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Slamdance Co-Founder Peter Baxter and Fest Director Taylor Miller on Moving to Los Angeles
A Slamdance 2024 audience (Photo: Lauren Desberg) Los Angeles is a city in constant renewal. When the Arclight Cinemas closed during COVID in 2021, the initial despair was lessened as a host of repertory options sprang up in its aftermath, including Quentin Tarantino’s revamped Vista Theatre, the Academy Museum and Micah Gottlieb’s Mezzanine series. On the festival side, when L.A. Film Festival and OutFest both shut down a few years apart, much discussion centered around why this city has such difficulty sustaining a film festival, especially when on the opposite coast, the New York Film Festival thrives. (This line of questioning largely overlooks the long-running, can’t-miss AFI Fest and TCM Classic Film Festival.)
Since 1995, Slamdance’s presence in Park City, Utah has acted as a counterpoint to Sundance’s more industry-focused, corporatized festival. Like Sundance (pending), Slamdance has chosen to decamp from Park City, Utah, choosing Los Angeles for their 31st edition, while shifting dates forward slightly to late February.
One immediate benefit of Slamdance’s newfound home in the heart of the movie industry is that it allows the oft-overlooked independent film community in L.A. a greater opportunity to celebrate the work of their peers. Park City may be a short flight from L.A. but housing in the resort town (especially during peak ski season) has always made the trek for indie creators a difficult endeavor. Lockjaw, a narrative feature from Sabrina Greco, premiers on Saturday night, and was one of the first films to sell out once online tickets went on sale. “Lockjaw was made with a majority L.A.-based cast and crew, and it’s wonderful that everyone that worked on the film gets to be part of the premiere,” Greco tells Filmmaker. “It’s also important that now there’s a festival here that can support this community while bringing others from around the country, and the world, into the fold.”
“By filmmakers, for filmmakers”: Slamdance has always focused on discovering and illuminating new talent, and it’s no small feat that they were there first with Christopher Nolan, Greg Mottola and Sean Baker to name a few notable alumni. Recent discoveries include Kit Zauhar (Actual People), Clay Tatum (The Civil Dead) and Frédéric Da (Teenage Emotions). This year’s Slamdance carries that perennial excitement regarding what unknown filmmaker is to be discovered hidden among this edition’s 146 films from 20 countries. Among the titles: Woody Bess’s comedy Portal to Hell has Richard Kind as a demon who enters Earth through a fiery laundromat dryer. In a rare move, Erin Brown Thomas’s Chaser, a single-take proof-of-concept pilot, will play Slamdance after first premiering at Sundance this January. Festival director Taylor Miller highlights new program 6XTY, made up of shorts all clocking in at 60 seconds or less. “You’ll sit down and in 45 seconds your mind’s completely blown,” Miller says.
Slamdance kicks off tonight with a sold-out screening of environmental documentary Out of Plain Sight at the historic Egyptian Theater in Hollywood. The festival will then shift to Quixote Studios in West Hollywood, as a single location setting is critical to fostering the community and connection Slamdance prioritizes. I spoke with Slamdance co-founder Peter Baxter and Miller on the decision to leave Park City, filmmakers as programmers and if there’s any pain in discovering new talent and then sending them on their way.
Filmmaker: Outside of the big move to Los Angeles this year, how has Slamdance evolved over the past 30 years? Have you noticed changes in your mission or how you’ve approached things?
Baxter: We’ve always focused on the discovery of new filmmakers, the launching of careers and new ideas in filmmaking. That has been and still is our mission. But what is exciting right now in coming to L.A. is how we can grow Slamdance. In Park City, there have been moments where we wished there could be more collaboration with our neighbors and location. Coming to L.A., this is beginning to happen, and not so much for Slamdance—it’s happening for the independent filmmaking community and the filmmaking community here in Los Angeles.
Over the last 12 months planning the festival, we’ve been able to form community partnerships that not only strengthen that mission that we’ve had for all of these years, but grow the festival in other ways. Netflix is providing this amazing opening night for us at the Egyptian Theatre. We’ve sold that event out—great start. But also important is grassroots filmmaking. We’ve established a partnership with the Compton Unified School District partnership where high school students are going to be working at the festival. Our Slamdance alumni are going to three high schools in Compton to share their knowledge of positions above and below the line. USC will provide those Compton filmmakers a showcase later on in the year. This initiative is supported by ARRAY in Los Angeles, who are providing mentors to come and support them through the festival. Market Monday aims to bring all kinds of L.A. film industry members together, to look at refreshing distribution and at the future of filmmaking through the lens of accessibility. Easterseals is our accessibility partner this year. We began our Unstoppable program a few years ago, and we see great opportunity in Unstoppable expressing new ideas in accessible filmmaking. These initiatives help us strengthen the independent filmmaking ecosystem. For the audience, we have $50 passes. This is not easily done in Park City. We’ve got $50 passes here in Los Angeles, and they’re sold out. If you have a pass, you get to see every single film (if you get your tickets in time). It’s important for us to show that it’s there for everybody.
