2007 Sedona Film Festival Preview
Thirteen feels like it’s going to be a lucky number for the Sedona International Film Festival & Workshop. Now in its third year under executive director Patrick Schweiss, you get the feeling the annual celebration of independent films, launched in 1994, is coming of age. It’s evident in the new corporate sponsors, cash prizes for filmmakers, closer ties with leading independent film studios in Hollywood, and the films that have found success after screening here displaying the seal of Sedona approval on DVD cases and posters. In another unmistakable sign of growth, this year the festival is adding a fifth full day, starting on Wed., Feb. 28 and running through Sun., March 4. The festival’s energy derives from the people who’ve made it their passion. Sedona Monthly sat down for a roundtable chat with six of those who’ve helped make the festival what it was, is, and will be: Schweiss; board secretary and co-founder Marion Herrman; board chair Dr. Sheila Jackman; longtime film screener and major donor Connie Levinson; film screening co-chair Sagan Lewis; and operations director Debbie Williams. What follows is an unedited version of our conversation, held Nov. 14, 2006, at Sedona Rouge Resort & Spa (2250 W. Hwy 89A). Let’s begin at the beginning, and talk about how the Festival began.
How many people were involved at this point? MARION: There were about four of us left who started it. It was Laurie Seymour, Pinky Greenberg, Sherlynn Hiatt who was my companion, and myself. And Sherlynn and I went to Sundance, I think we were the oldest people there. This is…what year? MARION: 1994. So what we did was we networked like crazy. We went to all the parties, and we met all these movie stars, and we went to every event and talked to a lot of people, and just got a feel of how it’s done. And even in Sundance, it’s not done – I don’t know how it is now – but it was done all over town, they have their old Egyptian Theatre, which is one of these real old-fashioned movie theatres, and they have it in school auditorium, and a hotel ballroom, and they had a complex of I think three theatres. And that was it, so you had to dash all over town for every film you went to. And each place you’d meet someone new everywhere you’d go. It was fun and we really got a feeling for it. Laurie Seymour, who was actually in the film industry, she had come from California and she had directed and she had acted, and she had done almost everything there is, so we made her the chairperson. And our first film festival was all over town, there was no Harkins Theatre. It was at Cinedona, Flicker Shack, the Poco Diablo Ballroom, and there was the sort-of theatre in the Sedona Arts Center. And so it was all over town. And poor Pinky Greenberg, who was busy collecting the money, had to make the rounds of all these places. For the two days we did it, actually, maybe it was only one day the first year. Where did you get the films? MARION: Laurie had a few connections. Filmmaker Magazine, We may have run an ad. You know, I’m not sure, it was a long time ago. But we got some very good films. There was a series of films about gypsies going around the film festival circuit. We showed it at 9 a.m. on a Sunday, and the Flicker Shack was filled. The owner of the Flickershack was like, he couldn’t believe it. We had a movie about Croatia that was very good. The following year, I think that’s when Dan Schay and Nadia Caillou came on board. Dan did it before Nadia, Dan was the chairman. Nadia worked for the Arts Center at the time. And that’s when you came on board [pointing to Dr. Sheila Jackman]. Was that the second year? MARION: [Nods] So we did the festival for several years, and Nadia took over from Dan. From the four of us, after a few years we had this huge committee. We didn’t have an incorporation, we weren’t an organization, we were part of the Sedona Cultural Park. And all the people who were interested in film, we’d just put them on the committee. You were there in those days [referring to Connie Levinson].
DR. SHEILA JACKMAN: In fact, at the Oscar parties, everyone used to get their picture taken with Frank’s Oscar. [Laughter] MARION: I forgot to mention that our first honorees – we called the award the Sedony – were Ann Miller and Donald O’Connor, who lived here. The following year we honored Frank Warner. The next year we honored Diane Ladd, who also lived here. Then we honored Sean Young, who lived here. Then we honored the Harkins.
