Musings on the 17th Philadelphia Film Festival

SET IN PHILADELPHIA 2008

By David Greenberg

Times change. People change. Film festivals change. Sometimes change is easy and sometimes it requires an agonizing period of trial and error. Sometimes change is for the better. Sometimes better is relative.

I have been involved with the Philadelphia Film Festival off and on and in variety of peripheral positions from the beginning, when it was the Philadelphia Festival Of World Cinema.

In 1992, I had just moved back to Philly after a stint in Maine working at a documentary production company, I was looking to get involved with the local film scene and, in keeping with the times, become the hot new indie filmmaker instead of merely being the really nice guy with the inexhaustible knowledge of movies who worked behind the counter at TLA Video. I heard about the new film festival preparing for its inaugural year and volunteered. I was already friendly with some of festival staff and was soon given some juicy assignments like managing the box office at some of the busier theaters. It was cool to be part of a scene, at the center of a hip, urbane event even though nothing that I was doing was especially hip or urbane.

Still, over the years, I took advantage of everything the PWFC had to offer: The Set In Philadelphia Screenplay Competition, countless workshops on how to make, finance, promote, distribute indie films and how to cover all of the legal bases. I entered the SIP competition a few times and I eagerly attended all of the workshops and hung on every word that the cool and confident panelists delivered. It was my career on line here, after all!

A couple of years later I bumped into a girl I had gone to high school with and when she found out that I was an aspiring filmmaker like her, she quickly recruited me to be a reader for the screenplay competition for which she was now serving as coordinator. So, I somehow went from being a contestant to being a judge for the first round, a position that I have now held four or five times over the years.

Despite making a couple of shorts, winning a little award from the AFI and having a couple of screenings, the hot indie filmmaker thing never really happened. In 1996, I did get my first screenwriting gig, actually getting paid peanuts to adapt a couple of books and develop some other projects for a record company that were pitched around Hollywood, well received but never got made

Somewhere around this time, the PWFC morphed into the PFF. “Morph” however is a polite word for the political clash of egos and ideology and the power struggle that sent the festival founder and driving force in the Philadelphia film scene, Linda Blackaby out of town for good. The festival trudged on for a few years but seemed to lack clear vision and a strong identity despite attracting larger crowds and bigger names to town.

I basically stopped writing, started a family, quit TLA after almost nine years, repaired and sold rare books and wound up going back to my old alternative high school as the film and theater teacher. Over the years, countless people suggested that I would be a good teacher and I always resisted them and doubted my ability to teach. I have rarely been so right about my instincts. Other than getting shot in the classroom, almost all of my fears about myself as a teacher were completely legitimized.

I moved to Maine again, taught film at another alternative school, helped to set up, implement and judge the first Maine Screenplay Competition and managed a little video store for two years. Upon moving back to Philly, I somehow convinced, impressed or bamboozled the head of the screenwriting department at Drexel University and was hired to teach the subject there.

I read more screenplays for the competition and I started to get asked to sit on panels at workshops during the festival, staring out at wide-eyed, eager aspiring filmmakers who seemed to hang on my every word. I might have even come off as cool and confident up there.

In 2006 one of my classes was cancelled due to low enrollment. Faced with severe underemployment, my earnest and supportive wife did what any good spouse would do: she gave the house a feng sui makeover. A month later, a producer responded to one of the (literally) thousands of e-mails I had sent out and I was hired to write a screenplay. Weeks after that, I was hired to write another screenplay. Since May 2006, I have been hired to write or doctor something like twelve features. That first screenplay that I was hired to write was 95% re-written by the director and was shot in NYC last year. The producer of that film has just asked me to write and possibly direct his next film.

In June, my screenplay “Aftermath” (yes, I know, there are 19 other films with the same title) will be shot in Philly. I tried to produce and direct the film myself several times over a three year period but it just kept crumbling and when a hot local production company  that had made everything but a feature wanted to adopt the project, I searched my soul for about five minutes and graciously relinquished control.

So, today, I go to the film festival that is now run by TLA Video, bigger, glitzier, more high profile than ever. I am a working –albeit minimum wage- screenwriter, a confident, popular teacher at Drexel and the University Of The Arts and I am heading off to the award ceremony for the Set In Philadelphia Screenplay Competition. I will be standing next to Rich Murray, the veteran music video director who gave me my first screenwriting jobs and who just started the job teaching music video production that I got for him at Drexel. By the time you read this, the announcement will have been made, one of my students, a kid who I mentored through the writing process, is the winner of the Parisi Award (named for the mother of “Nixon” and “Ali” screenwriter Stephen Rivele) for a screenplay by a writer under 25. Last year one of my students came in third place. Rich Murray is looking for his next feature project and wants to read both screenplays. I told both students that they were likely to win the Parisi Award even before they entered the competition. I have already told a current student that I think she will win next year but that, being over 25, she’ll have to settle for the grand prize. Not bad.

So, I stood there, proud of my student, hoping to help him get his film made. I came into the room, cool and confident, finally feeling like a bigger part of the film scene in Philly and I went virtually unnoticed, not that there was anything to notice. It is funny how things change but not as funny as when things don’t change even after you think that they had changed. As always, maybe next year.