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Selling Shorts The Mill Valley Film Festival has to promote itself too. To that end, the festival has continually produced some of the most creative promotional “trailers” in the industry. BY DAVID TEMPLETON Over the course of its full 40 years, the Mill Valley Film Festival has become famous for more than just its parties, visiting celebrities and tendency to show movies that go on to win Oscars. The MVFF has also become known for its trailers, those imaginative, entertaining promotional shorts created each year to promote the festival in amusing, sometimes baffling, sometimes challenging ways. “People call them trailers, those little film festival shorts,” notes Dennis Scheyer, founder of the San Francisco advertising agency that created some of the most memorable such festival promos between 1996 and 2010. “The only problem is, they’re not really trailers,” he says. “Trailers are actually built from clips of some upcoming movie. What the festival makes are short little films that promote the festival itself, not any particular movie. For what it’s worth, the Mill Valley Film Festival has had some of the best promotional shorts ever made for any film festival anywhere.” One of the earliest shorts — still considered one of the greatest by those who remember it — was a legendary threeminute piece produced for the MVFF’s eighth outing. It was released in fall 1985. Though Scheyer had nothing to do with that one, he says its influence on future festival promos has been enormous. “When I first came on board to start making shorts for the festival, that’s the one everyone pointed to as the cream of the crop,” he says. “It’s the one everybody always compares all others to.” Created by the San Francisco ad agency of Goodby, Berlin & Silverstein (the same folks behind the “Got milk?” campaign), the wry-humored “mockumentary” blended a hip surf-rock soundtrack with clips of “average” Mill 14
“The Mill Valley Film Festival has had some of the best promotional shorts ever made for any film festival anywhere.”
Valley residents — sushi chefs, trash collectors, butchers, cops and kids eating breakfast — all waxing eloquent about independent film and foreign movies, debating the differences between the French New Wave and New Zealand experimentalism, deriding their bosses for not knowing who Joseph Papp was. The short ended with a gag featuring an auto mechanic at work — only his legs visible, sticking out from under a car — as he spiritedly relays a cinema-themed joke to his fellow grease-jockeys. “God’s up in Heaven, right?” he says. “God looks down at his calendar and he sees the end of the world is coming up. And he decides somebody should film it, right? So he has Saint Peter go down and shop the property for a director. Saint Peter comes back and says he can’t find a director. “God says, ‘Well, what about Lucas?’ “St. Peter says, ‘He won’t do it. He’ll produce it, but he won’t direct it!’ ‘That’s no good,’ God says. ‘How about Spielberg?’ ‘He can’t do it,’ says Saint Peter. ‘It’s something to do with his contract! How about Coppola?’ “God says, ‘Coppola? Coppola? I gotta make a profit on this thing!’ ” The little comedy classic can still be viewed on YouTube and other web video platforms. It was a promo created 10 years later in 1995, Scheyer says, that inspired him to reach out to Mark Fishkin, founder of the festival, to offer his services. “It has Jesus in a taxicab,” he recalls. “It was extremely controversial and not well received. I remember seeing that and calling up the production company and saying, ‘What was that? I could make a more effective film than that!’ And they said, ‘Well, maybe you should!’ So I
MARIN MAGAZINE 2017 MILL VALLEY FILM FESTIVAL GUIDE
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