It's all about community

By Rachel Abramowitz

June 14, 2009 12 AM PT

A year ago, producer Rebecca Yeldham watched the obscure Canadian heavy metal band Anvil rock out the Ford Amphitheatre at the Los Angeles Film Festival. It was a heady night for the group of middle-aged headbangers, the first time it played live in conjunction with “Anvil! The Story of Anvil,” the rousing documentary that chronicled its years of toiling in obscurity and its determination to hold fast to the dream of metal glory against all odds. The crowd, filled with music business taste-makers and metal fans, “went crazy” recalls Yeldham, who produced the Sacha Gervasi documentary. Fireflies literally twinkled in the sky. From that moment, a new touring model was born -- as the band proceeded to follow the documentary around the world playing film festival after film festival for months.

“We suddenly saw this is about the whole experience, about connecting the audience and community with the subjects and filmmakers,” recalls Yeldham. “Anvil! The Story of Anvil” finally hit theaters this April. These days, Anvil, the band, is about to open for AC/DC in two stadium shows, and Yeldham, a 41-year-old Australian, has taken over the reins of the multimillion-dollar Los Angeles Film Festival, which this year runs Thursday through June 28 in Westwood Village (and is co-sponsored by The Times).

Yeldham is one of the few producers -- perhaps the only producer -- ever to oversee a major film festival, and she arrives at a time of tumult for both indie film and film festivals in general. The past year has produced a game of musical chairs in the film festival world, with Sundance’s longtime head Geoff Gilmore going to run the Tribeca Film Festival and Kent Jones of New York’s Film Society of Lincoln Center and Christian Gaines of the American Film Institute both left their posts for new environs.

The transition at LAFF was the most explosive, as the former director, Richard Raddon, chose to resign his post last November after it became public that he had donated $1,500 to California’s anti-gay-marriage initiative, sparking an outcry in L.A.’s creative community.

According to Dawn Hudson, the head of Film Independent, which runs the festival and the Independent Spirit Awards, the LAFF board quickly focused on Yeldham, who had started out as a Sundance programmer and was characteristically outspoken on where she thought the festival should go.

“We asked her to think about doing this job, and how does the festival fit in to these times,” Hudson says. “Times are tough. Resources are scarce. There’s a lot of free-floating anxiety. People want to come together even more. They want something to be experienced that they can connect to and connect to other people through.”

“I was feeling it as a producer among my filmmaking peers, just this despondency,” says Yeldham, who officially signed on to head the festival in March. “We were in this post-sky-is-falling moment, and so many filmmakers I knew were struggling to find the means to get their stories out. My peers are looking to make intelligent, adult, original stories. Then to see those stories fall flat when they come to market and not find their audiences, it’s so depressing. What we’re building is not just a platform for new work, but also a platform for community, to exchange ideas on how to invent new paradigms to get our work out there, because the system is not working.”

On a recent weekday morning, Yeldham, dressed in a long, orange tunic, spoke with forthrightness mixed with a puckish sense of humor. She never thought she’d end up in the film business because that’s not what good Australian girls were raised to do. Yet after dropping law studies to attend Brown, she quickly adopted the American ethic of following your dreams and wound up first at Sundance, later running the American wing of the venerable British production company Film4 and finally producing such films as “The Kite Runner” and “The Motorcycle Diaries.”

A mother, and partner to director Curtis Hanson, Yeldham is keeping her hand in the producing world, tending to a handful of producing projects (primarily with “Motorcycle Diaries” director Walter Salles) as she administers LAFF. One of her personal goals: to halt “the funeral pyre to drama.”

Known for its mix

Of course, adult or challenging fare is only one aspect of the Los Angeles Film Festival, which recently has been solidifying its brand as a film festival that uniquely encompasses both high and low culture, the ridiculous and the sublime. Unlike Sundance or Toronto, it usually features a few big, splashy, mainstream Hollywood movies. This year brings both Michael Mann’s gangster epic “Public Enemies,” starring Johnny Depp as bank robber John Dillinger, and “Transformers 2.” The festival also offers more classic film festival fare, such as “Crude Oil,” a 14-hour Chinese documentary film installation that highlights life in a Chinese oil rig; selections from the Ambulante Film Festival, a traveling documentary film festival from Mexico; an array of Sundance hits such as “Cold Souls,” “Amreeka” and “Black Dynamite”; world premieres of new independents; and a series of one-offs that mirror the eclecticism of L.A audiences.

The LAFF has always shown a wacky sense of humor, hosting events like the “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” singalong, which Rachel Rosen, LAFF’s director of programming, described as a “religious revival experience” for many attendees. This year brings such experiential phenoms as “13 Most Beautiful . . . Songs for Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests,” featuring Warhol portraits accompanied live by the musical group Dean & Brita; a screening of the ‘70s cult classic “Billy Jack,” with director-star Tom Laughlin on hand; and talks with Pritzker Prize-winning architect Thom Mayne, and director Robert Rodriguez and his family.

“It’s a public festival,” Yeldham says. “It’s a populist experience.”

Looking to bring a fresh perspective to her position, Yeldham traveled to Cannes this May, in part to commune with other festival directors about more film-sharing and lessen the intra-festival competitiveness.

“In the festival world, we should be able to get along to support the work right now,” says Yeldham, noting that for a certain type of film, the film festival circuit is likely to be the broadest venue of theatrical exposure. “We have no qualms about playing movies that have been elsewhere,” she says, noting that in these economic times, “fewer and fewer people are traveling . . . . All the more reason to launch something great here.”

So, how to open?

Yeldham also parlayed her producer skills into bringing in the independent comedy “Paper Man” about a grown-up (Jeff Daniels) with an imaginary superhero friend (Ryan Reynolds). “We’ve never opened the festival with a world premiere of a film that doesn’t have a distributor; that’s never been seen before. It’s really exciting,” Yeldham says.

Yeldham had wanted to find just the right film for opening night, a slot that in past years had gone to more established studio fare (last year, the festival opened with the Angela Jolie-starring “Wanted”). Yeldham had read “Paper Man” as a script some five years ago, and later learned from producer Guymon Casady, a longtime business acquaintance, that the film would be finished in time. “It wasn’t quite as easy as then just scheduling it,” Yeldham says, explaining that Casady was part of a team of producers, “and each had their own thoughts on where the movie should go.” LAFF was ultimately able to snag the film with an assist from the film’s directors, Kieran and Michele Mulroney.

Yeldham certainly adheres to the producer’s credo that one should never just accept a “no.” She prefers to concentrate on the unusual opportunities afforded a filmmaker as the indie world reinvents itself. “Anvil,” for instance, played the festival circuit for almost a year, after several of the distribution companies that had expressed interest in releasing it went out of business. A young VH1 executive caught the “Anvil” experience -- a screening of the documentary and a live performance by the band -- at the Prague film festival while on vacation. VH1 ultimately came aboard as a partner -- it will not only show the film on TV in the fall but also has been playing spots on the network to promote the filmmakers’ self-financed theatrical release.

“I love that so much of this is empowering the filmmakers to pull up their socks and get to work and be part of forging their own destiny. The days of sitting back and waiting for the Willy Wonka $10-million acquisition fee to land in your lap are gone,” says Yeldham. Film festivals have an increasingly important role for these filmmakers, both for building audiences and for the networking opportunities afforded.

“I’m not despondent at all,” Yeldham says. “It’s a very interesting time to be an independent filmmaker.”

rachel.abramowitz@latimes.com