37th cleveland international film festival :: April 3 - april 14, 2013
Film Festival Blog
April 3rd, 2011 @ 1:52pm

Dressed for success no matter what

Sorry I vanished! We're preparing for the Closing Night ceremony, which has me distracted in about ten directions at once. But here's that wild story I've been promising you, now that I've finally had enough of a quiet moment to write it up.

We've had some wild and crazy times at the Cleveland International Film Festival over the years. Some of you may remember how, a few years ago, we had a mad scramble to get the film Who Loves the Sun onscreen, after discovering that we'd only received half of the print and that the only other available copy was on the other side of the Canadian border. You may have read about that in our blog or in the Plain Dealer at the time. On Friday night, a similar drama unfolded behind the scenes, and it's too wild not to share!

Did you know that films are now often distributed on hard drives? I had no idea until yesterday, when I talked with our feature film print traffic coordinator, Randy Brunner. Now that we're in the digital age, a lot of film distributors send hard drives out to the theaters... and plaster the data on those drives with a level of copy protection security that rivals the gold vaults at Fort Knox! Several of the films in our Festival this year were sent to us on drives... and there was a mix-up with the security on one of them on Friday.

Dressed, the high fashion documentary that follows the rags-to-gladrags life and career of designer Nary Manivong -- one of our delightful guests this week. Its first showing was on Wednesday at the Capitol Theatre, and that went off without a hitch. When Dave Huffman, our projection booth guru, tested it in the Tower City Cinemas projection booth on Thursday, everything seemed fine and all of the lights were in the green. But then, shortly before showtime, he returned to the booth and discovered that the lights had gone red -- the exhibition license had expired an hour before showtime!

There'd been a technical mixup when the license key had been coded -- it was supposed to expire at 8:00 am the morning after the showing, but instead it had expired twelve hours early. Frantic calls went out to the distributor, trying to get the situation resolved so that the film could run from the drive, while the staff contacted director David Swajeski to see if he'd permit us to use the screener DVD just in case. Both of those calls ended in bad news. The issue with the licensing code wasn't going to get resolved in time for the screening... and our screener version of the film was an out-of-date version that didn't match the final cut. We couldn't show that, either.

Fortunately, Swajeski had a blu-ray of his final cut back in his hotel room. The problem: most of the Festival drivers had already gone home for the night. "Typically we don't have drivers here that late unless there's an airport run," explains Brenda Benthien, our guest relations coordinator. Fortunately one of the drivers, Amanda DeLauder, was still in the Hospitality HQ, taking a breather from the day's activity. She jumped into high gear and whisked Swajeski back to his hotel, which was just a few minutes away by car.

Or at least, it should have been. An accident had snarled the road and had traffic backed up. By the time Swajeski reached the hotel, the start time was already upon him. He raced up to his room, put the key-card into its slot... and nothing happened. His card had been demagnetized by something and wouldn't work. He'd walked into the punch-line of a Steve Mazan stand-up routine, but with the clock ticking, it suddenly wasn't so funny. Racing back downstairs to get a new card, he was confronted by a long line of tired travelers checking in.

"I have three hundred people waiting in a theater," he pleaded with them. "I need to get a new key!"

They let him go to the head of the line.

Meanwhile, back in the theater in question, those three hundred people wouldn't leave their seats. Nary Manivong had jumped into action himself, launching an impromptu pre-film Q&A session that went on for the half-hour that it took Swajeski to bring the blu-ray back to Tower City. But half an hour after the listed start time, that patient and enthusiastic audience was rewarded with their film at last!

David Swajeski was thrilled, telling our directors that he was surprised we hadn't canceled the screening under the circumstances, and that most Festivals would have. (Of course, he hadn't seen the sit-in you guys staged during a glitch in another film a few days before... we knew there was no way you'd have let us!) He was so happy that, when we asked him if we could add another screening on closing night (it begins at 7:20), he agreed without hesitation. Which, of course, means we've gone chasing after another key to the hard drive!

No matter what happens, though, the show always goes on! You wouldn't have it any other way, and neither would we.

Posted by Lara Klaber

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