Los Angeles Film Festival: Opening night surprises
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From Big Picture correspondent Mark Olsen:
Film Independent’s Los Angeles Film Festival had its opening night on Thursday with the world premiere of “Paper Man” at the Mann Village theater in Westwood.
The 10-day event will screen some 200 films from 30 countries. Among the selections are such high-profile Hollywood films as ‘Public Enemies’ with Johnny Depp and Christian Bale and the Michael Bay mega-production ‘Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen,’ and so it felt like a particular statement of intent that the festival, in its first year under new director Rebecca Yeldham, would program a genuinely independent film without distribution for its opening night.
‘I honestly didn’t know,’ Yeldham said at the party following the screening as to how she expected the film to be received.
‘It’s an interesting environment,’ she said. ‘It’s a festival audience, but it’s also an industry crowd and an acquisitions crowd. So I wasn’t sure if it was the kind of situation where if a particular buyer didn’t think it was for them, they were going to leave. But everyone was glued to their seats, and it was so beautiful.’
Co-written and co-directed by the husband-and-wife team of Michele and Kieran Mulroney, ‘Paper Man’ follows a struggling middle-aged novelist (Jeff Daniels) who still maintains an imaginary friendship with a superhero (Ryan Reynolds) while struggling to hold on to his wife (Lisa Kudrow) and engaging in an awkward friendship with a teenage girl (Emma Stone).
‘We felt so much genuine support from Film Independent and LAFF, real confidence on their part,’ said Michele Mulroney following the screening. ‘And when they feel that confident about the movie, how are we going to second-guess them? We really feel they walk the walk, they don’t just say they support independent film. This was a big move on their part.’
“Even though we didn’t have a distributor, there’s no studio behind us, we knew they would come out and make a great night for us,” said Kieran Mulroney.
The opening night of the Los Angeles Film Festival sometimes feels like an indie film prom. Besides the usual sea of talent agents, managers, sales agents, executives, publicists, producers, critics and journalists, among the crowd were such notable faces as Dermot Mulroney (brother of co-director Kieran), Emma Stone, Christina Ricci, Melissa Leo, Laura Dern, Christian Slater, Joshua Leonard, Adam Yauch, Dean Wareham and Britta Phillips, Anna Chlumsky, Penn Badgley and Robert Downey Jr.
The two main stars of the film, Jeff Daniels and Ryan Reynolds, were not in attendance, but prior to the start of the film a video screened featuring both of them. In the video, Daniels called Reynolds on the phone and they began to one-up each other for the reasons they couldn’t be there – Reynolds had talk show and promotional commitments for another film, while Daniels is appearing on Broadway in the play ‘God of Carnage.’
In her remarks before the screening, Yeldham thanked Richard Raddon, her predecessor in the position of festival director, who resigned amid controversy when it became public that he had made a personal donation to a group supporting Proposition 8. When Yeldham acknowledged that Raddon was in the audience, a brief moment of reserved applause followed (and it should be noted, no booing).
Yeldham said afterward that she had not prepared her speech in advance, and so had not specifically planned to mention Raddon.
‘I saw Rich right when I came in,’ Yeldham said, ‘and I have very deep respect for Rich and what he did for this organization and this festival. And I saw him right when I was walking down, and I was so happy that he was here, and I wanted to pay homage to him and what he had built. It was a speech from the heart.’
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