It’s the big tent of film festivals

I thought I was at a film festival until I ran into a professional eater. He was buried in buttered popcorn in a sort of telephone booth strategically placed in the multiplex that was one of many venues for the Tribeca Film Festival.

Crazy Legs Conti had munched his way down to his shoulder blades before finally giving up. The stunt was intended to get viewers to his documentary “Zen and the Art of Competitive Eating,” but I didn’t have the stomach for it. I had just emerged from an unsettling German film about violence in the West and needed a Diet Coke. Instead, I encountered a man in a white shirt smothered in butter.

Tribeca is a smorgasbord -- a little of this, a little of that. Or more precisely, a lot of this and a lot of that. The 250 films included a few that were commercially cocky -- or is that schlocky? -- like the Olsen twins’ latest, appropriately titled “New York Minute.” But mostly the festival featured first-time pictures by earnest newcomers.

In other words, the Tribeca festival is not the Whitney Biennial, and cinephiles looking for curatorial guidance were surely disappointed.

But enough people appeared eager to be roaming this funky, downtown neighborhood and taking in the festival part as much as the films. And for the time being, that fulfills the founders’ chamber of commerce goal -- to gin up business for an area devastated by the terrorist attacks of 2001.

In its third year, the nine-day festival that ended Sunday apparently sold 80,000 tickets to movies and panels, a third more than last year. That doesn’t include the free events, among them a Van Morrison concert, kids’ shows and a massive street festival. There were also several “drive-in” movies along the Hudson River, including one to watch the final episode of “Friends.” Some 9,000 viewers sat on blankets and lawn chairs on Pier 25 because who in Manhattan has a car anyway?

People don’t normally associate the idea of “fun” with “New York” and “film festival.” Of course, I’m new to this world and don’t usually go to movies that cost less than $150 million to make. But on Tuesday afternoon -- after I sat through a screening with 50 women who had come from as far away as Japan to see a sci-fi star I had never heard of in a low-budget film by a director nobody had ever heard of -- I realized this was a very different festival.

This was more of a populist event, accessible not just for the paid professionals involved in making, selling and criticizing films but for people with all levels of interest in them. Which is probably fitting for New York, a place of enforced togetherness where people come from all over the world to get a foothold and move up and out.

A shared mission

“I’m looking to talk to the press about my film,” 21-year-old Crystal Liu confided to Vinod Ganatra, 53. They came from opposite ends of the world but they were in New York on the same mission. She, of Los Angeles wearing flip-flops, and he, of Bombay in leather slippers, had won entry to Tribeca, but neither had a distribution deal for their work.

After the three of us settled into the couches in the festival’s hospitality tent, it emerged that there was hardly a filmmaker at the six-block festival who hadn’t come dreaming of meeting an investor, a producer, a distributor or any one of the elusive three as long as that person had a suitcase of cash.

“I believe in knocking on every door,” said Ganatra, who had already taken his children’s film, “A Blind Camel,” to several festivals and was on his way to Cannes, which starts this week.

These filmmakers -- by now we were joined by a third, 27-year-old Ruth Borgobello of Melbourne, Australia -- put the neophyte Tribeca right up there with Berlin, Toronto, Cannes and Sundance. That’s not the popular view among the film aficionado who would rather be dipped in popcorn oil than attend a film festival that included the Olsen twins.

But Ganatra insisted he knew better: “It’s New York. It’s big, it has rich sponsors, TV coverage, $25,000 prizes! What do they want?” Borgobello and Liu, both film-school graduates, offered a more academic analysis of why Tribeca was sure to attract great movies, important film makers, big deals: “It’s important exactly because the festival has a balance between commercial and independent films,” said the young Australian. “It offers newcomers more exposure to a broader audience.”

As I was leaving I overheard Ganatra regaling the younger women with how it took three camels, four hours and nine rolls of 35-millimeter film for him to get just one shot for his movie.

Borgobello leaned in closer: “Did you say you used three camels or three cameras?”

Serious or not?

Susan BRATTON, an investment banker with Sandler O’Neill & Partners, had sneaked out of the office to see about a dozen films, and by Thursday she had sat through some features she really liked but several more that were clinkers.

While riding the elevators to screenings, she had met an older New York couple. The man lectured her that if she was “serious” about film, she’d be attending the established New York Film Festival that takes place this fall at Lincoln Center.

The next day she happened to be uptown and picked up a brochure for the more prestigious event: “I don’t know how serious I really am,” she said. “I just like the movies, and there were some good ones this week.”

Peter Scarlet, the festival’s new director, doesn’t mind the comparison to that other New York festival known for its esoteric selections or to any of the 1,200 festivals that go on around the globe every year. “Ours is the ‘big tent’ festival,” Scarlet said.

It was odd to hear an event so clearly dominated by left-leaning Democrats described with a metaphor that has been associated with the moderates of the Grand Old Party. But Scarlet, former director of the San Francisco Film Festival, was trying to make a point:

“I grew up in this town and this is the crossroads of the world and should be the crossroads of the world of cinema. So I traveled all over looking for new works so we could include an eclectic selection.”

Again, the film snobs interpret eclectic as amorphous. But most successful festivals apparently take a while to find themselves -- for Sundance to become a scramble for hot films, for Cannes to attract that many women in diaphanous dresses. Tribeca may be ahead of itself with its own Vanity Fair party, an un-manic version of the Oscar night event at Morton’s.

Role reversal

It’s extraordinary to think of anything that takes place in Manhattan as less manic, less all-business than in California, which apparently is not what it used to be. But that seems to be the case when it comes to film festivals, or at least with Tribeca.

The premiere of Larry Golin’s touching first film, “Cross Bronx,” felt like a homecoming of sorts. Almost everybody associated with this coming-of-age story -- the director, the actors, the producers, the cinematographer -- were New Yorkers who had moved to Los Angeles to be in “the business.” Last week, their friends, relatives and in-laws from the Bronx seemed to confuse the film’s premiere with a Yankee game, whooping and hollering as the credits rolled. (On Sunday night, it won the festival’s best high-definition technology award.)

Later, Golin confirmed a growing impression that while New York once was the place where business got done and L.A. was where people kicked back, now it’s the reverse. Movie people come to New York for fun, and L.A. is all about jaded business.

“People in Los Angeles go there on a mission, a hunting trip. All they want is to be an Actor, a Screenwriter, a Director. And that’s all they want to be about, all the time,” he says. “Here it’s across the board. Yeah, you want to be in pictures, but there’s another life in New York; there’s a hundred other lives that your friends and family are living. So you can come to a festival and have fun.”

Did he say fun?