Reports from the South by Southwest film festival.
AUSTIN, Tex. – Moviegoers had to make room for music, which is still the main event of the South by Southwest Music and Media Conference and Festival. The catalog of musical events weighed close to twice as much as that for film; those lugging both guides in their SXSW 2010 tote bags invited sore shoulders. “Me can keep longing inside no more,” reads the thought bubble of its signature cartoon; more apt would have been “me can keep lugging no more.” Few did; festival participants ditched both bags and guides and instead used iPhones and Blackberries to keep apprised of times, acts, venues and where the lines were longest.
As movies began to be eclipsed by music on Wednesday, and despite competition from bands playing indoors and out and green beer served at pubs up and down Sixth Street, the last of three screenings for the feature film “Cherry” was a sellout at the Alamo Drafthouse.
The story of a college freshman lugging the expectations that spring from being the sole scion in a “long line of engineers” who just wants to take an art class and shed his nerddom, the film is reminiscent of wry, poignant sleepers like “Juno,” “Lars and the Real Girl” and “Little Miss Sunshine.”
Made on a something of a shoestring, the filmmakers employed Kalamazoo College and Western Michigan University as stand-ins for a generic Ivy League college. (The events that inspired the story took place at Brown, the alma mater of the writer and director, Jeffrey Fine.) Cast and crew slept in a dormitory during the 25-day shoot, and students at the colleges were involved in the production as extras and behind the scenes. An advanced film-producing class from the University of Texas chose it from among the SXSW offerings as its class project, using it as a case study to learn about film promotion.
The movie offers a number of I-know-I’ve seen-that-actor-before faces including Kyle Gallner as Aaron, the lead (he’ll next be seen in “Nightmare on Elm Street,” and has a long list of film and television credits including “Haunting in Connecticut,” “Law & Order” and “Big Love”); Britt Robertson (star of the CW series “Life Unexpected”) and Esai Morales (“La Bamba”), and a producer, Sam Kitt, who knows his way around independent film: he is a former president of Spike Lee’s company 40 Acres and a Mule. (It also includes at least one marquee name: Mamet. It’s not David, the playwright, but his daughter, Zosia. She plays the girl (“Woman!” she corrects Aaron sharply) who lives in Aaron’s dorm and catches his eye.
Despite those bona fides, the movie does not have a distributor, which is increasingly the case for independent films, Mr. Kitt said Wednesday during an audience Q. and A. after the screening.
“In some ways you’d love to be dependent, because there’s a lot of work ahead if you have to do the distribution through social networking,” he said Thursday in a telephone interview from his home in Los Angeles, where he headed after the last screening. “But that is the path that lots of independents have to take now. Distributors, and the press, are so brand-conscious – they’re attuned to pre-sold commodities. One of the things that surprised me at SXSW was that the interest in the Hollywood movies is the most intense interest there is. People are running off to see ‘MacGruber,’ which isn’t anyone’s idea of a discovery.”
What next for “Cherry”? That’s the question, Mr. Kitt said. For now, more film festivals: Boston and Seattle, college towns both.
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