SIFF and the City

Seattle’s film festival might be the largest in the nation, but it’s no dinosaur. By doubling down on the Puget Sound, SIFF is building a community of moviegoers and assuring its future.

When Dan Ireland and Darryl Macdonald impulsively started the Seattle International Film Festival in 1975 with ten thousand dollars of borrowed money, they didn’t know if their harebrained scheme would even get off the ground. “We were flying by the seat of our pants,” confesses Ireland, now a director working on a Martin Donovan script. “I’m blown away at how big it’s become."

SIFF’s budget is 580 times bigger now. It’s North America’s longest film festival (May 20–June 13 this year), and SIFF artistic director Carl Spence expects a crowd of about 145,000. SIFF is also conquering more turf: West Seattle, Kirkland and Everett, where SIFF’s schedule will appear on every resident’s utility bill. “What a great way to get people to watch a film!” exults Ireland. Perhaps there’s a subtle warning: watch a movie or we’ll cut off your power!

Dream Screen: SIFF Cinema lives beneath Seattle's McCaw Hall, which is home to Leni Schwendinger's light sculpture, Dreaming in Color.

Compared to other powerhouse festivals, SIFF is remarkably focused on the local audience and is arguably the least industry-and-press-centered major fest on earth. Even tiny Telluride Film Festival exists in a vast web of international movie marketing. Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire premiered at Telluride on Labor Day weekend,to create buzz that propelled its triumphs at Toronto and the Oscars. Where does Seattle fit in this? Outside the entire system, in a parallel, isolated universe.

“We did the U.S. premiere of Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting,” notes Spence. “He got his first award here. Every day when he wakes up, on his bedroom windowsill is his Golden Space Needle from SIFF, and now he has an Oscar next to it.” SIFF tends to get people before everybody on earth wants them. Its choices are based more on good taste than marketing.

And that’s dangerous in today’s film world. Art houses and indie studios are closing, Variety sacked its two-hundred-thousand-dollar-a-year festival-haunting film critic Todd McCarthy, and cineastes increasingly watch movies in home theatres bigger than any Tarantino used to own. “Festivals are also in danger,” says Spence, citing Nevada’s CineVegas, which is currently on perilous hiatus.

The fact that SIFF lacks the star power that fuels most fests, from Palm Springs to Sundance to Toronto, would appear to compound that risk. Few celebs or suits will come to Seattle – in fact, that’s why directors Cameron Crowe and Alan Rudolph made movies here, because they knew Hollywood types would never hop a jet to hound them here.

Independence has its cost. The city of Palm Springs gives four hundred thousand dollars to its film fest, to attract Entertainment Tonight publicity and sell the place as a celeb getaway and film-production location. Cash-strapped Seattle won’t pony up such monies anytime soon. Spence jests that he’d gladly move SIFF to generous Everett, which foots the bill for its satellite fest. Don’t worry, he won’t – Everett can’t afford the entire behemoth SIFF has become.

What keeps SIFF in Seattle is the devotion of filmgoers here, and a master plan. The plan calls on SIFF to supersize its audience, expand geographically, use its new Wallace Foundation grant to enhance its Web presence and audience interactivity, popularize the incredibly fun new SIFFter iPhone app and enhance the movie experience with interviews and discussions on SIFF.TV, available online.

Most crucially, SIFF has gone year-round. The fest proper still lasts only a month or so, but the permanent 380-seat SIFF Cinema in the Opera House has revved up its programming. In addition, in 2011 SIFF hopes to add a hundred-seat theatre and a fifty-seat classroom theatre, to be located in the nearby Seattle Center Alki Room. Having a constant venue as well as a one-shot fest is a tried-and-true strategy. “That relationship is common in many cities, a logical focus of energies,” says Seattle critic Sean Axmaker. Toronto, Vancouver, Denver, Portland and New York all follow this model. For that matter, the original SIFF came into being thanks to the year-round Egyptian Theatre.

“It’s much more cost-effective to have screenings throughout the year” says Spence. Not only for SIFF fans, but tourists and educational groups. “We have a full-time education coordinator,” he says. And ex-Northwest Film Forum managing director Susie Purves points out that “School traffic is more profitable than cinema traffic. You can sell it way in advance, instead of programming it and hoping the public will agree with you and the weather will cooperate.” At SIFF, the average viewer sees four movies. SIFF Cinema-goers have a better chance of building a film addiction.

