Building a Hollywood Film Festival

I keep being surprised by the LA Times' willingness to run puff-jobs on entrepreneur Carlos de Abreu's Hollywood Film Festival, a cannily constructed facade which honors stars and filmmakers and craftspeople and lines the pockets of Mr. de Abreu, a clever industry player. Finally, today's NYT tells it like it is:

In Mr. de Abreu’s retelling, he had an awards show in mind all along, but was urged by friends to try a film festival. So he created both. Yet while the awards show now looms large on the industry’s fall calendar, and while the Hollywood Film Festival has turned up discoveries like the director Craig Brewer, it is still not a rival to independent film festivals like Sundance, Telluride or the New York Film Festival. Its premieres are also not the cream of the crop: last year’s opening feature was the action-comedy “Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang.” This year’s is the family film “Flicka.”

Moreover, unlike those and many other film festivals — and even the Golden Globes, whose organizers give away millions of dollars to charity — Mr. de Abreu’s business, including both the film festival and the awards show, is anything but a nonprofit enterprise. He declined to reveal its revenues but insisted he was not getting rich: his Mercedes, he said, is 16 years old.

Mr. de Abreu said he did once establish a philanthropy called the Hollywood Film Foundation, but that it was no longer active. Asked why, he said: “I don’t have time for everything.”

The deal with de Abreu is this. He served as a second lieutenant in the Air Force in Mozambique before being forced out of the country in 1975 by the communist regime. He came to Hollywood after he got tired of being a marketing director for the jeweler Cartier. He took classes at UCLA, hoping to become a screenwriter. He got a foothold in the film industry by putting on conferences every two months to give 100-200 screenwriters at a time the chance to pitch their stories to Hollywood buyers. He started giving out the Hollywood Screenplay Discovery Awards, and co-wrote with Howard Smith a book for Random House called Opening the Door to Hollywood. He sent scripts to agencies, and in 1996 Ted Kotcheff optioned two of the winners' screenplays.

De Abreu got involved with the internet in 1994, started a website, and collected over 3000 domain names, all related to Hollywood, including the Hollywood Film Festival, which he launched in 1996. Married to well-connected TV actress Janice Pennington (The Price is Right), de Abreu worked his way up the Hollywood social ladder, throwing dinner parties and becoming friendly with the likes of Kotcheff, Mark Rydell, Sherry Lansing and Mike Medavoy (a fest award winner this year, for the flop All the King's Men). De Abreu took advantage of his social contacts with agents and studio heads when he mounted the festival, which wasn't taken seriously until he hired the powerhouse PR firm PMKHBH to do PR (now he hires different agencies every year) and in 2002 brought on their client, respected producer Paula Wagner, a former CAA agent, as his co-chair. Her producing partner Tom Cruise then attended the screening of their presentation Narc. After Cruise, many more stars such as Harrison Ford followed him down the red carpet, either as presenters or award winners. This year's presenters include the likes of Cliint Eastood, Bill Condon, Robert De Niro, Nic Cage and Benicio del Toro.

De Abreu moved the festival from October to August and back to October again to best capitalize on the awards season. He recognized that if you give someone who is campaigning for an Oscar an award, they will come. That was all he had to do. "It so happens that the Oscars moving up by one month worked fantastically with our dates," he says. "The Oscars are the biggest promotional vehicle of all for those being honored." This year the Hollywood Fest is covering up the pool at the Beverly Hilton and throwing an after party for 1100 people complete with poker tables and cigar clubs, he says: "The Hollywood Film Festival is fun, it's a celebration."

The actual festival film programming of 80 films tends to be light also-rans leftover from other festivals, he admits: "You can't get 20 real previews, the market doesn't bear it anymore." The screenings serve as a backdrop for the big awards night when everyone walks the red carpet to accept their prize. "A good thing about being independent is we can do as we please, just as long as the filmmaker benefits. I make the final decisions. As executive director, it's my event, my vision. I'm the only man in Hollywood who doesn't want to be a producer. I'm a felicitator for everybody: agents, managers, producers, studios."

There is no organization, no philanthropic goal behind The Hollywood Film Festival, beyond de Abreu's hope that he is "bridging the gap between established Hollywood and emerging talent," he says. Even the Golden Globes give some of their profits to charity. This festival is a business enterprise, selling tickets, VIP passes, sponsorships and studio tables. How much money does it make? "I don't want to talk about it," de Abreu says. "We're private. It's nobody's business."

Comments

[David]

This is a great story. But why no comments? Are industry people really so jaded that sordid behavior on this scale can simply be shrugged off?

