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Sarasota festivals reflect a region’s rising film aspirations

With an irresistible assist from a state cash-back program, Roberts was making his own movie — “Deadly Closure,” a suspense-thriller and reputedly the first full-length feature shot exclusively in Sarasota.

This year, Roberts’ valentine to his favorite city — in which Marina Jack, Jungle Gardens, son Wes’ SRQ Magazine office and 18 other locales have starring roles — is booked for a Film Festival premiere. Tickets sold so quickly, two additional showings were arranged.

Roberts, 60, will not say how much his DeVere Films Inc. sank into the venture. But between state incentives and a come-hither local climate, the buoyant Siesta Key resident feels his decision to gamble on film amid the turbulent 2009 economy is being vindicated. “People are going to take notice of Sarasota and they’ll see what can be done here.”

They will definitely notice its aspirations. The filmmakers, stars and fans converging this week for the Sarasota Film Festival and the upstart Sarasota Fringe Film Festival will have a sizable portion of local or Florida-based flicks waiting for them. More than 40 of the combined 300 films shown over the next 12 days have a local hook.

But whether Sarasota can transition from festival venue to movie incubation factory remains to be seen. After all, Hollywood discovered this place more than half a century ago.

Sarasota was the venue for Cecil B. DeMille’s “The Greatest Show on Earth,” which won an Academy Award for Best Picture in 1952. The city shared location shots with Palmetto, which hosted the 1998 noir film “Palmetto” with Woody Harrelson. That was the same year “Great Expectations” hit the theaters, which celebrated John Ringling’s Cà d’Zan as the setting for the Dickens classic.

Over the past 20 years, Sarasotans have developed appetites for more obscure cinema as well. From the enduring Sarasota Film Society and the Burns Court art house to the French Film Festival and The Cine-World Festival, Sarasota’s recent history of patronizing the big screen has evolved into the intentional cultivation of more sophisticated younger audiences.

Over the past decade, SFF’s outreach and education program has introduced thousands of schoolchildren to film culture through field-trip screenings, lectures and student competition.

“We fostered an appreciation … of film at all ages,” said Hans Wohlgefahrt, who for seven years ran its outreach program. “For a lot of kids, maybe it was the first foreign film they ever saw. Maybe it was the first classic film they ever saw.”

More than talent

Nowhere is the development of young filmmaking talent more evident than at Ringling College of Art and Design. Imagine FX, a British trade magazine, recently named Ringling as the top digital arts college in the world.

Seventeen Ringling animation graduates had a hand in producing “Avatar” and “Up!,” which together won five Academy Awards this year. Headhunters from 20 out-of-state companies — Nickelodeon, Pixar, Lucasfilm, Sony and DreamWorks — have recruited at Ringling this school year. The first students enrolled in Ringling’s new digital filmmaking school are just completing their junior years.

But what it might take to keep those careers — and all those production dollars — closer to home is tricky. And it is not just the lack of a backyard soundstage, an issue Ringling has raised this year by making overtures to lease the Sarasota Municipal Auditorium.

When Alan Roberts contemplated filming “Deadly Closure” in late 2008, he was among the first to apply to the Independent Film Queue. A cash incentive program designed to encourage independent movie-making in Florida, the Film Queue offered 15 to 17 percent reimbursements for Florida-based expenditures on films costing between $100,000 and $625,000.

The problem: “It was so popular they ran out of money instantaneously,” said Sarasota County film commissioner Jeanne Corcoran. “The $10.8 million they set aside for it was gone in three hours.”

This time around, the Florida Legislature is trying to bait the hook with tax credits. At last glance, lawmakers were debating $55 million in credits for year one of a five-year commitment, and allotting no less than $27 million annually on the back end.

Should it pass, Florida will discover if those coffers are deep enough to compete with states like Michigan and Louisiana, which offer tax rebates of 40 and 30 percent, respectively, to qualified moviemakers.

Some of the ones who got away would like another shot at Sarasota’s turquoise waters and artsy Spanish Mediterranean aesthetic.

In 2007, St. Petersburg native Erin Kitzinger won a John Welch Scholarship — named after the SFF founder — and has been producing small, attention-grabbing films elsewhere ever since. Most recently, her “Hope for a Thorn” won the Audience Award for Narrative Feature at the Gasparilla International Film Festival.

Kitzinger, 27, moved to Chicago, where she is a freelance editor. “Sarasota is just such a beautiful town,” she said. “I would love to shoot down there.”

“Deadly Closure” director Andrzej Mrotek, 28, has bounced from Colorado to North Carolina to California during his young career. He quickly burned out on the Hollywood scene.

“As much as I loved L.A., it was a nightmare to shoot anything there,” Mrotek said. “It’s like everything out there’s been used up and thrown away. It’s just a business. There’s no passion.”

A perfect place for film

Passion is just what local filmmakers will bring to the Fringe Festival on Thursday evening, says director and founder Patrick Nagle. That’s when “Made in Sarasota Night” — featuring more than a dozen productions with local connections — will kick off the four-day event. Nagle anticipates the entire medical community will turn out for the marquee feature, “Dr. Idol,” a battle of the bands for local medical professionals.

“Per capita, this is one of the most creative places in the country,” says Nagle. “And I don’t believe in being a judge; I believe in being an accommodator. We’re looking for projects that have a level of commercial value and we want to work this as a business.”

In terms of promoting Sarasota’s filmmaking chops, Nagle’s ambitions draw a major distinction between the Fringe Fest, a limited liability corporation, and the nonprofit SFF. Although the SFF has local tie-ins in its screening lineup, artistic director Tom Hall says the missions are different.

“We’re not interested in doing only local films,” he said. “The same standards apply for the other arts in town. It would be like an opera house director just putting on operas he wrote.”

Either way, at least one SFF celebrity guest hopes the politicians come through for Sarasota.

Oscar-nominated screenwriter Oren Moverman, whose screenplay “Queer” will be presented as a staged reading on April 16, says Sarasota’s fate is linked to the political stage in Tallahassee.

“I was working on a film last year, set in 1900 in the South, there was a perfect town in Florida to shoot it, really remarkable,” he said. “We could go in and shoot the film just as it was, but there was no tax incentive with that budget to shoot in Florida. It became a real problem.

“If there was tax incentive, if you get 35 percent return on what you’re doing down here, this place would be swarming with film crews.”

Jay Handelman contributed to this story.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, April 4th, 2010 and is filed under Business News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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