By Jaclyn Marinese
Staff, volunteers mount massive undertaking
Just a few months ago it was wintertime and the seasonal workers began to arrive. Soon the offices of the Tribeca
Film Festival on North Moore St. were bustling with activity. The seasonal staffers complemented the 10 or so year round office staff and everyone was hustling to organize the mammoth undertaking that is the Tribeca Film Festival.
While many of us know about the glamorous celebrity-studded events of the Robert De Niro and Jane Rosenthal-founded festival, we rarely hear about the people beneath the glitz of the big screen: the production team. The vast bulk are interns and freelance seasonal staffers, who tend to work regularly at festivals across the nation and the world.
While examining the office space and speaking to festival staff, I approached Nancy Schafer, program manager and managing director of the festival, a full-time staff member.
“And who are you exactly?” she inquired while running hurriedly between the fax machine, a waiting call on the phone and a conference room full of people awaiting her presence. Once I explained I’m a reporter, she smiled.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “there are just so many new people around here, it’s hard to remember who is who.”
The large main room of the festival’s modest ground floor offices faces the street through an old garage door now serving as a large window for the front of the space. A long table occupies the center of the room where seasonal employees type furiously at computers while fielding phone calls. Encircling the main room are small offices where yearly staff operate.
“It’s a very good working environment,” said Duane Watson, a program assistant who began working with the festival last year as a volunteer and was later offered a full-time staff position. “Sometimes it can be crazy, insane and there are deadlines to take care of,” he said, standing in the conference room, motioning to the wall behind him.
On it was a huge grid full of thumbtacks and colored dots. The colorful wall is a nine-day snapshot of the festival.
“This thing is a thing of beauty, we should take a picture of it,” said Watson.
“I already did,” chimed in David Silver, the screening coordinator for the festival, a seasonal employee since the first festival in 2002. Seemingly without a regular desk space in an office brimming with people sharing computers, desks, and offices, Silver sits at the conference room table before the large grid, the blueprint of the days to come. His job: organizing the times and locations of every film.
“I have last year’s in a frame in my apartment,” he said.
And it’s understandable why that board is such a big deal. This year the festival is scheduled to include approximately 150 feature films and 100 short films by directors from all over the world. After sifting through the roughly 3200 submissions received at this office, the staff narrows the numbers down. Once a film is selected, it’s David Silver’s job to find a place for it on the blank board.
“We try to make a festival that is as audience friendly, as filmmaker friendly, as talent friendly and as section friendly as possible, so a lot of variables come in,” he said. Each day there are 20 screenings and 10 venues to keep track of.
He gave an example of just one kind of logistical consideration.
“We don’t want certain New York films to play against other New York films. If there is a specific audience for a movie, we spread the films out.”
Once the schedule is set, Silver, who works at other film festivals throughout the year, including Sundance, is responsible for staffing and running the screenings. He hires the house managers and makes sure that everything goes smoothly.
Aside from scheduling, the wheels in this office must churn through the thousands of little details that make a festival like this a success.
The tasks being handled in just this office include: handling director benefits; accommodating hundreds of filmmakers and crews, organizing hospitality tents where filmmakers and industry heads mingle; planning accommodation and transportation for the thousands of patrons, directors, employees, panelists, and jurors; organizing parties and hundreds of screenings.
“The first year almost everything was done by the seat of our pants and we didn’t know what was going on,” said David Kwok, another program director who started out as a seasonal employee and is now on staff.
“Because Nancy Schafer and I have been here since the start, we have seen it all…it is a little easier this year because we have a better understanding of what works and what doesn’t.”
When asked what it is about this particular festival that keeps seasonal employee David Silver coming back year after year he said,
“It’s the people…I’ve worked in a lot of jobs where I don’t like the people at all, and it’s torture…everyone here is so easy to work with and, no matter how stressful it gets, they know how to laugh.”
For Silver who’s been here since the get go, it’s remembering the impetus behind the festival’s launch in 2002 that keeps him going.
“I’ll never forget it,” he said. “We have a production editor who during the first festival, every day, would put a new picture of ground zero on the door.”
Despite the stressors of deadlines, limited work-space, and a constant stream of new colleagues, no one seems to sweat the little discomforts. The vibe here is exuberant, filled with pending excitement for the festival’s start.
“This phase,” said volunteer coordinator Peggy Gormley, who organizes and manages the festival’s staff of approximately 1900 volunteers, “is one of planning and putting things together. Hopefully the plane will fly.”
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