[Tom Hall]

Well, as a film festival programmer who does not work at Toronto or Sundance, I'll bite here. I have mixed feelings about this complaint. Mr. De Abreu is absolutely right when he says that using the standard of 'festival premieres' is a bit unfair; I can tell you now that the market doesn't bear festival world premieres for all festivals. Producers of independent and high-quality foreign work generally save their films for market-style festivals that will allow them to sell their movies (Cannes, Toronto, Sundance, Berlin) with the months before Cannes, Toronto and Sundance being particularly difficult for programmers; everyone is waiting to see if they're in the big show. That the Hollywood FF is not among the big three is no surprise; No one else is. I program the Sarasota Film Festival in Florida, and while we have hosted some great film related events (last year, we hosted a 14 film doc retrospective with Werner Herzog and had the East Coast premiere of A Prairie Home Companion with Robert Altman attending), the idea that, a mere month after Berlin, two weeks after SXSW, three months after Sundance, two weeks before TriBeCa and a month before Cannes that we are going to secure 160 premieres to fill our 10-day program is absolutely impossible. There aren't enough good movies available.

So, we compromise. Not knowing the dilemmas of the Hollywood FF, I can empathize; They are just after Toronto FF and the NYFF, and before Palm Springs, Sundance and Berlin. With the hook being publicity in awards season, I don't see why they shouldn't look to tie-in awards for talent; It is a functional way to get people to attend in a win-win for both talent and the festival. What else should they do? Compete with Toronto and Sundance?

Trashing the parties is something else altogether. I understand that complaint, but at the same time, the financial ability to pull off events and screenings, travel and accommodations (in the case of my festival), staffing, equipment rental, etc etc come directly (again, in our case) from sponsors, as it does for most of us in the festival world. In order to attract sponsors, in our case again, we are required to show them a good time and give them access to more than screenings; People want to engage with talent. So, in order to provide sponsors and audiences with an experience beyond what they would ever get at the movies, we do Q&A's, invite people from the industry, and we throw events... Big, splashy events not unlike what you describe in Hollywood. While events are by no means the focus of our work, they are a means to an end for all of us, a way to raise enough money to make the screenings and talent attendance possible. While we only charge an audience friendly price of $8 to see a film (Opening and Closing Night at $15), we charge much more for our events because they cost more to put on, but that expense is required to make more money from sponsors (to whom we give access). That is the world we are in; At a festival like Toronto or Cannes or Sundance, the festival hosts two or three big events, but the industry presence is so great at the fests that the industry throws hundreds of parties during the 10 day festival. We dont have that luxury, nor do 99% of film festivals in the USA.

I could go on; We don't get federal subsidies like our European and Canadian bretheren, the NYFF is a great festival that is a "best of" other international festivals, etc etc. But we are also not personally getting rich (our fest is a 501 (c)3 organization) and I am, and my programming staff are, SERIOUS about cinema and about bringing films and artists to communities that otherwise wouldn't have access (which is not the case in Hollywood, the home of the industry). If, in your judgment, the Hollywood FF is not serious about film and doesn't balance their events and parties with the quality of the film they present, I don't know enough to argue, but it seems a legitimate complaint. But a lot of these complaints seem unfair in light of the reality of making a festival a viable event in a community with high economic and industry access standards already in place.

Love the blog. More on me here:

http://blogs.indiewire.com/twhalliii/

Thanks,
Tom

[Sam Boogliodemus]

Isn't this really ALL just an advertisement for the industry? Actually he seems to see it as it is. The 'Oscars' and "The Golden Globes', etc . . . are a farce, as is everything associated with 'Celebrity'.

[anne thompson]

David is right when he suspects that the industry at large here is giving this festival a free pass. If de Abreu gives an award during awards season, why wouldn't any self-respecting self-promoting player show up for their five minutes of PR? I have watched de Abreu, who is a charming man, build this festival piece by piece, year by year, with fascination. He understands well the way the town works. He's in the business of mounting a film festival. This is what he does for a living, and he works hard at it. It's good honest work, right? So what's wrong with it? Well, it's the issue of the greater good, I guess. He can claim that he helped to discover Craig Brewer. But this festival is not like the AFI Fest or LA Indie Fest, which have cinephile programmers who scour the world to find great gems to enlighten L.A. filmgoers. The quality of the programming has always been pretty low. It's more about finding available programming to support a "film festival" and gaining stature in the Hollywood film world by coming up with awards to give to people in the community, and bringing in stars to present awards to other stars. It is all about the Red Carpet. And it's a lucrative business with no organization behind it except de Abreu, and no other greater philanthropic or educational mission. De Abreu has every right to do this if he wants to. Absolutely. But should he win our respect for it? No.