MARION: After a while, we ran out of celebrities that lived here. [Laughter] We had to spread out. We gave an environmental award to Dennis Weaver. One year we did musical scores as the subject for the workshop, we had Elmer Bernstein come in. Pretty big name, so we had some very important people coming in here. The festival was growing year to year, at this point was it mostly word of mouth, or were you actively working to get the word out? MARION: We were making an effort. I was doing publicity, and I’d get the word out as best I could. I’d do a shotgun thing – this was before e-mail – and I’d get every major newspaper and I’d send out faxes all over the country. And I got responses – the N.Y. Post, I remember, and then a few weirdos. [Laughs] And Phoenix started getting interested in us. They’d had a film festival, but it hadn’t been very successful at the time. So we got people from Phoenix coming up here, and we got Phoenix Home & Garden, newspapers getting interested in us. And then we got professional PR people. So at what point did it go from a group of people who were interested but essentially amateurs… CONNIE: You mean people who didn’t know what we were doing? [LAUGHTER] You could look at it that way… But when did you say, we’ve got growth going on here, let's bring in some people dedicated to making it work? MARION: Nadia had connections. Nadia was the daughter of the gentleman who just passed away, Alan Calliou, who was in the movie business, a screenwriter, and she grew up around Hollywood people. What year is this now? MARION: Nadia took over about our third or fourth festival. She was there for many years. But what happened was the committee got so unwieldy. All our meetings were like 30 people. But we only had a small amount of screeners, I was doing it, Connie was, Sheila, you were doing it. Actually, Sheila, didn’t you start as a host? Sheila was a host for all our Hollywood visitors – who did you host? SHELIA: I hosted Laurie Seymour’s sister, who brought in a film. Two films, I remember, one was a film in a senior citizen’s home, and one, interestingly, was about mah jongg. I didn’t know what it was, and now I’m deeply involved in it – much like the festival, didn’t know, and now I’m deeply involved in it. MARION: That sort of established the way we treat our filmmakers. We treat them with great respect, with great honor, and we want them to be successful. That has gotten around in the industry; filmmakers know they come here and they’re going to be treated very well.
Do you remember in particular an instance of a filmmaker commenting on that? SHELIA: I remember getting a letter from a filmmaker who said, I’d given up on festivals, you go and you’re invisible, no one feeds you, nobody says anything to you. And then I came to Sedona, and it was a whole different experience. And as I said, that’s how we are. And to have someone who’s already satiated with festivals, and given up on festivals be enlivened again, well, then we did our job, well, one wonderful part of our jobs. MARION: Festivals now, it’s the only place these filmmakers can get exposure, and they’re becoming more popular. The industry is controlled by these big, blow-‘em-up movies, and there’s no place for these guys. It’s no wonder film festivals are booming. DEBBIE: I think every state has one now.
SHELIA: People who attend get an education in two days, that’s worth so much. The panelists, with all their experience, basically give away everything they know, there’s no holding back. How much of that is due to the influence of Frank Warner? MARION: Well, he has chosen, or given us the way to find, high-quality people who are really interested in the art itself. Not making money – of course, we do have to bring them in. [Chuckles] CONNIE: They’re speaking to an audience that’s extremely eager to learn from them and hearing what they have to say. You get someone like Elmer Bernstein, or the top animators from Pixar or Disney, or the special-effects people that worked on Gladiator – where else would you ever get four, or five, or six people of this caliber in one room to talk to an interested group of students and filmmakers and anyone else who might want to come by. SHELIA: And talk to each other, that’s one of the things they’ve said to us. Here’s their opportunity to make the rounds, and they don’t get to do that when they’re in their own studio working. MARION: We had Walter Mirch here, he was just then working on redoing the Orson Welles film [Touch of Evil] and he showed what the film looked like originally, and how he was changing it according to Orson Welles’ notes, which they didn’t use. We had the guy who won the Academy Award for Titanic the week before he won. We’ve had some very big people participate here.
