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David Poland

By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

Posted Friday, May 19th, 2006 - Comments Off on In With the NewFest: NYC's Biggest LGBT Festival On the Way
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In With the NewFest: NYC's Biggest LGBT Festival On the Way


Member tickets go on sale today for the 18th annual NewFest, the city’s biggest gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender film festival, skedded this year for June 1-11. The Reeler stole a few minutes the other day from NewFest director Basil Tsiokos, who confessed to not just a little exhaustion as he and his staff wind down their final preparations for 2006.
“It’s been a good process in terms of getting the films that I want,” said Tsiokos, who selected roughly 230 shorts and features from roughly 1,100 submissions and viewings from other festivals. “I think we’ve got a pretty strong lineup overall, with a lot of premieres for the New York area.” At the top of the premiere stack is Strangers With Candy, Paul Dinello’s long-awaited adaptation of the cult classic TV show, featuring an A-list New York cast including Amy Sedaris, Steven Colbert, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Matthew Broderick and Sarah Jessica Parker. As noted here Wednesday, Tsiokos will chat with Sedaris and Dinello at a free Soho Apple Store event on June 8.
Tsiokos noted the Sundance comedy Forgiving the Franklins among the other films he is particularly excited to screen, also namechecking other international fest faves like the Mexican drama Broken Sky, the documentaries Camp Out and Cruel & Unusual and the experimental Berlin Film Festival gem Combat. The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros, which claimed the Berlinale’s Teddy Award for best feature, will appear as well. NewFest’s Filmmakers Forum calendar offers discussions of gay history in cinema, masculinity in the lesbian community and an intensive, 90-minute filmmaking crash course taught by Go Fish writer/director Rose Troche.
I asked Tsiokos, who joined NewFest as an intern in 1996 before ascending to his current post in 2000, to chart the festival’s evolution as both a film and community event in New York. “For a long time, the only gay film festivals were only in the major cities,”he said. “Now there are gay festivals everywhere; every small town seems to have a new festival. I believe I’ve been told the stat that there are more gay film festivals than any other kind of festival out there, just because it shows the way that it serves a community function as well as a place for filmmakers to display their talents. It also exists as a way to bring the local gay and lesbian community together.
“That said,” Tsiokos continued, “we (started as) one of the first festivals where you kind of just showed what was available–you didn’t really have much of a selection. There were so few films that you kind of had to hunt around at times. Now submissions are up every single year. There’s always a lot of work that you want to show that you can’t, because not only is there so much work being produced, but there are other competitions in New York and other places for films to screen. I think the festival in the time that I’ve been with it, even, has definitely matured to become a more professional organization–more respected outside the community and through the industry, but it definitely relflects the changing environment and the changing way that gays and lesbians are represented in media in a more public forum.”
The full program for Newfest ’06 is here, and again, NewFest members can score their tickets today. General ticket sales start May 24; most films run about $12, with the Filmmakers Forum events starting at $6. And of course, I hope you will check back with The Reeler for more coverage throughout the festival.

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon