One Part Marketing, One Part Moxie Make Hollywood Film Fest

In 1997, a former marketing executive with Cartier jewelers named Carlos de Abreu pulled off something of a coup in Hollywood: Although L.A. had played host to many successful film festivals, De Abreu discovered that no one had thought of naming one after the film capital of the world.

So he contacted the state of California and obtained the rights to what he believed was a supremely marketable brand name: “Hollywood Film Festival.”

“I couldn’t believe no one else had done it,” the personable 47-year-old businessman and author remarked recently over lunch at the Four Seasons.

With his wife, Janice Pennington, a model who displays prizes on Bob Barker’s popular TV game show, “The Price Is Right,” serving as co-founder, the first Hollywood Film Festival was launched in the fall of 1997.

This week, the fourth installment of the Hollywood Film Festival will get underway in the heart of Tinseltown, with screenings of independent films and four days of conferences.

The festival will close Monday evening with a gala black-tie banquet at the Beverly Hilton Hotel, where Oscar-winning actor Richard Dreyfuss will accept the festival’s lifetime achievement award and Morgan Freeman will be honored as outstanding actor. De Abreu said he has commitments from John Travolta, Lynn Redgrave, James Woods, Anne Archer and DreamWorks co-founder Jeffrey Katzenberg to present the various awards.

But behind the glitz and glamour of the festival is a savvy brand-name marketing whiz who sees the Hollywood Film Festival as part of his three-stage, 15-year master plan to become a dominant force in Internet-related entertainment. For this onetime pilot in the Portuguese Air Force is not merely the organizer of the Hollywood Film Festival. He also calls himself an “Internet pioneer” who manages a host of Web sites geared to the brand name “Hollywood.”

Click on his Web site, https://www.hollywoodfestival.com, and you begin to see the master plan in action, from the Hollywood Shopping Network, an e-commerce store that sells videos, books, software, T-shirts and even a $45 pocket-size Gloria Martel face exerciser. A separate Web site called Hollywood Inner Circle (https://www.hollywoodnet.com/indexmainbody.html) allows “access to Pros & Services Online, including Dealmaking Desks, Opportunity Desks, Pitch Rooms, and more.” He has registered close to 400 popular Internet domain names like actors.com, directors.com and screenwriters.com.

For lowly film festivals that scrounge for every dollar they can find, the specter of the Hollywood Film Festival tossing money around as if it were confetti raises questions. How does he do it? For example, how does he afford to pay the cost of the Beverly Hilton bash, which he confirmed will cost more than $200,000 when all is said and done?

De Abreu said part of the money comes out of his own pocket and part comes from corporate sponsors like Hollywood Video.

“If I can get sponsors to write cash contributions,” he said, “then I have to balance the negative.”

Asked how much the festival overall will cost, De Abreu declined to give a figure.

“I don’t want to release that,” he said, “but I can tell you that our sponsors, including Hollywood Video, have greatly contributed. Otherwise, I couldn’t have grown as fast as I did.”

Some Remain Skeptical of His Intentions

De Abreu is still eyed with suspicion by some in the world of independent films who can’t quite decide if his goal is to give emerging filmmakers a road map to success--as he repeatedly states in interviews and press releases--or is simply to stoke his own ego by hosting what they believe amounts to a Carlos de Abreu Film Festival.

Pounding his hand on the table for dramatic effect, De Abreu said he is proud of what he has accomplished in such a short period but notes that he couldn’t have done it alone.

“I say, it is the Carlos de Abreu Film Festival because he put his time, his energy, his money and his friendships into building it, but it could not be where it is unless there were dozens of other people out there helping Carlos,” he said.

“I cannot do this without the total involvement of the community--politicians, the public at large, the established Hollywood industry and independent filmmakers from around the world.” With a promoter’s swagger, De Abreu says: “My quest is to become, if not the biggest, then one of the biggest festivals in the world.”