CONNIE: But any of the functions that filmmakers tell us over and over, “This has been such a wonderful experience, I can’t believe how well we’ve been treated, I just love it here, may I come back next year?” [Laughs] And almost to a person and that’s fairly unique. The thing that struck me, especially coming from New York, where you have films of every type, and you come here and you’re a great film lover and the great films aren’t out there all the time. There are a few; the films that get the wide commercial releases are very seldom a 10 or a 9 or even an 8. There are a lot of shoot-‘em-up/blow-‘em-ups and silly dumb movies out there. People really want to see good films. One thing that Sedona did early on was to recognize great documentaries. Before a lot of other festivals would even show them. How did that happen? SHELIA: Nadia certainly had an interest in them. MARION: We would watch them, the screeners would really enjoy them. We’ve always had high-quality films. The review process is a killer. SHELIA: The process is also incredibly fair. It’s a wonderful system. I’ve seen other systems that are much more biased. But the fact that five people have to view each film that’s submitted before it’s either tossed out or accepted for that next round is amazing. DEBBIE: It’s nice for the filmmakers too. One of the worst parts of this job is handing out the rejection letters. You feel badly because you know every filmmaker has put a lot of time, money, and effort into it, but you can’t show them. Because we have so many screeners, and they get a numeric rating for seven different categories and classifications and they write comments, well, I got one call from a filmmaker this week who said, I got my rejection letter and I appreciate it, but would you mind just telling me what’s in the comments and why, so next time I can know what to do. And I could go and very easily get that information and it’s all so well done and professionally done as far as the ratings and the comments, and he was very appreciative. I hate to have to tell him, Oh, you’re film stinks. I softened the comments a little bit. PATRICK: Our relationship with the filmmakers starts from the very beginning. We are one of the only festivals – and I have to credit Josef Septimus Bean for this because he had a brilliant idea, we didn’t do it the first year I came on board but he suggested it last summer and we started it for last year’s festival – every filmmaker who submits us a film immediately gets a response from our office saying, We have received your film, thank you for submitting to our festival, it’s in the process, and it’s personalized to them with their name and the name of their film so it’s clear it’s not just a blanket thing going out. You wouldn’t believe the number of filmmakers who tell us, No other festival has ever just acknowledged receiving their film. Thank you for this. We’ve heard these wonderful things about Sedona before and this just proves it. And it really is quite astounding. So from the very initial moment of the mail coming into our office, we start that very personal relationship with the filmmaker, whether they end up in the festival or not. It’s a personal connect that they have. We’re also, which I didn’t realize, one of fewer festivals that you’d think that absolutely sends an acceptance or rejection letter, every filmmaker knows exactly where they stand with our festival, and that’s not the norm. A lot of festivals only send acceptances, and if you don’t hear from them you just assume you’ve been rejected. From that perspective, they never have to wonder where they stand with us. By the last week in January, every single filmmaker will have heard from us, yea or nay. They get a personal phone call and a personal e-mail from us if they’re accepted, and they get something in the mail. We treat a three-minute film the same as an hour-and-a-half documentary. Those people are very important to us, and it goes along with what’s been established in the history of this festival, and we continue that and add to it each year. It’s a very personal experience for them. And it carries over to when they get here. MARION: We have a town that donates hotel rooms. And some luxurious ones too. PATRICK: Last year, we got 120 hotel rooms rooms donated for four nights each (that is 480 rooms!) for us to house our filmmakers. That is not just a reflection of this festival, it’s a reflection of this community, seeing the value of what we bring, and the economic impact that we have, for those four and now five days of this festival. SHELIA: That’s been one of the fun parts for me since the very beginning, putting people who come into hotel rooms. The three-minute people [makers of short films] call and say, You’re putting me in a hotel room?! They think they’ll be put up in somebody’s house, or in some little dump – well, we don’t have little dumps [in Sedona]. Beforehand, I’m e-mailing them back and forth about Sedona, and asking them who they’re coming with so we’ll know whether they’ll need one bed or two, and it’s thrown them. What I get before they get here is a sense of who they are apart from their film – so some of them may get nicer rooms. [Laughter] It’s an incredible closeness that I personally get, even if I don’t see them when they show up, which happens, though I go looking, it’s still a feeling of being connected to their film, and connected to who they are. It’s all here [points to head] and it’s in here [points to heart] and it's really neat. It’s very special. SHELIA: What was it that Ned Beatty said about our festival, didn’t he have a great quote? PATRICK: Last year, Ned Beatty said after the screening of Sweet Land where he was in attendance, “This festival is better than Sundance. You are what