Filmmaker: Festivals often seem to unilaterally increase their individual ticket price by about $5 each year, so now you have individual tickets priced at an absurd $35 or $40 at some fests. A full pass available for $50 is remarkable. Taylor, I understand Unstoppable and the accessibility aspect is a major part of your mission as festival director.
Miller: Five years ago, Juliet Romeo, a filmmaker and advocate, wrote Peter a letter about film festivals and accessibility: “What’s going on? What can we do together? How can we make things better for people in the community with visible and nonvisible disabilities?” Unstoppable has elevated everything. When programmers are watching submitted films, if there is a character being portrayed that is not authentically disabled, it doesn’t get watched. We’re so committed to being honest and fair. It’s been a bit emotional sometimes for me to think about all of those discussions that we had in 2020, and then last year when we reached out to our Slamdance community about geographically moving from Utah. The email we sent out said we are putting accessibility and community first. The feedback was incredible. Going from all of these ideas, all of these maybes and possibilities, to really doing it—what we said we would do, we’re doing, and sometimes it takes a lifetime to be able to say a sentence like that. We don’t take for granted that we made this massive move. We want so much for our filmmakers, for the community. This is absolutely the right place for it, because based on our feedback from filmmakers in the Unstoppable program and in other programs, community is critical right now in Los Angeles.
Filmmaker: Making the decision to leave Park City, was there any hesitancy in light of the recent history of festivals struggling to make it here, specifically with the L.A. Film Festival and OutFest both shuttering? Part of it is that L.A. is such a big city. A festival here must decide where it wants to be within this very large geographic space.
Baxter: In making the decision to move, we involved our community, meaning alumni and our programmers. We have over 250 programmers currently. We obviously involved the board. As a community, everyone was involved in that decision. At the time, I felt as though that it was the best of times and the worst of times to move to L.A. for some of the reasons you’ve just mentioned. It’s not easy to start a festival in L.A. And yet, because of festivals no longer existing here, we felt that there was a space there. We also felt this excitement of being able to collaborate with others in L.A., to grow not just what Slamdance is doing with its program, the filmmakers, but also for the greater good.
We made the announcement and didn’t know whether we’d have a drop in submissions, but we had record-breaking submission numbers. Over 3,000 filmmakers applied just from the L.A. area. Although the entertainment business in Los Angeles is going through a lot of plate-shifting and uncertainty at the moment, it’s clear that from the grassroots perspective, not only is it alive here, it is thriving. Those filmmakers want a showcase for their work, and we are providing that. But we want to do more, not just for those filmmakers that are in Slamdance, but for those filmmakers that aren’t.
It’s the people that make things go. It’s not the buildings. You do need a place for them to gather, and in L.A., it’s difficult to find that central location where you can stay together, hang out all day, be together, have conversations which might affect your career, showcase your work and so on. We’ve been incredibly fortunate with Quixote Studios. We’re taking over their studio: three soundstages, the whole lot—that is the hub, the village green where everyone can gather. This is central to why Slamdance worked in Park City. There was a place where people could gather wherever we were, whether it was the Treasure Mountain Inn at the top of Main Street or last year at the Yarrow. Finding that place in L.A. is difficult, but we found it. Let’s see how that goes. But we’re excited about being able to say that we’ve got that place where you’re invited to come and hang out, watch films, be a part of it. It’s accessible. And although passes are sold out, we still have free events at that location, which you can register for, so you can still come and join us.
Filmmaker: With the independent spirit that Slamdance champions, the assumption might be that that’s largely American. But in my interactions with Slamdance over the years, and in going through this year’s program, what impresses me is your mix of American cinema with international cinema. How do you balance the two?
