Telluride and Toronto Look for Exclusivity

For normal people, Labor Day weekend represents the last breath of summer, a pleasant island of leisure and shopping on the journey back to work, school and other autumnal responsibilities. But for citizens of Movieland - a fractious, mobile and multifarious population that includes publicists and producers, celebrity profilers and the celebrities they profile, bloggers, soothsayers and critics of every temperament and medium - it is the opposite of a holiday. The start of September means the onset of Fall Festival Season, which is the first leg in the Oscar race. So here we go.

The Telluride Film Festival commences on Friday, but a quick flashback is already in order, because Wednesday was the opening of the Venice Film Festival. By the time you read this, that glittering event will be a distant memory, or at least a fading, solitary data point in a fast-transforming algorithm, but it's still important. The opening film was Alejandro G. Iñárritu's 'Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance),' starring Michael Keaton as an aging movie star, and even before its initial public screening, rapturous reviews (including write-ups from Variety, IndieWire and The Hollywood Reporter) were beaming out across the world from the Lido. Conscientious Oscar prognosticators must now, at a minimum, pencil Mr. Keaton's name in their charts - in late August, nearly a full six months before the big broadcast from the Dolby Theater in Hollywood, and in anticipation of the inevitable backlash. I'm sorry if that sounds cynical, but those are the rules in Movieland.

'Birdman' will make its North American debut this weekend in Telluride, Colo., which has just announced its lineup, by longstanding custom a closely guarded secret until right before the start of the Show (as this four-day program of new discoveries and restored treasures is known locally). Herewith the breaking news.

The roster includes, as usual, a handful of imports from Cannes, among them Bennett Miller's 'Foxcatcher,' starring Steve Carell, Channing Tatum and Mark Ruffalo; Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardennes's 'Two Days, One Night,' with Marion Cotillard as a Belgian factory worker fighting for her job; Mike Leigh's 'Mr. Turner,' with Timothy Spall as the 19th-century British painter J. M. W. Turner; Tommy Lee Jones's western 'The Homesman,' with Mr. Jones and Hilary Swank (recipient of one of Telluride's tributes); and 'Leviathan,' from the Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev.

These will be joined by as yet unseen movies scheduled to open in the coming months. Outdoor adventure is something of a Telluride theme, fittingly enough given its remote mountain setting, and the lineup will include Jean-Marc Vallée's 'Wild,' adapted from Cheryl Strayed's memoir and starring Reese Witherspoon. Jon Stewart will make his directing debut with 'Rosewater,' in which Gael García Bernal plays a journalist in Iran imprisoned after that country's bitterly contested 2009 presidential election. Benedict Cumberbatch will show up in 'The Imitation Game,' a biography of the British code breaker and computer pioneer Alan Turing. There are new films from old masters like Wim Wenders, Volker Schlöndorff and Martin Scorsese (a documentary about The New York Review of Books) and younger ones like Ramin Bahrani ('99 Homes,' starring Michael Shannon) and Sophie Barthes ( 'Madame Bovary,' with Mia Wasikowska in the title role). But wait, there's more, as the TV pitchmen say. I'll let you know what I see, and what I think.

Next Thursday, attention will shift - and the residents of Movieland will stampede - to the Toronto International Film Festival. And then, at the end of September, to the West Side of Manhattan, where David Fincher's 'Gone Girl' will open the New York Film Festival. ('Birdman' will close it.) So far so good. By October, Movieland will be in a state of thorough, giddy confusion. But this year the festival parade - usually an orderly if hectic sequence of screenings, parties and mini-junkets instantly recapped on Twitter, in blogs and on websites - has been disrupted by a rare outbreak of interfestival skirmishing.

In January, the Toronto festival announced that it would not screen any film shown at another North American festival during its first four days, traditionally the most media-packed and therefore globally visible part of the 11-day festival. This rule was immediately understood to be aimed at the Telluride festival, which is known for its 'sneaks,' movies that pop up with minimal notice on Saturday and Sunday. In recent years, those have included future Oscar winners like 'Juno' and 'Argo,' and in 2013 Telluride commemorated its 40th anniversary by sneaking what would become the two top best-picture contenders, 'Gravity,' which had been in Venice, and '12 Years a Slave,' in addition to Denis Villeneuve's 'Prisoners.'

Those three films were scheduled for Toronto premieres, and the Toronto festival's new policy represents an effort to reclaim the exclusivity of that designation. It also compels filmmakers and distributors to choose their North American port of entry, and to forgo what Tom Luddy, Telluride's co-director and one of its founders, called 'the one-two Toronto-Telluride effect.'

'I always felt it was a wonderful thing for the films,' Mr. Luddy said in a telephone interview last week. 'I've experienced the joy of filmmakers going from Telluride to Toronto for years, and I don't want to feel like we're doing something bad that we have to be defensive about.'

Nonetheless, Mr. Luddy and Julie Huntsinger, the other co-director, who was also on the phone, were eager to defend their festival from what they perceived as aggression on Toronto's part. Mr. Luddy noted that Telluride was the older festival (by a couple of years), and both pointed out that it was much smaller, showing around 40 films (including revivals), in contrast to the more than 300 at the Toronto festival.

Ms. Huntsinger also spoke of the 'fragile ecosystem' of Telluride, which for many years has prided itself on having a more relaxed and less hype-ridden atmosphere than its competitors. For decades Venice was defined by a certain Euro-trashy glamour; Toronto by its broad selection and democratic, Canadian vibe; and Telluride by its relative serenity and the easy mingling among the Movieland tribes.

'Not paparazzi, not autograph seekers,' Ms. Huntsinger said, but a self-selecting audience for carefully selected films. It is also a festival that has insisted on showing those movies first. 'We owe it to everybody to have things they haven't seen elsewhere,' Mr. Luddy said, though he noted that 'we don't use the word 'premiere.' '

He also observed that the word means something other than what it once did. Big commercial releases now have multiple premieres: in New York, Los Angeles, London and wherever else the entertainment media can be herded to help manufacture an instant pseudo-event.

It seems to me that the festivals, though they view themselves as oases of art in a desert of commercialization, have been sucked into this system. Telluride may not have Toronto's red-carpet galas, but at a time when reactions to a movie can be instantly shared with the world, the distinction between a big and a small festival hardly matters. If someone with a blog, a Twitter account - or a job at a newspaper, for that matter - sees a film, the rest of the world has all but seen it, too.

That 'all but' is everything, of course. The fall festivals serve not only their customers - the ordinary Torontonians who line up for tickets, the pass holders who make the pilgrimage to Colorado every Labor Day weekend - but also an increasingly competitive segment of the film industry, for which exposure through awards is seen as a crucial, or perhaps the only, means of survival. Small- and medium-size films enter the marketplace facing steep odds, and festival word-of-mouth is one way they try to gain a competitive edge.

This seems to have created competition among the festivals themselves, which strikes this Movielander as unfortunate. The audience and the movies are ill-served by an awards-obsessed film culture and an entertainment media - of which I am obviously part - that can lose all sense of proportion in our collective haste to be first, fastest and most in the know. When it comes to movies, which finally belong to the totality of their audiences, present and future, 'I saw it first' is a meaningless boast, as empty as claiming, 'It's mine.'

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