Sundance used to be. You are Sundance with a heart. And don’t ever lose your heart.” And I said to him, Can I quote you on that? And he said, “You can absolutely use that wherever you want to, and I really sincerely believe that.” And he and his wife left us a pie. DEBBIE: Yes, when they were driving back they had our volunteer who was driving them stop in Black Canyon City at this bakery with homemade pies and bought a couple and sent them up. PATRICK: With celebrities, we don’t deal with high-maintenance people. They’re not worth having at our festival. If they’re demanding, if they’re this, they’re that, it’s not worth the festival’s time. The celebrities that come here are very accessible, we make that part of what we tell them when they come. We want them to be here, but we want them most importantly to be part of all the festivities, to be accessible to people, to spend time with people. And with the exception of one or two, they’ve been really, really good. SHELIA: Honestly, we can count on one hand the number who stand out as being high-maintenance, why are they here? And there’s one I can recall who started out as high maintenance – and it wasn’t such a surprise, we knew it on the phone – and there was a numbers discrepancy about some stuff, and we were just there and there, and there was no fighting or moaning, and by the second day he got that there was a different way to interact. And then he became a human being again. I don’t know what happened after he got home [Laughter] It rubs off, and that's what’s neat. MARION: Spoken from a psychologist. [Laughs] PATRICK: So we’re hoping that’s what people take away. We put that up with every correspondence that we have with them, with how we treat them, how we talk to them, how we communicate with them, and certainly that’s what they experience when they’re here. MARION: We’re a gracious film festival. Are you finding that the word is getting around? PATRICK: Yes. Another thing that our festival does more than others is when we know a filmmaker is here, whether the film is one minute or two hours, there is always, always, always a Q&A session scheduled afterward. When I was at the Telluride Film Festival, there’s only certain films that have a Q&A scheduled, even if the filmmaker is there. We do it with every single one, so people know that if there’s a filmmaker there, or a cast member is there, there will be a discussion about this film. At first, I didn’t realize that didn’t always happen at every film festival. A lot of filmmakers have commented to us, What a remarkable thing. That usually for short films – and for us, 65 of our 120 films are short films – those people don’t often get a chance to talk about their film at festivals, usually they’ll say the filmmaker will be standing out in the lobby if you have any questions for them. It’s another part of the way we honor our filmmakers, who we always say are our true celebrities. What is a Sedona film festival film? SHELIA: I think it’s easier to say what isn’t. SAGAN: What I love…I think I’m a little more radical about avant-garde [films] than some of the screeners, I really love avant-garde , and that’s a stretch, I think, for us. I find, for me, what I’m drawn to – and Sheila has been wonderful at coaching that we really have to be fair to these filmmakers – I know that I’m drawn to films of the heart. I know that I’m drawn to films that have a unique voice. A lot of times something I really like I’ll say, This film is unique, pay attention to it. I think that we’re very open to many, many different styles. I don't think there's a rule about, No, we’re not going in any direction. I just think we’re open to any good film if it hits us on some level, to make a note of that. Did you notice a common thread to the films that made it into the festival after the fact? MARION: There was a time when we thought we had to have some kind of brand, we had to have some kind of specialty, but we discarded that. Quality and the audience being able to stay in the film, that’s the first thing I think of. Does what you anticipate the audience will think of a film enter into your ratings, or is it more a personal reaction? General reaction: Both SHELIA: One of our screening categories is suitability for Sedona, for this festival. And there may be a film that gets [high scores] and when it gets to suitability, it was zero – and we don’t even have zeroes on our scale. There was a film I remember that was like that, but it was just too adolescent. And there were a few films that would be incredible at a specialized festival, but there wasn’t enough that this community, which is incredibly diverse, it just wouldn’t really have a spot here, but could be wonderful for another festival. DEBBIE: There are some films that some of the screeners will see and just don’t like them at all, but we’ll end up putting them in because that’s a personal taste but we know there’s an audience out there for them. CONNIE: Sagan and I were discussing just before we started this. We’d both just seen a film that more or less was biased, a documentary, and I said that I would hate to see that in our festival. But I think what distinguishes us is the fact that you can view a film, and the film can have all high scores, until you get to that last area. The sound may be perfect, the cinematography may be perfect, the direction, the production, the art direction can all be perfect, and the film can still be a dog. Or simply unsuitable. MARION: We have one main rule we tell the screeners: Do not let your personal prejudice influence your score. SHELIA: When it’s pure pornography it’s out – pornography for the sake of pornography. Nudity can be OK, and sex. CONNIE: Sexual themes, we just warn people beforehand, that there are