Woodstock woos the limelight Long known for Sing Sing Prison movies, valley seeks a broader scope By LYNN WOODS

Woodstock woos the limelight
Long known for Sing Sing Prison movies, valley seeks a broader scope By LYNN WOODS

Laurent Rejto and actress Barbara Sicuranza at the Woodstock Film Festival fundraising gala on July 14, held at the Wiltwyck Golf Club in Kingston.

In the 1920s, Woodstock gained fame as an arts colony. In the 1960s it was a happening place for rock musicians. The festival that bears its name it took place in Bethel, 70 miles away has made Woodstock one of the most famous small towns in the world and plenty of musicians still live and record in the area.

But lately it’s the film world that’s giving the town its cachet. For four days in October, dozens of actors, directors, producers, screenwriters and others in the business descend on the area for the Woodstock Film Festival, an event that also draws thousands of film lovers, some traveling from as far away as Ohio and California, to see a roster of 150 carefully selected, independently produced movies, documentaries and shorts. The festival just held a fundraiser July 14 at Wiltwyck Golf Club in Kingston.

A few stars always make a festival appearance. Last year, Matt Dillon, Rosie Perez, David Strathairn and Timothy Hutton gave out the awards. Top documentary filmmakers, screenwriters, producers, cinematographers and others in the industry are featured on educational panels. Several concerts round out the festival.

The event has been a success since the beginning. Laurent Rejto, who founded and directs the festival with his wife, Meira Blaustein, recalled that the first year, a documentary called “Voice of Heaven” it was paired with a concert performed by 10 Sufi musicians from Pakistan was picked up by a national distributor.

That was in 2000, and since then there have been many other coups. Four films that premiered at Woodstock subsequently won awards at Sundance. “Binta and the Great Idea,” a short shown at last year’s festival, was nominated for an Oscar at this year’s Academy Awards. Produced in France and shot in Senegal, the script was written in Rhinebeck; and it turns out the Spanish filmmaker Javier Fesser had briefly rented a house in the area. That kind of local connection “happens all the time,” said Rejto.

Rejto is doing more than just showing quality independent films, however. He has founded the Hudson Valley Film Commission to woo aggressively filmmakers to work in the area and provide valuable assistance once they are here. Rejto’s numerous contacts, many forged at the film festival, are a key to his success in doing this. “The whole idea is to bring filmmakers to the area to show their films, and bring them back to shoot their films,” said Rejto. “We’re trying to stimulate a film economy, which brings in lots of money and doesn’t pollute. Having films made here is a way to create jobs and opportunities.”

Last year, four feature films shot in the area generated $4 million in revenues, he said. Sitting in his home office in Woodstock, he pulls out forms filled out for various films indicating the number of crew members brought in, the number of people hired locally, the number of hotel rooms used, whether rental cars or vans were used, and other information. One 2006 film was “SuperHeroes,” which generated $100,000 in local expenditures. The film was shot in Stone Ridge and Kingston and brought in 30 crew people to the area for 18 days of production. The crew booked 16 hotel rooms for 12 nights and also used local catering services.

Another was “The Cake Eaters,” which just premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City. One of the producers, Jesse Scolaro, had shown a film at the Woodstock Film Festival in 2001 and returned to the area to get married. Rejto ran into him in Austin, Texas, at the South by Southwest Film Festival and, after learning about the new film project, suggested Scolaro consider shooting it in the Hudson Valley. Scolaro agreed, provided union labor could be found for the actors and art director. Finding local actors belonging to the Screen Actors Guild wasn’t a problem, but the union art director was a challenge. Rejto contacted the art directors’ union for a list of names and located someone locally.

Meira Blaustein, Steve Buscemi and Laurent Rejto at the 2005 Woodstock Film Festival. Buscemi was honored as the annual Maverick Award recipient.

The project resulted in $1.5 million being spent in the area, with 16 locations, 55 crew members and five local hires. The crew booked 40 rooms for 23 nights at a local hotel and also rented cars. Yet another film, “Lonely Man of Faith,” had a more modest outlay of $4,185. However, that was for just one day of shooting. The filmmaker needed a location that suggested turn-of-the-century Russia. Rejto sent him to Byrdcliffe, the art colony located on a forested hillside in Woodstock with rusticated, medieval style wooden buildings.

ATHENS’ SCI-FI SET

Rejto doesn’t get paid for any of these services. In many cases, he’ll hook up a filmmaker with one of the three professional scouts in the area. He provides this kind of assistance because personal contact and high-touch service are essential to landing projects in this extremely competitive business. In some cases, the Hudson Valley is competing with other states to provide attractive locations.

Three years ago, Rejto got a call from the New York State Governor’s Office of Motion Picture and Television Development seeking a farm field and a harbor with a ferry landing for Steven Spielberg’s new film, “War of the Worlds.” The producer from Paramount Pictures was on a tight schedule. Rejto contacted Newburgh and Cold Spring and had scouts on the job, but nothing turned up. Then he got the idea to offer the producer a helicopter he knew someone who had one and hooked him up with the pilot. From the helicopter the producer spotted the Hudson River shoreline of Athens, which was chosen for the harbor scene. (The pilot flew him all over the East Coast, and he picked a field in Virginia, said Rejto.)

