They've been changing teams with the frequency of baseball superstars.
Geoff Gilmore, the head of the Sundance Film Festival, left Robert Redford's festival last month to work for another actor of a certain age: Gilmore's now the chief creative officer at Robert De Niro's Tribeca Enterprises, the parent company of the Tribeca Film Festival.
The head Sundance festival programmer, John Cooper, was elevated into Gilmore's job early this month. A day later, Rebecca Yeldham, herself a former Sundance programmer, moved in to oversee the Los Angeles Film Festival, which had lost its director, Richard Raddon, in November.
Kent Jones, the associate director of programming at New York's Film Society of Lincoln Center, left his position earlier this month too. Last year, Christian Gaines exited his post directing the AFI Festival to run the online festival submission/distribution entity Withoutabox, while former South by Southwest programmer Matt Dentler left the Austin, Texas, gathering to work in digital media sales for Cinetic Rights Management.
This recent surge of job switches was not set off by any single fracture within independent film (where a number of top distributors have closed their doors) or inside the festival world (which is suffering its own shakeout, with numerous festivals shutting down). But the moves do underscore how volatile the festival world has suddenly become and how programmers foresee leaner and more focused events in the months ahead.
"There's been more news in the independent film festival world in the last three weeks than I can recall ever happening in my life," says Nancy Schafer, executive director of the increasingly prominent Tribeca Film Festival, whose eighth annual get-together runs in New York from April 22 to May 4.
Says Trevor Groth, a veteran Sundance programmer who also serves as artistic director for the up-and-coming Las Vegas CineVegas Film Festival, marking its 11th edition this summer: "It's indicative of what's happening in the indie world -- there's a lot of change going on."
Taken together, the leadership shifts play up the importance of hiring the right festival director -- typically chosen by a board of directors -- and of the director selecting the right programming staff. Choose well and you're presiding over the next big thing; make a poor choice, your movie-lover event goes the way of Smell-o-Vision.
