Going Into 10th Tribeca Film Festival, Co-Founder Recalls How It Began
Craig Hatkoff, with his wife, Jane Rosenthal, and Robert DeNiro, founded the Tribeca Film Festival in 2002. For a recent program at 92Y Tribeca, Trib editor Carl Glassman interviewed Hatkoff about the festival’s beginnings and its evolution. Following is an excerpt from that interview.
TRIB: How did the idea for Tribeca Film Festival come about?
Shortly after Sept. 11, in the middle of October, my family and I went down to Little Italy to try to support the restaurants. We saw restaurant after restaurant with the staff just standing in the doorways. And we were one of two parties having dinner. To be in Little Italy and be the only party in a restaurant was a pretty poignant moment. We said, “We’re going to lose Little Italy, we’re going to lose Chinatown and the Financial District.”
What came of that was a series of dinners in October and November, about 800 people each, with pretty high-profile people coming down to the restaurants in Lower Manhattan. And that was the seed of the idea of getting people back on the streets.
You got the first festival together in a remarkably short time. How did you do it?
That remains one of the great mysteries of my life. Bob [Robert DeNiro] and Jane [Rosenthal] had talked about doing the festival for many years but there was never really a rationale for another New York festival. All of a sudden it felt like this was the time to do it. Jane came home and said, “Bob and I decided we want to do the festival,” and I said, “What year are you thinking of doing this?”
The only time slot that worked was April 2002. We made the announcement in December 2001. And what we had in place was nothing. But we had the governor on board, we had Martin Scorsese, who said, “We’re going to do all these great things,” we had Meryl Streep and Whoopi Goldberg and we said, we’re going to make a festival happen. But we had no sponsors, no venues, no films, no know-how.
Normally, a lead cycle for an event like this is about 18 months. We went on vacation for the Christmas holidays and came back and said, “Oh my God, we gotta put on a film festival!” We did it all in about 120 days.
Did you doubt that it would happen?
We were very close to having to call off the festival. We had no idea what it takes to get a sponsor—they want rights and benefits and where’s our logo going to be? The day before I was going to say, “Look, I don’t think we’re going to raise the money,” we got a call out of the blue. Someone said, “You don’t know me, I’m Nancy Smith from American Express. We heard you are trying to do a festival and we want to be your partner and we want to build the festival with you. And we want it to be a three-year deal.” So we really couldn’t have done this without American Express.
You really thought this was just a one-shot festival?
We were hoping to find 15 or 20 films and get about 10,000 people to come down for a couple of days. The first festival, we ended up showing about 160 films with about 150,000 people. So we were a little off on our projections! And the family festival was literally just an afterthought.
An afterthought? How so?
American Express [located in the World Financial Center] had a very traumatic front-row seat to the disaster. Their offices are across from the World Trade Center site and, coincidentally, they were moving their employees back into their headquarters the same week the festival opened. They said to us, “Can you do an event for the families?” So we quickly threw together a family festival.
It opened at 10 in the morning; it was 46 degrees and windy. “No one’s going to come,” I thought. And then the sun came out at around 11 and people kept coming and coming and coming and we ended up with about 125,000 people.
You have said, “One of the rules we have is there are no rules.” What did you mean?
If it’s close to making sense or sometimes doesn’t make sense but let’s just do it anyway, that’s kind of our business model. Our business model was different than anybody else’s. No one had ever had a sponsor the size of American Express for a film festival. A lot of the festivals view sponsors as a necessary evil. We said, that’s crazy. Let’s figure out how to help filmmakers get their films out there. I think we now have about 70 marketing partners—so we viewed sponsorship very much as helping us build the festival.
Through video on demand, the festival now reaches audiences far beyond New York City. Why did you decide to make it more than a conventional festival?
We generally can sell about 80,000 seats during the festival. That’s maximum capacity. It’s sort of like if you want to go see the Yankees, there’s only 80,000 seats in the stadium. There are millions of people who want to see the film. Last year, instead of selling 80,000 tickets, we got 2,000,000 views, so you can see what happens in terms of getting exposure for independent films. People might say, “Isn’t this a little antithetical to what a film festival is?” And the answer is, yes and no. There are so many people who want to see the films and the filmmakers want their films seen. But nothing will ever replace the experience of being there in the room when the lights go down.
By 2003 you had already created Tribeca Enterprises, a global media company that operates the festival, Tribeca Cinemas, the online video-on-demand distribution system called Tribeca Film and international events. That’s a far cry from your beginnings in 2002.
Some film festivals say they’re pure, they’re just about independent film. We’ve come to a conclusion that that’s just not how we’re going to do it. You can’t support a film festival as a stand-alone event, with the kinds of programs that we do, without these other business activities.
It’s been pretty much acknowledged by everyone that the independent film business model, let alone the film festival model, is a broken model. The economics of getting runs in movie theaters doesn’t work any more. We see these different activities as the new way. Because if we lose independent film that would be an absolute tragedy.
POSTED Apr. 01