All the old familiar faces

Filmmakers, journalists, film programmers and acquisitions executives are accustomed to bumping into each other in far-flung locales as they “work the circuit,” traveling from town to town, film festival to film festival. It might surprise them, however, to find out there is another festival circuit as well, backstage, behind the scenes and populated by people who are working at least as hard as those dashing among screenings and scouring receptions or hotel bars for news or interviews.

As this year’s AFI Fest 2003 moves into its final weekend, this most recent assemblage of festival staffers soon will part ways again. Referring to themselves as “gypsies,” “road workers” and (perhaps only half-jokingly) “carnies,” they periodically coalesce into smooth-running units for bigger festivals, or splinter off on their own to take jobs at smaller regional festivals. The migrant festival-worker population includes people in all departments, from programmers and festival directors to marketing and publicity to theater managers.

People usually start with one festival, stick with it, and word gets around. Soon someone who knows someone is calling to offer a job at another festival. Volunteer coordinator Peggy Ellithorpe, for example, had been “pushing paper” at an Austin, Texas, insurance company before she began working for the South by Southwest festival in 1994. After several years there she was part of a contingent that traveled to Portland, Ore., for SXSW offshoot North by Northwest and “got the bug” to start looking for other festivals.

“I wanted to see if it was different,” she says, having walked away from her desk in the AFI Fest office across from the ArcLight theaters to avoid the distractions of her array of phones and walkie-talkies, constantly abuzz with the logistics of organizing and arranging the 300 to 400 volunteers who will participate in this year’s festival.

“I knew there were people out there who worked the festival circuit, bouncing around to other festivals. I had been doing South By for so long, I wondered what it was like to work for another festival.”

What Ellithorpe found, besides the differences from festival to festival being largely ones of size and scale, was a small cadre of like-minded fellow travelers. Among the most mobile of these festival nomads are AFI Fest’s three main box-office employees -- Amy Holt, Derek Call and Lili Romero -- who among them have handled ticketing and registration at Sundance, the Los Angeles Film Festival, the Tribeca Film Festival, Outfest and others. “I’ve never encountered anyone who does as many festivals together as we have,” Romero says.

Holt, box-office manager, began in Utah selling ski tickets, then worked with a theater company before eventually heading into festival ticketing when she went to work at Sundance in 1999. She hooked up with her fellow box-office staffers along the way, and now they keep each other informed of job opportunities and sometimes share apartments when working together. “When you meet good people, you hold onto them,” Holt says.

Explaining the benefits of having a mobile team, she adds, “I don’t have to train anyone except to tell them what’s different each time -- these are what the passes look like, go for it.”

One afternoon, as screenings are about to begin, the tangle of cables, desks, computers and boxes in the office area of the box office is a hive of activity. Programmers, theater managers and assorted employees come and go, asking about the number of tickets sold, perhaps looking to shuffle theaters, or wondering about rescheduling the film that is stuck in customs.

“Yes, there is a festival going on right now,” Call patiently says into his phone, before navigating the caller through the festival’s Web site.

There is an easygoing, grace-under-pressure feel to the proceedings, as few problems elicit more than a slight grimace, and the trio have a familial air in their interactions with one another. Fully conversant in the internal mechanics of the kaleidoscopic system of colored badges used to identify sponsors, filmmakers, the press and others, Romero is momentarily stumped by an ostensibly more innocuous question.

“Right now,” she says, somewhat bewildered, “I don’t know what my title is.” Looking to Call and Holt a few yards away, she asks, “Do I have a title, or am I just a ticket agent?” Call quickly responds, “Assistant. We’re both assistants.”

Romero considers this for a moment. “It’s usually coordinator or supervisor. I pretty much do the same thing, but it’s a different title everywhere we go.”

The transient festival life is one filled with far-flung storage units and periods of uncertainty. During downtime between festivals some workers pursue their own artistic aspirations or post-graduate degrees, or simply wait for the call to hit the road again.

Many mentioned that the work, though enjoyable, is only a temporary stop on the way to something else, even if exactly what is not yet certain.

“You can only do it so long before you want a place to go home to,” says Holt. “It’s too hard to pack up every few months.” Having worked festivals on and off for more than six years, Romero says, “The plan is this is the last one.” She pauses, then adds, “This time I think I mean it.”

Though she certainly doesn’t regret her time working the circuit, it wasn’t something she planned on doing. “I got started to see free movies,” Romero continues, “and then as you move up you only see maybe one or two movies in the festival, if even that many.” These sentiments are echoed by Ellithorpe when she says, “For me to sit in a movie for two hours in the middle of the festival and not get a phone call or have a problem to sort out, it’s not going to happen. And leaving a screening just seems rude. Plus, with the kind of films shown at a festival, ones which you may never get a chance to see again, I’d hate to start watching, be into it, and not be able to see the end.”

In fact, Ellithorpe sometimes will attend festivals she isn’t working just to catch up on the movies she misses at the festivals she does work. Even then, it’s hard not to watch for what’s working and what’s not, keeping an eye out for ideas on how to improve things when she’s putting on the show.

She says, “It’s a totally different vibe being on the back end of a festival from when you’re on the other side of the counter, just picking up your badge.”

Now that nearly every midsized burg has a film festival to call its own, it stands to reason that an internal circuit would arise as well. So if you happen to be attending another film festival anytime soon, look around. The people selling you tickets, handing out badges or directing the way may look familiar, and might even have a story more interesting than the one you’re about to see on the screen.