What a difference a month makes.
When the Montclair Film Festival was held in May — as it was for the first eight years of its run — it was good.
But when it switched to October, five years ago, it became important.
“It’s just been a complete shift,” said Tom Hall, artistic director of the festival, which runs this year October 17-26.
The festival’s producing organization, Montclair Film, just announced that Conan O’Brien will join Stephen Colbert onstage for an evening of conversation at Newark’s NJPAC on Dec. 7. Tickets become available to Montclair Film and NJPAC members beginning at 10 a.m. Oct. 15 and at 10 a.m. Oct. 17 for the general public.
Conan O’Brien, presented by Montclair Film, will appear with Stephen Colbert at NJPAC Dec. 7
But that event is just a late-date coda in a series of celebrity appearances that swirl around the festival.
Star power in Montclair
Spike Lee (Oct. 18) Lucy Liu (Oct. 20) Brendan Fraser (Oct. 25) E. Jean Carroll (Oct. 25) and Bobbi Brown (Oct. 26) are some of the other big names that have amped up the festival’s buzz to buzz-saw levels.
This — and the number of prestige films that appearing at the festival’s seven screens in four venues — is part of the festival’s new reality since, almost by accident, it made a momentous 2020 change in its calendar.
“It’s completlely flipped what’s available to us,” Hall said.
“Hamnet” (Oct. 19), “Nuremberg” (Oct. 18, 23), and “Rental Family” (Oct. 25) are among the films on this year’s schedule that are generating Oscar chatter.
Paul Mescal plays William Shakespeare and Jessie Buckley is the Bard’s wife, Agnes, in director Chloé Zhao’s “Hamnet.”
Talking the Oscar talk
What’s happened — with the shift to October — is that the Montclair Film Fesival has become part of the awards season conversation.
The Critics Choice Awards (Jan. 4), The New York Film Critics Circle Awards (Jan. 6), The Golden Globes (Jan. 11) and the Oscars (March 15) will be very much on the minds of many of the 20,000 people who are expected to attend the festival’s 60 features, 75 shorts, and many ancillary events.
Increasingly, those people include members of the movie industry — among them, Oscar voters.
“Montclair has always been the home of many people who work in the film industry, in the crews the guilds and the unions,” said Tom Bernard, co-founder and co-president of Sony Pictures Classics, a key art-house distributor that often partners with the festival.
That includes, he said, a number of voting members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. And it includes Stephen Colbert, whose wife Evelyn McGee-Colbert is the President of the Board of Trustees for Montclair Film.
The Late Show with Stephen Colbert during Monday’s December 16, 2024 show.
“I think there are a lot of Academy members who have moved there, away from the city,” Bernard said. “The [film] culture in the area has grown tremendously, and a lot of it has to do with the Montclair Film Festival.”
A fateful change
So the stage was set for a fateful change that was dictated, in 2020, by necessity.
That was, of course, the COVID year.
Montclair Film, the non-profit that has produced the festival since 2012, already had their annual May event scheduled when, on March 15, America shut down. The festival was postponed until October.
“We moved it to the fall of 2020, and that year we built our own drive-in theaters and all that stuff for social distancing,” Hall said.
But in the process, they discovered something interesting.
The Oscar race runs through Montclair
By October — as opposed to May — many of the Oscar front-runners had emerged from the pack. Consequently, there was a sporting interest in certain films. They had become must-sees.
“We ended up opening the festival with ‘Nomadland,’ which went on to win Best Picture that year,” Hall said.
It was one of several top films they had access to, that year, that they might not have been able to book otherwise.
“They were looking for opportunities to screen for people, because there were no movie theaters open and people couldn’t see movies,” Hall said. “So we had a really robust drive-in movie schedule, and did some virtual screening as well. And those films went on to become part of the award season conversation that year.”
Next year, 2021, they were were able to leverage that with their distribution partners. And there was another happy consequence of the scheduling change.
Festival vs. festival
Film festivals are competitive. And they jealously guard their premiere pictures.
“If you play one film festival, another film festival feels your movie is not going to have the same clout, so they won’t have it,” Bernard said. “If you play Telluride, Toronto will not play your movie, because they feel their thunder will be taken.”
May — the original slot of the Montclair Film Festival —was before most of the other big film festivals.
Consequently, many distributors didn’t want to launch their big releases there, for fear that later festivals wouldn’t screen them.
Mid-October is another matter.
The Venice Film Festival (end of August), The Telluride Film Festival (end of August), The Toronto International Film Festival (early September), the New York Film Festival (late September), and the Hamptons International Film Festival (early October), have already come and gone. The year’s big-buzz films have, mostly, launched.
So they was now nothing to keep them from being shown in Montclair.
Artist Kariem Young’s work for the Montclair Film Festival
“We started seeing the distributors offering us award-season contenders, to sort of help amplify the movies on their award season journey,” Hall said.
Smells like a winner
Moreover, the earlier festivals had made it clear which films had the wind at their back. Film-savvy people — including Academy voters and industry folk — seized on the Montclair Festival as a way to do their homework in the leadup to the awards season.
“Everything about the Oscar race is, you’ve got to get the people to see the movies,” Bernard said. “You’re not going to convince anyone to vote, just because you have the best ads. People vote on the quality of the films.”
And the Montclair Festival’s prestige is is only likely to grow, as more and more film work comes to New Jersey.
Big movie studios are in the works in Eatontown, Bayonne and West Orange. More and more films are being made on location here. And a 35 percent New Jersey motion picture tax rebate, launched in 2018 by Governor Phil Murphy, includes incentives for film people who live in-state. So the ranks of Oscar voters, buying tickets for the Montclair Film Festival screenings, can only grow.
“You have more and more film people moving to New Jersey because of the film commission,” Bernard said. “They have to have a Jersey address.”
Visit montclairfilm.org for times, dates, venues and other information.
This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: Conan O’Brien proof Montclair Film Festival has arrived
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