By Timothy Lavin
Amid all the turtle-necked film buffs, thick-necked bodyguards, flash photography and chronic hagiography accompanying this year’s Tribeca film festival will be a fresh series of panel discussions, one of the more popular—and populist—of the festival’s attractions the last two years.
Held throughout Tribeca, and hosted by The New York Times, the series will gather actors, directors, producers, writers and critics to discuss films and filmmaking and answer questions from curious audiences.
The primary organizer of the series is Annie Leahy, formerly a producer at ABC. She has been working to produce the panels since festival co-founder Jane Rosenthal hired her in 2002. That year, the festival’s first, Leahy and her colleagues realized that the panels they had scheduled had intellectual and thematic merit—they knew that they could attract stars willing to pontificate and that film critics would clearly be stimulated. But what the panels lacked, she said, were “broad strokes,” themes of more general appeal.
“We realized we had all these great ideas floating around for panels, but nothing about flicks, nothing about just getting really involved in a movie you love,” she said.
The first broad stroke, in 2002, they dubbed “In Love, In the Movies,” featuring Nora Ephron and Lauren Bacall. “It just reflected our love of romantic films,” Leahy said.
Last year, the festival organized “What’s So Funny: Laughter in the Movies,” with Nathan Lane, Paul Rudnick and the creators of South Park. This year’s rendering will be “Sex & Cinema.”
“These are the ‘We love movies’ panels,” she said. And finding the proper panelists to execute them, she continued, was easy.
“I think, ‘Who are the people, if I was having a dinner party, who would be on my dream list?’”
The list for “Sex & Cinema” includes Sharon Stone, John Cameron Mitchell and Laurie Parker. They’ll be discussing ratings systems and the history of on-screen sexuality, among other aspects of cinematic prurience.
For the more modestly inclined, other, more wholesome panel discussions are available. Martin Scorsese will talk to “Vanity Fair” contributing editor Lisa Robinson about the influence of music in his films in an interview titled “Scorsese & Music.” This will be one of the more glamorous in a series of one-on-one discussions dubbed “Tribeca Talks” that eschew the traditional moderator-and-panel format.
“We’ll pair, say, a director with an actor who’s acted for them before,” said Leahy. “This way, it’s not like an actor talking to a reporter. A relationship already exists. I think the audience gets a more intimate conversation.”
Another Tribeca Talks discussion, “Music Fit for a King,” will feature “Lord of the Rings” composer Howard Shore, and “Marshall Magic: A Tribute” will focus on the career of director and producer Garry Marshall.
By aiming to produce panels with diverse, accessible themes, the organizers hope the series will have an egalitarian allure—attractive to both film studies majors and the pedestrian movie-going public.
“We wanted panels that would appeal not only to the film festival audience, to the people who would already be attending the festival, but to New Yorkers as a whole,” said Leahy.
“Cable and Creativity,” for instance, will include Robert Greenblatt (a Showtime executive), Edie Falco from the “The Sopranos” and “Sex and the City’s” Kim Cattrall, among others. Ira Flatow of NPR’s “Science Friday” will discuss the science of genetics in the movies (think of “Jurassic Park” and “Brave New World”) with Dr. James Watson and Mick Jackson, of “Race for the Double Helix,” in “Hollywood & the Double Helix.”
Surprisingly, no science inheres in panel-creation. Nor does Hollywood alchemy or Madison Avenue chicanery. What determines the themes and structure of the panels, according to Leahy, is a process commonly called brainstorming.
“If there are emerging themes in the films scheduled for the year, we’ll consider them for a panel,” she said. Other than that, she and her colleagues toss out ideas. “We always aim for the unexpected, for an unexpected juxtaposition of people and topics. We try to be relevant in unconventional ways that can inspire new strains of conversation.”
Perhaps the most unconventional and interesting part of this year’s lineup is a series produced in partnership with the Norman Lear Center, a research institute at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication that explores, according to its web site, “the implications of the convergence of entertainment, commerce, and society.”
These panels, likely to appeal to the intellectually omnivorous, will examine the influence that films have outside of the theater.
“Our overall theme is that entertainment matters,” said Kiera Poplowski, the center’s director of special projects and publications, who is the liaison to the Tribeca festival. “It often isn’t taken seriously, but entertainment has its tentacles in all aspects of our society. From foreign policy to education, so much of our lives and so many of our perceptions have been entertainment-ized.”
The partnership has resulted in four unique panels. Krista Parris, a panels coordinator for the festival, has worked on developing a talk titled “We Hate You (But Please Send Us More Austin Powers),” which will contemplate the popularity of American entertainment in countries where America is otherwise enthusiastically maligned.
It’s about the branding of America abroad, the use of soft power,” she said. “About how a country can spread its message in other places without necessarily going to war.”
To discuss the idea, she has invited a collection of speakers from diverse backgrounds: journalists who cover the Middle East, Hollywood directors and studio heads, academics, and foreign policy experts.
“Our overall goal,” said Poplowski, “is to get together people who have something to say on these topics, but who live in different worlds, who wouldn’t ordinarily be in the same room.”
Other topics include “Jesus as Celebrity,” which will feature Peter Jennings analyzing the resurgence of Christ as a marketable figure; a one-on-one discussion with Norman Lear, the writer and producer for whom the center is named; and “Box Office: Movies, Media and Marketing,” an examination of modern movie economics. For more information on the Lear panels, see page 39.
Leahy believes the panels have been a success in the past largely because of the geniality of their participants—who are usually flattered to be included, she said, despite the potential for an indecorous question and answer session with the audience—and the dynamism of their themes.
“We always aim for the unexpected with these panel discussions,” said Rosenthal, the festival’s co-founder, “and I hope we’ve succeeded in doing that this year.”
For a complete list of the panels, see page 63.