explicit scenes, but we wouldn’t pull it out of the festival for that. SHELIA: And language. I remember reading one of your reviews and it was about the language. [You said] the foul language was absolutely appropriate for this character, and it was. So, of course. SHELIA: Of all the categories, I would say the strongest one for us is story. If it’s very well shot, but it’s a lousy story, [we’d look at that differently than if] there are some flaws with the cinematography but the story really grabs you. DEBBIE: There might be a tendency to overlook some of the other flaws if the story is strong. CONNIE: The worst thing is predictability. If after five minutes you know exactly what’s going to happen in this film, that’s the biggest shame of all. Everything can be technically right, sometimes spectacularly so, but you get to the end of it and you just shrug and say, I know what it is, and that's kind of a shame. PATRICK: We like films that stir some kind of emotion, whether it’s anger, or stirring you to action, or makes you look at a subject a little bit differently. Those are the kind of films we want to bring in, whether it touches the heart. As the festival grows, how do you guard against losing the vision? PATRICK: We have checks and balances, even among just this group that’s sitting here. It would never happen. SHELIA: We can try something, and if it doesn't fit who we are, we just say, OK, been there, done that, cross it off. PATRICK: We canceled a fund-raiser that wasn’t working. There was a group we were going to work with, they’d promised us a lot of celebrities, and all sorts of stuff but I had a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach from the minute we started conversations with them, just saying this doesn’t fit what we want to do. We’re not all about celebrity here, and we saw a lack of ticket sales, a lack of interest in the event, three weeks before it – a lot of people would say, let’s try to pull it off, we’ll do the best we can, but forget it – why do an event that’s not what we’re all about? So we very quickly learn from things that work or don’t work. Shelia will always tell me, Pat, you’re too starstruck, stop it! [Laughs] CONNIE: There’s been a change in types of film, there’s now a real interest in animation, which is relatively new. I think it’s fair to say it’s been an enormous success. One of our festival favorites last year went on the next week to win an Academy Award. That’s an interesting point. When you see festival favorite The Moon and the Son win an Oscar, or another one from last year, Sweet Land, open to rave reviews months later in N.Y. and L.A., how does that make you feel? PATRICK: Those films came to us in an interesting way. Eighty-five to 90% of films in the festival go through the submission/screening process. Other films come to us from other film festivals; we had eight films last year that were screened at the Tribeca Film Festival that we went after. John Canemaker’s The Moon and the Son was screened at Telluride. SAGAN: But when Pat gets films solicited through other film festivals, he doesn’t just make that decision, he asks people to screen those films too. PATRICK: I won’t even look at it again. I go into it with a bias. For instance, I happen to like John Canemaker, we had a very nice breakfast at Telluride, I couldn't say let’s have this film in because I already have that personal bias. Sweet Land is a good example of how cool this festival works, I was working my other job – I go teach newspaper seminars twice a year, and I was in Chicago last year, and a friend I hadn’t seen for 12 years came up to me and said, Oh my god, you’re working with the film festival now? My brother-in-law’s a producer on this thing called Sweet Land that just won an award at the Hamptons Film Festival, I should give him your card. So I took his phone number and when I came back to Sedona I called and said could we take a look at this film, it sounds kind of interesting and I know your sister-in-law Rita, and through these miraculous series of events we got the film for our Second Tuesday series, we were looking for a kind of romantic film for Valentine’s Day, a reason for people to bring their dates to the theatre and spend their Valentine’s Day with us. And it was beautiful. I gave it to Sagan and said what do you think of this film, because I’m a little biased, I have a friend with a connection to this film. Our biggest film of the festival came to us from Connie and her husband. Happened to come into the office and said, My nephew is the composer. Just composed the score for this very controversial documentary. Do you want to take the story from here, Connie? CONNIE: My nephew is a wannabe rock star and a terrific composer. His cousin, Ricky Stern, is a documentary filmmaker. I e-mailed Patrick one of the writeups, and he took it from there. I had nothing else to do with it. PATRICK: Now it’s a matter of people letting us know about great films, and nine times out of ten, now that we know the game, we can get them. SHELIA: But it works the other way too. Someone called me and said I have this film, would you take a look at it, and she told me who it was about, and I said, well, if it's a film that’s going to be selling someone or a product, we don’t do it. And I'm glad I said that, because that’s exactly what it was. And I had to tell her it’s not a film we can show, across the board, technically it was good, but it’s not a Sedona film. So we have a lot of local people with connections, there’s a film school here, and sometimes the films are awful. And having to say to your family and friends it’s just not going to work for us, to say No… poor Debbie has to do it all the time. A few years ago we went to the first-ever convention of film festivals. We