He has a long way to go. Though the Hollywood Film Festival has seen its attendance climb from 4,000 in its first year to more than 12,000 last year, its crowds still pale in comparison to those attending some other local festivals. The American Film Institute’s AFI Fest, for example, drew 50,000 people last year, and attendance at the recent Outfest soared to more than 32,000.

At the same time, the Hollywood festival is struggling to overcome a dubious reputation for the quality of films it has presented.

“I’ve seen most of what has played, and they’re not very good,” said the owner of a locally based independent film distribution company. “It seems like it’s a festival that has films that they didn’t take at Sundance or LAIFF [Los Angeles Independent Film Festival] or AFI. I could go down the list. It’s like a reject festival.”

De Abreu said the festival is upgrading the quality of this year’s screenings and blamed past problems on the fact too little attention was paid to foreign films.

“We started the festival without much focus on a global program but with more of an eye toward domestic filmmakers,” he explained. “Now, we have expanded the horizons of our programming.”

A consummate promoter, De Abreu frequently refers to himself in interviews as a “New York Times best-selling author” because a 1994 nonfiction book he co-wrote with his wife called “Husband, Lover, Spy,” hit the New York Times paperback bestseller list for two weeks in March 1995. He has also co-written a book on screenwriting called “Opening the Doors to Hollywood.”

Born in Mozambique, De Abreu came to America after the African nation shrugged off Portugal’s colonial rule in 1975. De Abreu said that during the turbulent transition, his parents had to flee Mozambique to South Africa and were stoned and nearly burned alive in their car.

After coming to America and working at Cartier, De Abreu said, he eventually tired of the jewelry trade.

“If I had to go to Peoria to sell another watch to a jeweler,” he recalled, “I would kill myself.”

So he enrolled in filmmaking-related courses with UCLA Extension, including a class in screenwriting. When the teacher told him that because of his then-limited English he would never make it in Hollywood, De Abreu became incensed. It was then, De Abreu says, that he began to devise a plan for success in the industry that included the Hollywood Film Festival.

But his first film festival got off on a rocky footing in October 1997, when he opened less than a week before the American Film Institute was holding its much older festival, angering AFI members who had lent their names to the Hollywood Film Festival without realizing it might steal the AFI’s thunder. To soothe any hard feelings, De Abreu said, he “gladly” agreed to switch his festival the next year to August, where it remains.

The Hollywood Film Festival also received embarrassing publicity that year when the sponsor of a dinner honoring the festival reportedly handed one of L.A.’s top restaurants, L’Orangerie, a check for $35,006 to pay for the dinner, only to have the check returned for insufficient funds. De Abreu stressed that he had nothing to do with organizing the dinner.

In the face of such controversies, it would have been understandable had De Abreu folded his tent long ago, but he will not let a little criticism divert him from his goals.

For instance, when news about runaway production in Hollywood reached a fevered pitch a while back, De Abreu announced that he had established a nonprofit foundation--separate from the film festival--with the goal of raising and distributing grants of between $5,000 and $200,000 to independent filmmakers to help them complete their movies and to support the existing talent pool in Hollywood.

The project stalled after the California Legislature failed to budget $5 million for that purpose, he said. Still, De Abreu hopes to try again next year and, in the meantime, is seeking money from private entities.

Though he admits there is no money to be made in simply staging a film festival, De Abreu acknowledges that one of his ultimate goals is to have a network or cable outlet televise the Hollywood Film Festival’s closing awards show, in much the same way NBC telecasts the Hollywood Foreign Press Assn.’s star-studded Golden Globe Awards.

This year, he said, the Hollywood Film Festival will showcase 35 independent foreign and American-made feature-length films, documentaries and shorts while offering four days of conferences at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. The festival will begin Wednesday evening with an invitation-only party for 800 guests at the trendy Sunset Room in Hollywood.

Then on Thursday, the festival officially opens with “Marlene,” a German-language film by director Joseph Vilsmaier that is based on the life of the late screen legend Marlene Dietrich. De Abreu has invited members of Dietrich’s family to attend the screening on the Paramount Pictures lot in Hollywood.