A full year-round staff could be more effective than an annual staff starting from scratch as endlessly as Sisyphus. The plan is to have the festival feed SIFF Cinema and vice versa.

After three years of obscurity, says Spence, “we’ve doubled our SIFF Cinema attendance and seen box office increase significantly. That’s encouraging in a time when art house films have been struggling.” The key was to replace one-shot screenings with micro-festivals like April’s Alan Rudolph tribute, this month’s tribute to Stewart Stern, the Seattle author of Rebel Without a Cause, and movies shown in partnership with groups from ethnic and other subcultures, on subjects ranging from skatepunk to Norse heritage.

SIFF Cinema now draws an alleged fifty thousand people a year, putting SIFF’s total audience within reach of two hundred thousand. People like what they see at the Cinema for good reason, says revered Seattle projectionist Pete Kerchinsky, who’s worked SIFF and Sundance. “They went all out,” says Kerchinsky. “They can do anything, HD cam, DigiBeta, a new Sony digital projector, brand-new top-of-the-line sound system, Dolby 650. It’s also gorgeous. I love that booth! I would compare it to the Eccles booth [the best one at Sundance, used for premieres].”

On the Waterfront: As part of its Eastside programming, SIFF will present an outdoor screening of The Triplets of Belleville at Kirkland’s Juanita Beach Park on Saturday, May 29.

“Year-round programming takes it back to the roots,” says Ireland. Spence adds, “There are many films we show at the festival that we want to bring back to the Cinema, and the festival builds word of mouth.”

Seattle would be crazy to let SIFF sink (or move permanently to Everett). “To let the festival fall from its lofty status would harm Seattle’s reputation,” says Palm Springs journalist Bruce Fessier. “To help the festival advance to the next level as a challenger to Toronto and Sundance would be an investment in the growth of Seattle.”

Good luck challenging Toronto without its massive civic investment, or Sundance without Robert Redford’s cash and cachet. Yet SIFF may thrive even so, and its impact reverberates beyond the fest itself. “I see us feeding each other, emphatically,” says Northwest Film Forum director Lyall Bush. “People say, ‘What should we do tonight? Netflix something? Or go to SIFF, or the Film Forum, the Central Cinema, Grand Illusion, SAM, the Frye? The more people get out of the house, the more we all win. And frankly, I think the people win, too.”

“We’re trying to create an experience,” says Spence. “Something different from what you can get from your computer or your home big-screen TV.”

“It’s an alternative festival,” says Ireland. “They’re not putting themselves in competition with those other festivals. I think it’s great for the city that they don’t.” •

NOW SHOWING: Four musts for this year’s SIFF

SIFF is massive, so you can be excused for missing a lot of good stuff. Still, there are some events that you simply must get to if you want to hold your own with your fellow SIFFers.

THE OPENER The promising $7 million film The Extra Man (above) stars Kevin Kline as an aging rich-widows’ gigolo with sexual views “to the right of the Pope” and There Will Be Blood’s boy preacher Paul Dano as Kline’s playwright protégé, who wants to get into Katie Holmes’ lingerie (literally – he’s a cross-dresser). Plus Patti D’Arbanville as his dominatrix instructor and John C. Reilly as a helium-voiced weirdo. It’s said to be one of the gems of Kline’s entire career.

SPANISH FILMS The hit prison drama Cell 211 (above), winner of eight Goyas (Spain’s answer to the Oscar) and the audience fave at São Paulo Film Festival, plus fifteen to twenty other biggies SIFF won’t specify yet.

A DOCUMENTARY Docs are the glories of any film fest these days. At SIFF you can see flicks about Andy Warhol star Candy Darling, William F. Burroughs and the global bee crisis. Plus Oscar magnet Bruce Beresford’s biopic Mao’s Last Dancer, about a Chinese ballet star who defected to America.

A CLASSIC (saved by Martin Scorsese) The Scorsese Film Foundation celebrates its twentieth anniversary by screening glorious restorations of The River, Drums along the Mohawk, Shadows (above) and more.