..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..R.J. Matson
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Michael Wilmington

September 18, 2006

CLARIFICATION TO:
Penultimate Days : Festival of Tears by Len Klady

By David Poland, Editor-in-Chief, Movie City News
_____________________________________________________________

In Len Klady's closing article about this year's Toronto Film Festival, he broke the following news:

And on a related note. The New York Times has decided it won't print reviews of selections playing at the upcoming New York Film Festival. Though the exact reasons behind the decision are a bit sketchy, it appears the publications was persuaded by a film industry emissary that the potential blot on a movie was neither good for it or them.

Ironically, it took years to convince the Times that doing reviews of movies at the festival during the festival was a boon to the films and filmmakers. Now its review staff will do something tentatively called portfolios that sound like backgrounders to the event's selections and might interject a degree of criticism.

This news, a lead festival story which we at MCN sadly allowed to be buried, has upset a few people on various sides of the story, so we wish to clarify.

The New York Times' Manohla. Dargis (aka The Man) is very clear on the evolution of the coverage of the New York Film Festival. "We wanted to cover the festival the way we cover other festivals -- to look at the programming, and the ideas that come out of the programming, not just the individual titles."

She adds, "This is exactly how we do Cannes. We offer a feel for the overall festival. Especially for the New York Film Festival, which is so carefully curated. It just doesn't make sense to stick with what we were doing out of tradition. There are now more than 500 festivals in the United States. We are just getting with the times."

Also, the pieces on the NYFF will be called "Critics Notebooks" - not "portfolios," as coined by Mr. Klady - as they have been in The Paper of Record for a few years now at other fests, including Cannes, Sundance, and Toronto.

As for the contention presented by Mr. Klady that distributors were pushing for this change, "Anyone who thinks they can tell us what to do is out of their minds." And anyone who knows Ms. Dargis or Mr. Scott or The New York Times can fairly attest to that.

Yes, distributors have an interest. And to Mr. Klady's credit, he spoke to a number of distribution and media sources who asked for anonymity for this story. Unfortunately, in the heat of TIFF, neither he, nor I, as his editor, balanced that reporting with a strong enough effort to get clarity from The New York Times and/or the critics involved.

After further reporting, it is clear that this shift in coverage is not about the needs or wants of distributors. And what Mr. Klady was not as clear on was that there are two sides to this argument. Films that are primarily looking for a foothold in New York's aesthete film scene can be broken by a bad NYT review out of the festival, while others are made. And even in this new format, as in Cannes, we at MCN suspect that the same will be true this year.

There are 25 films that are new to 2006 in The New York Film Festival this year. Eleven, including David Lynch's Inland Empire (by far the title of the eleven that has the most national celebrity recognition), arrive with no distribution.

Eight are from small distributors that would be unlikely to press more than (or as many as) ten prints of any of these titles for U.S. distribution. (Those distributors: First Run with 2 films, Magnolia, New Yorker, Sony Home Video, Strand, Tartan, Zeitgeist)

And six of the films, including opening (The Queen) and closing night (Pan's Labyrinth), which have been endless written about by media that have already seen the excellent films, are from Majors or Dependents. Besides Miramax and Picturehouse, the others are New Line (Little Children - Telluride and Toronto), Columbia (Marie Antoinette - Cannes) and Sony Classics with two (Offside - Berlin, Toronto - and Volver - Cannes, Telluride, Toronto)

None of the bigger films are going to be first-view premieres. The media has had that bite of flesh already and the NY Times reviews, as all reviews will be, will be secondary to media buys to all but the Sony Classics films. (All but Marie Antoinette have already been getting near-unanimous raves, for the sake of argument.)

Inland Empire has been seen by the buying community and the only change to its distribution hopes from a NY Times rave or pan will be financial… how much money can it be sold for. The value of the New York City market - a primary market for Lynch - may be enhanced or damaged by the Times.

The rest, including Toronto International opener The Journals of Knud Rasmussen, will be vying for the "small distributors' ponying up the smallest amounts of money for a one or two print run before hopes of DVD sales paying for the marketing costs in the U.S. And those films, for which a NY Times rave could mean another $100,000 - $500,000 in their coffers, which is a lot for them, are really the only ones with anything on the line here.

And as the group of NYT film critics have shown, if one of those films is so compelling as to demand more coverage, they will give it more coverage. Because if there is one thing that is undeniable about the group there now, it's that they love film and will do all they can to support the great and easily overlooked films that don't have enough support, even if it means paying less attention to commercial product.

We hope this clears things up.

- David Poland