The Toronto Film Festival is increasingly lending its audience and celebrity luster to indie TV producers eyeing new small-screen financing models as the era of easy streaming money goes away.
“It’s about the whole package. It’s our curatorial stamp of approval. It’s access to decision-makers. It’s access to mentors, and it’s something you can put on your résumé for years to come,” Geoff Macnaughton, senior director of industry and theatrical programming, tells The Hollywood Reporter.
Macnaughton, who also programs the Primetime showcase of high-end TV series at TIFF, is getting set to reveal the lineup for his section’s 2023 edition as the marquee film festival gets deeper into premiering high-end international TV shows in front of cinema audiences.
The Primetime sidebar last year showcased seven TV series, including five world premieres, with auteur Lars von Trier bringing his The Kingdom Exodus series to TIFF, while also premiering fifth-season episodes of MGM’s The Handmaid’s Tale and the Allen Hughes FX docuseries Dear Mama.
Macnaughton says that number of international series premieres will grow this year, as will the festival’s TV accelerator program for emerging creators, as TIFF in September looks to spotlight the best in international TV and draw in indie producers eyeing the Canadian festival’s imprimatur of cinephiles and global star power before imminent broadcast or streaming releases.
“Doing well, winning an award at a festival, always helps any show to have quality recognized,” Joe Lewis, a producer of Fleabag and Transparent before he launched Amplify Pictures in 2018, tells THR.
Lewis adds that film festivals that are far more critic and audience-focused than traditional TV markets, like the two MIPs in Cannes, and can help forge new ways to finance and produce series as creators look to distribution models more typical of indie film.
“It’s a much easier sell than it’s ever been,” Macnaughton says of convincing prestige TV producers to bring series in development or ready for broadcast or streaming to TIFF, rather than traditional TV markets tailored more to industry players.
That’s especially true as major studios and streamers are increasingly expected to take fewer, but better swings in TV development as they look to bring down content costs to get nearer to streaming profitability, while also having to navigate the ongoing Hollywood strikes.
“The current path is, you take a series to a streamer or network and they give you money and they decide. We’re trying to figure out new ways to do that,” Lewis explains, with film festival exposure potentially shining a light into that murky future.
TIFF and other major film festivals can allow his L.A.-based company to green light a series without a distributor or broadcast partner attached, he ventures. And that allows creators and artists to retain more skin in the game for shows produced as new financing models are developed for a fast-evolving global TV arena.
For TIFF, the festival can bring its curatorial brand that a film festival has traditionally offered to indie film to a TV series before most everyone outside a creator’s immediate circle has viewed a show. “It’s a stamp of approval for a series prior to it being seen by anyone. That’s when the press will pick it up, or a broadcaster will acquire it if it doesn’t already have distribution,” Macnaughton observes.
Often veteran film producers and distributors branching into TV series will look to past premieres at TIFF and will want that same launch experience for their TV shows. And indie film execs who know the festival circuit well also see the value in bringing a prestige TV series to TIFF.
“I’ve heard of more and more creators working outside the usual funding system for series that are creating something that they truly love and using film festivals to launch that series,” Macnaughton adds.
Rachel Eggebeen, who was recently named chief content officer at Amplify, is a case in point. “There needs to be a shift on the buying side of TV to really create this new marketplace. And that’s where a festival like TIFF and other film festivals could play a role in growing a marketplace for high-end, premium acquisitions in the U.S.,” she tells THR.
“The history of American cinema was changed by film festivals and the notoriety around them. And we’re excited by the idea that festivals could do the same for TV,” Lewis adds.
Lewis suggests that just as a showing at marquee galleries and museums can raise the price of art, screening episodic TV in front of a public at major film festivals can raise the value of a series that would otherwise only be seen by a few network or streamer execs gathered around a boardroom table or at a cloistered TV market.
“It’s possible some great TV shows were not recognized or even made because they didn’t connect with the public or an audience. A film festival represents a chance for the public and critics and everybody to see shows and help raise their value of the shows and create a really incredible flywheel effect,” Lewis argues.
Source: Hollywood