went with the intention of learning a ton, and what we found was there wasn’t a lot to learn. A lot of the people there were just finding their way, and up there saying, I know, I know, and they didn’t know. And we went away feeling really good about our base and our focus and how we were running things. There are festivals where one person is reviewing the hundreds of films and putting together the festival. How did this year’s cash prizes come about? CONNIE: In a series of conversations with Patrick and a couple of the other people who had been donors, some for a very long time and some less so, that we really wanted to be on a par with some of the festivals that did encourage more and better submissions, and also to make an incentive for filmmakers and hopefully increase the number and type of submissions we get. And it just really sort of happened, one particular person was the incentor, and others were the incentees, and it just happened in the space of about four minutes. We were convinced it would make our festival even better. And part of it was our enormous trust and faith in, and affection for Patrick, and how very, very important he is to this festival. I can’t begin to tell you how much. He is the festival’s heart and soul. It’s such a happy place, when you walk into the office it’s a happy experience. People like the Weinsteins love him, and send us films like Transamerica and Mrs. Henderson Presents. This is an important thing for our city. It makes an enormous financial contribution, now at five days. That’s why it happened so quickly; it just seemed like the right thing to do at the time. PATRICK: We’re going to track where festival attendees are coming from, how they heard about us, is this their first time in Sedona, are they planning on coming back. We’ve found in the past that people come to the Festival, and make this their trip to Sedona. DEBBIE: People call us four days after the Festival to ask us what are the dates for next year, so they can schedule their timeshare around it. PATRICK: Nick Nolte came here in June, and it’s a really good case study in how this festival is different. He came to us as a surprise, as a gift from somebody, because we treated her daughter so well when she had a film in the festival last year. And she wanted to repay the festival for kicking off her daughter’s career. She knew Nick, and behind our back said, would you do me a favor and come up for this screening? SHEILIA: He stayed until 11 p.m., shot a commercial for us. • The Sedona International Film Festival & Workshop takes place Feb. 28-March 4. For tickets and updates, see www.sedonafilmfestival.com.
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SEEDONA | |
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This Month's Features |
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Sedona Gone Hollywood | |
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Sedona Activities | |
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Sedona Snapshots | |
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Dear Diary | |
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SEDONA GUIDE | |
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Lodging | |
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Restaurants |
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Art Galleries | |
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Spas | |
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Entertainment | |
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HAPPENINGS | |
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Calendar of Events | |
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DIRECTORY | |
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Maps and Directions | |
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MARION HERRMAN: It started as a fund-raiser for the Sedona Cultural Park. What had happened was I went to a meeting and I had suggested doing a retrospective of Ann Miller’s films, she was living in Sedona at the time, and from there it grew. Somebody said, Oh, I know somebody who’s connected to the Tucson Film Festival, and he goes to Sundance every year, and somebody, I forget now who it was, connected me to this gentleman from Tucson. He gave me some phone number to call, and lo and behold, I got tickets to the Sundance Film Festival. We knew nothing, we knew absolutely nothing [about film festivals]. 
SHELIA: Ted Danson and Mary Steenbergen.
SAGAN LEWIS: What drew me in, because I had sworn off Hollywood and festivals – I used to work in Hollywood and I used to speak at a lot of festivals – when I came back to Sedona I wasn’t interested, I thought. But then I went to the film festival. And what I love about this festival as opposed to… well, I used to go to Sundance in the early ‘80s, and I was shooting big Hollywood things, and I would go to Sundance as an escape, from Hollywood, and it was so charming, and so accessible, and so wonderful. And then it disappeared because it became so Hollywood-ized. And when I came to Sedona, and I went to the film festival and I saw they were really looking for new voices. Filmmakers with fresh voices. And the other thing that drew me in was the accessibility of these people, of Patrick and Sheila and Debbie, they are the most accessible staff. I’ve heard them talking on the phone to individual to hundreds of filmmakers and making sure they feel good about their submissions. And it takes so much time, but the office stays open and people walk in, and come in and say Hi. The fact that they’re eopen, and treat everyone with respect, that I just wanted to be part of this great group that cares about that voice and the filmmaker.
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