Ready, set, watch! The 16th edition of the Tribeca Film Festival kicks off Wednesday, April 19, and runs through April 30. What started as a showcase and support system for New York City’s independent film community following 9/11 has become an important cultural — and business — event where classic storytelling and technological innovations converge on a global stage.
The festival will open with the world premiere of the feature length documentary Clive Davis: The Soundtrack of Our Lives about the legendary music man, followed by a live concert featuring Aretha Franklin. On April 30, the festival will close with back-to-back screenings of Godfather and The Godfather Part II, celebrating the 45th anniversary of the American masterpiece. In between, the days will be packed with film, digital, VR, music and gaming content. And at the center of this artistic storm is Andrew Essex, who describes the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival thusly: “12 days of mind-boggling, head-spinning cultural whiplash.”
Entrepreneur spoke with Essex about the challenges and joys of running such a mammoth undertaking. Challenge number one? Getting people off the couch.
You’ve been at Tribeca for just over a year now. What was the biggest problem you needed to solve as CEO?
I don’t think there was so much of a major problem to be solved as a chance to start focusing on the problems of the next five years. Tribeca has entered into its teenage years and anyone alive in the world today recognizes that consumer behavior as it relates to media has radically changed.
When the festival started there was no Twitter or YouTube, let alone iTunes, Netflix and Amazon Prime. And now, all of those things exist and my central hypothesis is that for consumers of content, there really is no reason to leave the house. There are 429 scripted television shows available on any device at any time. So the question becomes: how do you make the event more eventful? We realized that there is a very serious case of…