Nantucket is famed for its whaling past, its sky-high real estate prices ($1.2 million is the average cost for a home), and an infamous limerick.Less famously, it has established itself as an island refuge for cinephiles and film people. The Nantucket Film Festival, founded in 1996 by resident siblings Jill and Jonathan Burkhart as an event focusing on the neglected art of screenwriting, celebrates its 20th anniversary this year, with screenings Wednesday through June 29.Though the Burkharts had limited financing, they had important friends. Among their Nantucket neighbors were such celebrities as MSNBC host Chris Matthews (who will be conducting this year’s “In Their Shoes . . .” onstage interview with famed screenwriter Robert Towne) and the comic team of Jerry Stiller and his wife, Anne Meara, who, along with their son — director, actor, and dour funnyman Ben Stiller — contributed their time and influence. After a hardscrabble but enthusiastic start with 500 in attendance, the festival progressed into a noteworthy event that attracts major filmmaking talent. Last year drew 7,500 visitors and received triple the funding of the maiden outing.Certainly there have been a few bumps over the years, including the 2008 recession, but one recent setback cut deeply on a more personal level. Meara died on May 23 at 85, casting a pall over the festival’s preparations. “Anne had been a part of the festival fabric since year one,” says NFF executive director Mystelle Brabbée, who has curated the festival for 16 years. “She has participated in so many things. One year she hosted the Screenwriters Tribute (we gave it to Judd Apatow). We have screened numerous films she has been in — ‘Daytrippers,’ ‘Southie’ — so we are creating a tribute piece that shows her work and connection to the island.” The tribute will be seen at “a few events.”Brabbée sees this year’s milestone not just as an opportunity to reflect on the past, but as a challenge to plan for the future. “I’ve watched the festival grow,” she says by phone from the island. “The seeds have been planted and the roots have taken hold. For 20 years it has grown in terms of attendance and venues and guests coming in, and pass holders and ticket buyers. But what we are looking at is the next 20 years. Where are we going?”One direction is toward television.“Our mission to shine the spotlight on excellent storytelling and screenwriting hasn’t changed,” Brabbée says. “But the last couple of years we have opened up the focus not just to movies but . . . to television. This year we have a TV writing award and we’re giving it to Beau Willimon [‘House of Cards’].”Some cinema purists might find this blasphemous. Not so Robert Towne, 80, the legendary writer of such masterpieces as “Chinatown” (1974) and “Shampoo” (1975) and the recipient of this year’s Screenwriters Tribute, an honor given in past years to such greats as David O. Russell, Aaron Sorkin, Charlie Kaufman, and Alexander Payne. Last September Towne created a stir when he joined the writing team for the last season of “Mad Men.” “I thought they were wonderful writers and I enjoyed contributing,” Towne says over the phone from his office in Los Angeles. “The need to keep on churning out ‘Jurassic Parks’
and various other franchises hasn’t done much good for the art of screenwriting. So a lot of the best screenwriting has been on television.”He compares the current situation in television to the New Hollywood Cinema of the ’70s that he helped spearhead. “What made that possible is the fact that people who were making movies were pretty much left alone,” he says. “Not a lot of executives felt called upon to contribute to the process. Today it’s television that has been left more to the writers than to the executives.”Another tack the festival will be taking is in the direction of female filmmakers.“Certainly there’s an industry-wide conversation about it,” says Brabbée, “both in Hollywood and in independent film. In both there is a real disparity between the number of male- and female-directed films.”To address that issue, the NFF has put together “Women Behind the Words: Stories From Hollywood’s Front Lines,” a panel discussion moderated by NPR’s Ophira Eisenberg and featuring Stacy L. Smith, a professor at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, Nancy Dubuc, the A&E Network’s president and CEO, and actresses Lili Taylor and Jacqueline Bisset.The festival will also present some of its top awards to women. Leslye Headland (“Bachelorette”) — whose second feature, the skewed screwball comedy “Sleeping With Other People,” is one of the Festival Spotlight movies — will receive the New Voices in Screenwriting Award.“It’s a big honor and the other people they have chosen for this award are people whom I respect,” she says on the phone from LA. “The festival is pro-women and screenwriter-centric and it’s a nice vote of confidence for my second film and for the work I did before.”Veteran documentarian Liz Garbus, whose most recent film is “What Happened, Miss Simone?,” will receive the Special Achievement in Documentary Storytelling award. Garbus is gratified that the festival not only acknowledges the achievements of women, but the storytelling virtues of documentaries, one of the few genres in which women have near parity with men.“The editing process in documentaries is like screenwriting,” she says on the phone from New York. “I don’t work from a script, I work from the material itself. It’s very much like creating a narrative arc in a screenwriting situation, so the same things that work for drama in a screenplay work for drama in a documentary film. Which is why I find it a very cool award and honor, because too often people don’t recognize the craft and storytelling aspect in documentary movies.”Such programs and awards aside, the films themselves are what determine a festival’s success. In that regard, the NFF boasts some high-profile draws. Among them are “Mistress America,” the latest comedy from Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig; James Ponsoldt’s “The End of the Tour,” a drama about the late writer David Foster Wallace, starring Jesse Eisenberg and Jason Segel; and Alex Gibney’s documentary about the late founder of Apple, “Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine.”But the unexpected, unheralded treasures often provide a festival with its distinctive panache. Program director Basil Tsiokos, on the phone from Nantucket, suggests a few favorites.“On the documentary side I’d recommend Dan Rybicky and Aaron Wickenden’s ‘Almost There,’ ” Tsiokos says. “It’s about an outsider artist whom the filmmakers discover and then become enmeshed in his life. . . . It’s a very smart film not only about this artist but about the process of filmmaking and the relationship between the filmmaker and the subject. ‘A Woman Like Me’ is a documentary, but it’s got fictional aspects: Elizabeth Giamatti and Alex Sichel are making a documentary about Alex’s cancer diagnosis, and to cope with it Alex makes a film within the film starring Lili Taylor as her doppelganger. And then . . . I’d suggest first-time director Zachary Treitz’s ‘Men Go to Battle,’ set in the Civil War, a really smart period piece that won the Best New Narrative Director award at Tribeca.”For a full list of films and festival information, go to www.nantucketfilmfestival.org.
Peter Keough can be reached at [email protected].
