The Reeler retuned to Lower Manhattan today, where Robert De Niro, Jane Rosenthal and a few high-profile pals met the press to chat about the 2006 Tribeca Film Festival. There was not a whole lot of Earth-shattering new information to pass along (Tom Cruise is still taking over New York in a week, programmer Peter Scarlet is still condescending), but on the whole, all signs indicate a fairly powerful buzz attending the festival’s fifth year.

The Tribeca Seven meet the press (L-R): Oren Jacoby, Ed Burns, Josh Lucas, Robert De Niro, Jane Rosenthal, Ken Burns and Trudie Styler at the Tribeca Performing Arts Center (Photo: STV)
“In 2002, in the wake of Sept. 11, we launched a film festival in 120 days and wondered if anyone would come,” Rosenthal said in her introduction. “Four years later, we have attracted over a million people to Lower Manhattan. In the process, we’ve screened an incredible range of films that have gone on to earn international acclaim. … While we have expanded, the heart and soul of our festival is Tribeca.”
Tribeca itself was a popular subject among other filmmakers in attendance, with The Groomsmen writer/director/star Ed Burns toasting the festival and its co-founders’ impact on the city. “I’m a New York-based filmmaker,” Burns said. “I’m here for the third time in five years, like Jane said. And speaking with other New York-based filmmakers, we love the fact that we now have our film festival. I love the fact we no longer have to schlep to the mountains of Utah for an independent film festival. So there’s that.
“The second thing I want to mention is that as a resident of Tribeca from before the festival, I’ve seen over the course of five years what the festival has meant to my neighborhood. Especially in the years immediately following 9/11, there was a lot of talk about how people were going to start to move out of Tribeca, restaurants were going to close, retail shops were going to be vacant. Walk around the neighborhood now and you see the opposite is true. There’s construction on every corner, you can’t get a reservation in a restaurant and there are shops all over the place. And I think you have to look at that and a big part of that has to do with this festival—(with) Jane and Bob turning it around 120 days after 9/11 to get this thing up and running. I just want to say thank you to them as a resident of Tribeca.”
De Niro, bless his heart, appeared touched by the festival’s reception, even as photographers filled each of his pauses with a full-bodied torrent of shutters and flashes that eventually drove him and his prepared speech back to his mark upstage. He was even more succinct in, um, discussing the programming of United 93 as this year’s opening film. “Flight 93 [sic],” he said, all but retreating from the podium. “If it were not opening the festival, it would seem strange. That’s really all I have to say.”
Rosenthal said that Tuesday’s premiere at the Ziegfeld will host 91 family members of the eponymous tragedy’s victims; invitations were also sent to 9/11 victims and their families around the tri-state area. The Reeler followed up on the lack of public tickets available for Tribeca’s triad of mega-premieres (United 93, Mission: Impossible III and Poseidon), asking Rosenthal if any seats would, in fact, open up.
“We’re venue-challenged,” she said. “In terms of M:I:III, we have some screenings in Harlem and Tribeca, and again, there’s just so many people you can fit into venues. We just don’t have enough venues. Even though some people don’t believe us when we say it, we’re still a struggling festival in terms of our finances. In the past, we have put screening facilities—projection facilities into Stuyvesant High School or at Pace University or put up a screening at the World Financial Center. We do what we can.”
Fair enough. In between snapping about festival selection criteria and what audiences should go see in a festival that some say is overprogrammed if not totally overextended, Tribeca executive director Peter Scarlet offered a genuinely spirited endorsement of the event’s revivals. “Some of the classics of cinema were shown here, and we’re showing more each year,” he said. “It’s a valiant effort to stem the tide that you may not all be aware of–that about 60 percent of the films that are made don’t exist anymore. So archives and people who are pouring money and time and attention into saving the past sort of deserve our support, and now we’re not just showing films from just Martin Scorsese’s collection, we’re showing films from major archives around the world.”
“We talk about independent filmmaking in New York,” he added a moment later. “It started with a man named Lionel Rogosin, whose film On the Bowery, made in 1956, has been restored by Cineteca di Bologna. We’re showing a fantastic new print, and when you see this film, you see it was the origin. It was before Cassavetes, it was before Robert Frank. It was at the origin of American independent cinema.”
And then they were off. I stuck around. Maybe I should just stay down here. Anyone have an open couch?

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