90s, introducing himself to mostly men -- including Frank Rich of the New York Times -- with the line, "I'm Stanley Kubrick." Despite the fact that Conway knew practically nothing about Kubrick and looked nothing like the late, great director, they all believed him. In the film, Malkovich doffs and dons strange accents and even stranger clothes, turning Conway into one of the great tragicomic wretches of the screen. Directed by Brian Cooke, who was Kubrick's assistant director on six films starting with A Clockwork Orange, from a script written by Anthony Frewin, who was Kubrick's assistant and researcher for 25 years, Colour Me Kubrick is the kind of vaguely surreal, unblinking black comedy that Stanley Kubrick might have directed and that Charlie Kaufman wishes he wrote. "I thoroughly researched Allen Conway on behalf of Stanley Kubrick," explains Frewin via e-mail from England, where he continues to work for the Kubrick estate. "Stanley was bothered by him as the guy was stealing his identity on a daily basis. We once found out that Conway had only seen a little of one of SK's film Barry Lyndon and didn't like it. 'What an ingrate,' said Stanley."

Frewin wrote the script as an exercise after the director died. "I had all of this material on Conway and it seemed a pity to deep-six it in a filing cabinet," says Frewin, who since the director's death has become a successful novelist. "I would hope Stanley would have enjoyed the movie but I'm not sure he would have approved."

Based on the strength of films like Kubrick, as well as others like Blessed By Fire, First Snow, and The Bridge, 9/11 is now just a topic, but it is no longer the topic at the festival, causing at least one filmmaker to ruminate, "I wonder if having a post-9/11 film here is a good thing?" The question is posed by Kevin Ackerman, whose controversial short film The Falling Man, a fiction inspired by Richard Drew's famous photograph of a man plummeting head-first from one of the World Trade Center towers, premiered here. "I'm not so sure anymore."

"Harold Ramis, the comedy of," is the topic of discussion at one typically packed panel discussion. Joining Ramis to discuss himself was Todd Phillips, Jake Kasdan, and Curb Your Enthusiasm's Jeff Garlin. Both Kasdan and Garlin wrote and directed comedies premiering at the festival -- The TV Set and I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With, respectively. Kasdan expressed his desire to make a film as big and funny as Ghostbusters. To make his considerably smaller The TV Set, an industry comedy inspired by his experiences writing for television, he had to bypass the studio system. "If you look at the studios now, there's only two or three comedies they like to make," he says later. "To make this film, the movie had to take it's own advice and skip the process of studio development."

Ramis, who at this point in his career is closer to being the developer than the developee, told a story about the ending to his last film, The Ice Harvest. In the original ending, John Cusack gets run over by an RV. "This was the point of the picture," he says. "If the guy dies, I was making art! If he lives, I was the same pandering, crassly commercial guy I've been throughout my career." The test audiences hated the down ending. Ramis changed it. The picture flopped anyway.

Director Steven Soderbergh sat on a relevant but dull panel, discussing not his films or films in general, but where and how he would like you to watch his films in the future. Earlier this year, his film Bubble was released simultaneously in theaters and on dvd. Both he and 29/29 productions head Todd Wagner, also on the panel, believe that this new mass distribution platform called "Day and Date" is the inevitable future of moviegoing. "The system is broken," Soderbergh says more than once. "It needs to be fixed." Exhibitors can't make any money, he explains, because the studios take all of the money. Then the studios pay talent way too much money, he continues, making the quality of the movie beside the point. Dean Garfield, executive vice-president for strategic planning of the MPAA, and the only man on the panel who wore a suit, patiently assures the feisty director that steps are being taken to fix the system. Although, he fails to mention what steps.

The next night, J.J. Abrams, creator of Alias and Lost, and now the director of M:i:III arrives to explain how he became J.J. Abrams. "When an idea occurs to me," he says. "I usually try to get rid of it." Then he outlines it. "I like crazy stuff," he says. "Like, for instance, a guy getting sucked into a jet engine. Maybe it doesn't make sense, but if I believe it can be true and it's cool, then I will find a way to do it."

Wednesday, Day 9, is officially M:i:III day for New York, and for the festival, too. This means that while gut-wrenching Argentinean movies like Blessed By Fire will continue to screen, they must contend with the ubiquitous presence of Tom Cruise. For example, coming out of the Regal Cinemas in Battery Park, a motorcade of black SUVs tears down the West Side Highway chasing an orange Mustang toward Ground Zero. The Mustang stops outside the cinema and, with helicopters hovering above, Tom Cruise jumps out to shake some hands. Many of the people just saw Mini's First Time, a black comedy about the rich and rotten in Los Angeles, starring Alec Baldwin and Nikki Reed, and they don't know how to react. See M:i:III! Tom Cruise! Tom Cruise?

The festival spends the last four days with something akin to a hangover. Too many films, too many parties, too many celebrities. Only two films -- Backstage and Mini's First Time -- found distribution deals here. Sydney Pollack's Sketches of Frank Gehry and eventual festival winner The War Tapes (documentary) already had it going in. For others, like Lonely Hearts, with John Travolta and James Gandolfini, and The TV Set, distribution deals are pending. On Sunday night, at a Chinese restaurant in Chinatown, awards are handed out to Blessed By Fire for Best Narrative Feature, The Treatment for Best Made-in-New York Feature, and to Marwan Hamed, the young director of The Yacoubian Building, the most expensive film ever made in Egypt. Colour Me Kubrick wins nothing.

Sunday, May 7 is the last day of the festival, and all of the films that won an award get a special screening. Though well attended, the festival at this point can't help but feel like a movie that doesn't know how to end. But with the screening of Joseph Lewis's 1955 crime classic The Big Combo at 7:30 pm, it finally does.

On Monday morning, David Kwok, the festival's senior programmer who during the festival demonstrated the mystifying ability to introduce two, sometimes three, films at the same time in three completely different theaters, reflects on the past 13 days. "I think it had the old Sundance feel," he says, then adds that they're not trying to be the new Sundance. "We're trying to offer more than a normal film festival."

As Kwok rattles off the various things Tribeca does that other film festivals don't do -- panels, family film festival, community out-reach, all good things, to be sure -- he neglects to mention the X-factor that sets Tribeca apart from the rest, the intangible that's going to make Tribeca into the new Sundance: New York. Nice place to visit, see a movie, meet a girl, guy, transvestite, whatever you want.

Judd Bloch is a writer who lives in New York. In the past, he has written for Spin, Penthouse, and ICON.

Civic Duty courtesy Landslide Pictures

Colour Me Kubrick courtesy Europa Corp
Walker Payne courtesy Persistent Entertainment
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