What is the Tribeca Film Fest?

Rosenthal makes the very valid point that much of Tribeca is weather-dependent—the annual street fair and even the drive-in movies are springtime events. But the cachet of a late-October/early-November TFF—when distributors would be falling all over each other to premiere their awards-season films at a major New York festival—might be more than its organizers could resist.

"I think there are old models here," said Gilmore, asked to survey his new city and the future of festivals in general. "To be honest, that's the kind of question I think about a lot: how to reinvent festivals, what they should be doing, whether or not their agendas—which have evolved greatly—need to be rethought completely." When one considers what's going on technologically and commercially, he said, there's a real question about whether festivals "are going to be obsolete in a decade, because people won't find them valuable anymore—they won't be the platform from which people need to operate."

It's worth noting that one of the things that occurred over the course of Gilmore's tenure at Sundance was its transformation from a "discovery" festival to a market and showcase. It's probably a symptom of success, but thanks largely to Sundance, there's no such thing as a discovery festival anymore. The feeding frenzy goes on all year long.

Meanwhile, Tribeca maintains its traditional split personality. The presence of directors Allen, Spike Lee, and Steven Soderbergh—and movies featuring such celebs as Meg Ryan, Jessica Biel, James Gandolfini, and Hilary Duff—is how the festival sells itself. At the same time, executive director Nancy Schafer says that Tribeca still has a "something-for-everybody" ethos and a "mandate" to support filmmakers all year round; how it does that "is what Gilmore's here to figure out." Presumably, Schafer means those independent filmmakers to whom TFF was theoretically devoted and with whom the festival could have carved a real niche, had its devotion to them been pure. Scarlet was quite open in recent years about ridiculing certain films programmed in the very festival he was supposed to be programming. Perhaps as West meets East—à la Gilmore—the festival will find its true orientation.