Baxter: There is a focus on North American independent filmmaking, which means then you’ll always see at least 50% American, with a breakdown usually of around 60/40, American to the rest of the world. It’s an open discussion amongst programmers of, “What is the makeup here? Why are we programming more American versus the rest of the world?” We have very few rules and regulations. The origins of Slamdance focused on American independent filmmaking, so today it works out that a majority of films are going to be from this area, but we’ve taken into account other factors increasingly. For example, look at Accident (L’incidente), Giuseppe Garau’s film from last year. He didn’t make his low-budget Italian feature film through the state. As a result of that, he found it difficult for his film to be considered in Italy and Europe, because it wasn’t part of those co-pro film productions, which oftentimes get preferential treatment when they come in front of festivals. It is important to show films like Accident or Fabio D’Orta’s The Complex Forms at the festival. After Slamdance, they started to get press interest and sales interest in their home countries. That is what Slamdance can do.
Filmmaker: Slamdance has a unique model where you bring on filmmakers from previous years as programmers. Where did that idea originate?
Baxter: So, a wild group of filmmakers got together. Let’s not pretend here: we had no experience in running or programming a festival, and nearly all of us hadn’t even been to a festival before. So, who are we to start calling ourselves professional programmers? But we are filmmakers, and we somehow got it together for year one. Why couldn’t we then continue it for others like us in years to come? Let’s give it a try to see how that works out. It quickly became apparent: don’t try to be a programmer. Be a filmmaker, be an artist, someone who is behind, for and feels passionate about independent filmmaking.
It’s a system that we develop. It’s not an institution. It has very few rules and regulations. There are lots of disagreements, but they’re creative ones. We’ve embraced that, and that’s how we run it, and it’s worked. Can you imagine, if you’re a festival manager, having to manage over 250 stray cats? How do you do that? But we do. That’s how Slamdance works, and is its essence. Taylor says the programmers are our lifeblood. Without them, we wouldn’t be Slamdance. I’m one programmer with one vote. No one has any higher or lower say. We all get our vote in the groups that we program in, and that’s it. We stay out of other people’s groups. We don’t interfere. We’re conscious of accessibility, and of trends that we discuss. But when it comes down to it, the programmers make their own decisions. They’re led by co-captains, who, again, don’t have any higher say than anybody else—they’re there to guide. We find it to be successful. The programmers love it. To them, it’s what independent filmmaking is all about, where the artists themselves have a say in supporting other filmmakers.
Filmmaker: Slamdance’s mission to support emerging filmmakers stands in contrast to other festivals, like Cannes, for instance, where filmmakers often start in a category like Directors’ Fortnight or Un Certain Regard and eventually graduate to Competition. From there, they tend to program these directors’ new works for decades. How do you grapple with the fact that you’re potentially a stepping stone in certain respects for your filmmakers? I assume there’s great pride in these young filmmakers eventually becoming titans of Hollywood filmmaking, but they’ve moved on regarding where their future movies premiere. Is there ever a sense of regret with that aspect? Are you OK constantly looking forward, finding the next batch of promising independent filmmakers to champion and shepherd?
Miller: I’m always incredibly proud and so excited for our filmmakers that go on to do big things. It’s all part of the artist’s journey. We get this incredibly special opportunity to know them and their film at this time in their career, then we have to let it go. We embrace it, but we also have to be ready to send it on its way.
Baxter: You can pay it forward as a filmmaker at Slamdance, and this sense of mentorship is inherently missing in the world of independent filmmaking in the United States a lot of the time. It has been there for a long time elsewhere, but perhaps not enough in U.S. filmmaking. We have been dominated by the studio system, and now we’re in this streaming business of things as well. Where does that leave independent filmmaking? One of the reasons why Slamdance filmmakers do well is the support they’re receiving from alumni. Having filmmakers themselves come back from the festival to give back, to pay it forward, to help program the next festival—this gives new life to what we’re doing, and also to independent filmmaking, with the films that we’re programming and the filmmakers that are discovered.
Then you have alumni who are able to do more than that, like Anthony and Joe Russo with the AGBO fellowship, which is given to a filmmaker each year, and involves mentorship and prize money. Memories of Love Returned received financial support from Stephen Soderbergh, another Slamdance alumni. If we look at the alumni that have been supporting Slamdance over the years, it’s one of the reasons that we’re still here. So, this idea of how to grow mentorship and collaborate with others in independent film, it’s something that forever needs nurturing and development. We champion these filmmakers for the year. And yes, they may go on, and they may not come back, but usually they all do in some way, because they recognize this is where they got their start. It meant something. Sean Baker is another example with Takeout. Sean is a great supporter of Slamdance. We have strong alumni backing because we did something as a community to support their film work. They haven’t forgotten that, so they help to pay it forward for the others to come.
Slamdance runs from February 20 to 25th in Hollywood.