A caravan of trucks from California arrived for seven days of shooting in the dead cold of December. The temporary headquarters of the director, actors and staff resembled a military encampment, said Rejto. A thousand extras were hired for three days, amounting to $240,000 in total pay, and 300 rooms were rented at a local resort.

This summer, National Geographic is shooting a documentary about consumption called “Human Footprint” in Dutchess, Ulster and Greene counties. In an Ulster County first, the British-based production company Touch Productions has also set up a film-shooting production facility in Tech City, the former IBM complex in Kingston. Touch Productions brought in a skeleton staff consisting of several producers, a director and a camera person, hiring the remainder a total 150 workers, including actors, sound people and other production people, and set designers locally.

Again, Rejto helped. The producers were looking for suburban locations, including condos and schools, and were also checking out sites in Connecticut and New Jersey. Rejto initially created a Web site for Touch Productions with postings of location photos and contacted the scouts. The director and two producers spent a week in the area, staying at a local B&Bs and eating out every night at The Bear restaurant in Bearsville. When Rejto discovered they were also looking for a film studio, he provided them with pictures of the warehouses at Tech City.

Rejto said constructing a sound stage, either built new or perhaps located in a renovated section of Tech City, is key to growing the industry. It would have to measure at least 7,500 square feet in order to enable productions to qualify for the state’s 10 percent tax incentive. Ideally, a TV show would be created as an anchor for the facility, say a talk show or even better, a cooking show, which could take advantage of the Culinary Institute of America, just 40 miles away, and the area’s abundance of top chefs, said Rejto.

The decentralizing of film production facilities out of the big cities to smaller regions, which is fueled by the rise of the Internet as the new TV, is “a huge opportunity,” he said. “We’d be willing to work with other industries” such as tourism “to get it built.”

MAYBELLINE TO MOVIES

That may sound like pie in the sky. But then, this is a man who started the Woodstock Film Felstival virtually from scratch, without a dime of government money. Rejto said he financed the first year of the event by selling 100,000 Maybelline discontinued rolls of lipstick on eBay (his father-in-law had obtained the lipstick at a federal auction). The investment was minimal. What Laurent and Meira did bring to the table was experience as filmmakers both studied at the School of Visual Arts and had made documentaries valuable contacts and a clear vision of what they wanted to show.

Rejto said he credits his severely disabled son Julian, who recently died, as being one of the central forces to making it all happen. His wife had made a film about the family’s difficulties in getting help to care for the boy, which resulted in many new friendships in the film community. Those relationships have in turn led to many others, in some cases with prominent people in the film industry who’ve been key supporters. For example, the festival received a grant from United Artists thanks to a contact who was the tech director on the film about Julian, Rejto said.

Today, the film festival has a budget of $300,000 and receives support from the New York State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. With about 20,000 seats available in nine venues, the festival is truly regional, encompassing theaters in Woodstock, Rhinebeck, Rosendale and Hunter, along with concert venues in Kingston and at Bard College. The events sell out. Saugerties-based Markertek is the leading corporate sponsor, although most supporters hail from outside the area. They include 120dB Films, a financial services firm; BMI, the national licenser of musical recordings, films, and other performance works; Lovel Light, whose CEO owns a house locally; and multinational liquor company Diageo.

Getting corporate sponsors is a challenge. Many want to be in metropolitan markets, because “they can reach 20 million people at one time,” said Rejto. Some of the other film festivals around the country have franchises, providing sponsors with wider access. Unfortunately, “local companies don’t have money or interest. A few multinationals have local footing,” and it’s those companies he hopes to tap into.

While it’s always nice to have a film picked up for distribution or national recognition, the festival isn’t meant to be a marketplace. Rather, “It’s a great place to network with people and build relationships,” said Rejto, noting that emerging filmmakers have the opportunity to meet directors, cinematographers, screenwriters and composers.

For their part, filmmakers appreciate “the very smart, educated audience,” he said. “They’ll challenge the filmmakers and have an intellectual debate. The filmmakers adore it.” With the largest theater only 165 seats, there’s also a sense of intimacy fostered between the filmmakers and the audience, he added. The lack of hotel rooms in the area means that many of the film people are put up at residents’ houses, spurring more personal and professional relationships.

Actor Kevin Bacon signs the Woodstock Film Festival poster recently in Woodstock.

The festival also does an outreach to the youth community. The Friday afternoon before the event, a career fair is held at the Woodstock Elementary School. Top entertainment attorneys, set designers, screenwriters, editors and even makeup artists are available to talk with visiting teens. The purpose is to show “how you can be somebody other than an actor or director in the industry,” said Rejto.

“It creates a job base,” he said. “A lot of kids have interned at the festival. We work a lot with schools.” He noted that he helped out a student from Saugerties who was making a film with locations and finances. “Our commission work is free of charge. It doesn’t matter if it’s Steven Spielberg or a student.”

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