With just days till opening night of the Sarasota Film Festival, Tom Hall and Holly Herrick are sprinting to the finish.
Neon green Post-it notes proliferate across Hall's desk, which is set flush against Herrick's in an "L" shape. DVD cases crowd nearby shelves. A disemboweled Amazon.com shipping box lies discarded on the jewel green carpet.
"S-h-i-m-p?" asks festival programmer Herrick, without looking up from her laptop screen. The festival's ticketing website goes live tonight at midnight, and she and Hall — the director of programming — are painstakingly double-checking everything, making sure pages load properly and proofing the descriptions they've written for each of the 160-plus films they've selected for this year's event.
"No. It's uh…" Hall says, double-checking the spelling on his desktop monitor before repeating it to the slender and curly-haired Herrick. "It's S-h-a-m-p. Like, 'Shamp.' And the event, oops, and the event number is 1079." Hall — with closely cropped hair, spectacles and an untucked navy polo shirt — clears up a few more details, then begins peeling the neon Post-it notes from his desk and mumbling out their contents. He triumphantly crumples them up and pitches them in the garbage. His to-do list just got that much shorter. When your tasks include not just scheduling events but wrangling celebrities, your to-do list tends to be a long one. SFF is, as always, packed with starpower: attendees will include Woody Harrelson, Steve Buscemi, Bill Paxton, artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude and Jon Voight, who's part of a tribute to the late Hal Ashby, director of Harold and Maude, Coming Home (for which Voight won the Best Actor Oscar) and Shampoo (that's spelled "S-h-a-m-p-o-o").
If Hall and Herrick are meticulous about making sure every detail is right, it's for good reason: As the force behind the selection of films the festival has screened for the past several years, they have a reputation to uphold. And in a year of well-publicized change for the festival (former head Jody Kielbasa out, new pres Mark Famiglio in), Hall and Herrick have remained constant, which means festival-goers' expectations will remain as high as they are every year.
So yeah, there's pressure.
Hall and Herrick have each worked on five Sarasota Film Festivals, four of them in tandem, but neither is a full-time Sarasota resident. The second-story Cocoanut Avenue office the two share also doubles as domicile, where Hall and Herrick crash from early February till the Late Night Wrap Party each year. Both spend the rest of their time in Brooklyn.
But that doesn't mean putting together the lineup for the festival takes just a couple months. The two make and maintain industry contacts year-round, and their serious research begins each September at the Toronto International Film Festival. "We see about 75, 80 movies in a week at that festival, combined," Hall says. "And then from there, we go to the New York Film Festival. Holly also works at the Hamptons film festival, and she's seen a lot of films through their submission process and their coverage. … So we spend the autumn, essentially, inviting things that we like, and at the same time the submission process starts."
With the rise of the festival's profile, those submissions are getting better each year. "We're definitely getting stuff submitted that we might have found out [about] through another festival and invited," Herrick says. "And people just submit to us, whereas in the past that didn't happen as much."
But more submissions also mean more films to sift through, and whittling down all that celluloid into just the number of movies that will fit in the festival calendar is an annual conundrum. Plus, Hall and Herrick have to perform a balancing act to put together a thematically rounded film festival. There should be old films, but plenty of new ones as well; work by established greats, but movies from fresh unknowns, too; funny flicks, but also serious tomes.
In short: They kind of have to please everyone.
And they do go out of their way to program films with appeal specifically for Sarasota. One theme running through this year's festival is a selection of films focusing on the performing arts, chosen specifically because of the city's love for the theater. "We use that, though, and we say, 'Okay, now that we've served that sort of populous thing, where can we show new work and new ideas that people may not be as experienced with?'" Hall says, "and try to introduce them to new artists and independent filmmakers and younger people and things that they might otherwise not see."
"Many times this has happened, where one of us comes in and says, 'I love this movie. Most people are going to hate this movie,'" says Herrick with a chuckle. "And we have to decide: Is it worth it for the five people who are going to love it?"
And if an audience doesn't like a film, rest assured Hall and Herrick will hear about it. Last year, the festival screened J'Entends Plus La Guitare (I Can No Longer Hear the Guitar), an examination of love and drugs by French auteur Philippe Garrel. "It's very abstract, and very French," Hall says. "And people would come out of the theater with their eyes that just glare at me. They're like, 'Who allowed this to be projected on the screen?'" Herrick laughs: "I don't think we've ever lost so many audiences."
While it may occasionally turn sour, witnessing viewer reaction firsthand at the Hollywood 20 is what makes all the long hours worth it for Hall and Herrick. They're often so stressed and busy that the parties aren't even pleasurable. "I'm very detail-oriented and meticulous and want it to be perfect every time, everything," Hall says, "so it can be going 99 percent great and the 1 percent will just stick in my craw." That's not to say Hall isn't satisfied: He says last year's festival went almost flawlessly.
But that "almost" means there's still room for improvenemnt, and that's why he and Herrick are poring over every detail on the website before it goes live, that's why they don't turn the festival's well-attended parties into all-night binges, that's why their bedrooms are just steps from their desks.
That's why those pesky green Post-it notes keep popping up.
This article appears in Mar 25-31, 2009.