Company Town : Film Festivals Are Big Hit With Cities

Peter Hall spent thousands of dollars and broke four bones to produce “Delinquent,” a feature-length film about a boy who kills his policeman father.

Now Hall is at the Palm Springs International Film Festival hoping to find someone to get his film projected onto theater screens across the country and perhaps around the world.

“I have a movie to sell,” said Hall, whose film premiered in Palm Springs on Saturday. “Here, I can reach audiences, distributors and the media. It’s like hitting a home run.”

For Palm Springs, it’s like hitting a financial home run. The festival’s organizers expect more than 60,000 people to attend the 11-day festival, pumping hundreds of thousands of dollars into the local economy, said Michael Fife, president of the Palm Springs Desert Resorts Convention and Visitors Bureau.

“Any town would love to have a film festival,” Fife said. “It brings a high-quality visitor and high-quality sponsors and celebrities.”

That’s the formula that organizers and attendees say is fueling the growth of film festivals, whose numbers have ballooned over the last decade. Dozens of cities from Santa Barbara to Ft. Lauderdale have launched festivals to boost off-season tourism, and independent filmmakers and distributors are flocking to them to make connections and find the next sleeper hit.

“They’re close to indispensable,” said Mark Tuck, vice president for acquisitions at Miramax Films in New York. “The acquisitions people are always meeting and greeting a new round of producers and sales agents because you never know where the next ‘My Life as a Dog’ or documentary about drag queens will be surfacing.”

For the independent filmmaker with a limited budget, the festivals are a crucial way to make industry contacts, said Ken Wlaschin, creative affairs director for the American Film Institute in Los Angeles.

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“If you tried to launch a film by yourself, it would cost too much,” he said. “Film festivals publicize your films for you.”

Hall is counting on that kind of publicity to get “Delinquent” into theaters. “My job is to get into the important festivals and raise my profile,” he said.

That strategy worked for filmmaker Bryan Singer, whose film “Public Access”--about a stranger who wins a town over with his public access cable television show--won the prestigious Grand Jury Prize at the 1993 Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. Subsequently, Singer received hundreds of phone calls from agents and distributors interested in representing his film. He also got $7 million worth of financing for his second feature-length film, “Usual Suspects.”

“Everyone I know in the industry I probably met through the film festival circuit,” Singer said.

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Dozens of cities are clamoring to earn a coveted spot on the profitable circuit. Although there is no official count of film festivals, Wlaschin estimates more than 1,000 take place around the world, including at least 150 in the United States--a one-third increase since the mid-1980s.

“There’s a lot more out there now because of the success of Sundance,” said Marcus Hu, owner of Strand Releases, a Santa Monica film distributor that scouts out fresh talent at the festivals. “A lot of cities are using them as a cultural event now.”

Sonny Bono, former mayor and now U.S. congressman, founded the Palm Springs International Film Festival six years ago to showcase independent films and promote tourism during the slow weeks of early January, said William Henley, a festival spokesman. It is now one of the resort town’s major events, he said.

The 10-year-old Greater Ft. Lauderdale International Film Festival draws thousands of out-of-towners in early November before the winter tourist season begins, said festival director Gregory von Hausch. Attendance at the festival has jumped from 3,000 in 1989 to 35,000 last year, making it the largest film festival in the Southeast, he said.

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Mary Harris, director of the San Luis Obispo International Film Festival, said she expects the 2-year-old event to bring more visitors to the quaint coastal community, where 25% of the economy depends on tourism. Harris got the festival off the ground with an $11,500 grant from the city to promote tourism. Last year’s November festival drew about 3,300 people, she said.

Santa Barbara has also made a tourism success out of its International Film Festival, said director Diane Durst. Nearly half the 22,000 people who attended last year’s 10-day event came from out of town, she said.

“In the beginning, we had just a few thousand people,” Durst said. “Now, during our opening and closing weekends, it’s difficult to get a hotel room in this town.”

With independent filmmakers churning out 1,000 to 1,500 feature films a year, the growing number of festivals helps the industry sort the good films from the bad, Singer said.

“Film festivals end up being a very strong proving ground,” he said.

And for those that don’t make it?

“It’s great that films that will never be seen in a commercial venue can get some exposure and generate some tourism,” Miramax’s Tuck said.

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