And I have Susan Kerns with me here. She's the executive director of the Milwaukee Film Festival. It starts tomorrow, right?
Yes, tomorrow, tomorrow is opening night.
You're cleaning the theaters at getting the bubble gum out from the under the seats and getting all that loose popcorn that was
there, cleaning it out, getting all spiffy up for the big opening night of the Oriental and doubter theaters to historic movie theaters in this country.
I'm not just saying in Wisconsin, I'm telling the country, the Oriental built.
Boy, I think it was built during the Depression or before the Depression, very old and downer to an historic movie theater.
And you're lucky to get your hands on those places.
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we're we're looking at celebrating 100 years of the Oriental and just a couple of years.
So we'll have a big big celebration around that. And the downer theater is the oldest operating movie theater.
Certainly in Milwaukee, but it might even be in all of Wisconsin at this point.
Yeah, and WRJN also celebrating its 100th anniversary in two years, a year and a half. That's my inner effect.
Let's get together. Yeah, we'll talk about the old days 100 years ago, 1926.
Okay, so the film festival starts today. What is the film festival people just turning it to and again? What is it?
Yeah, so it's really a celebration of movies. We have so starting tomorrow night, we have over two weeks of all kinds of films from around the world, including a lot of films that were made within Milwaukee.
And the Kenosha area, the M7 region.
Opening night, we have the documentary Sally, which is about Sally Ride.
And this is directed by Christina Constantini, who grew up in Milwaukee and she's now, you know, working all over the world.
But the terrific, terrific film. And it's something that, you know, it's not something that you're going to see at the multiplex.
So that's really what we're trying to do with the film festival is bring the best of films from, again, from around the world, documentaries, fiction films, horror films, subtitled films.
You know, anything that you can think of, short films, give a lot of great short programs, bringing those to the big screen so that people can see those in our historic theaters.
And, you know, just kind of vibe with each other too. Talk to people afterwards, go for a drink after dinner before.
You know, make a whole night of it, really embrace the movie going experience.
You know, and I love theaters. I, you know, I've tell everybody my suit, everybody's got a superpower.
My superpower is I can tell you every single movie I've seen my entire life and which theater I've seen it in.
Wow.
Isn't that a great superpower?
I believe a lot.
You know, it's funny. I was talking to somebody recently and trying to figure out what was the first film I ever thought in a theater.
And I truly can't remember because I remember my parents taking me to the movies a lot when I was a kid.
So I've sort of glimpses of what I was seeing there, but I couldn't tell you which one was the first. That's so interesting.
I think my first one in the theater was Tammy in the bachelor and I was real tiny.
But I remember going to the drive in and we saw Tammy in the bachelor.
I remember my, my can't believe my father actually did all this.
We went to the New York Paramount on 43rd and Broadway. It's no longer there.
And we saw Elvis Presley in Flaming Star.
Now, my parents were big Elvis fans, but we slept the whole family into the Paramount,
which was almost 5,000 seats, just short of radio city musicals, Big Theater to see Flaming Star with Elvis Presley.
And those are the earlier films I remember.
Yeah, that's very cool.
Okay. Now, how do you choose the movies?
Because before we went on the air, I'd say it's like in high school or rather in grammar school,
when you were setting up teams for dodgeball, pick me, pick me, pick me.
Is it something like that when you get all these filmmakers together?
Oh, pick me, pick me.
Something like that.
Well, it's not exactly that physical, but it is a really difficult process,
because we have literally thousands of films that come in, and they're hoping,
they're all hoping for a spot in the film festival.
Part of it is that we do want to make sure that we have a range.
So it can get, you know, where it becomes very competitive is, you know, there might be a year
where we have like two or three or even four films that are all great,
but they're all about a similar subject.
And so that might be a situation where we're like, okay, well, you know,
these three films are great, but this film is, you know, equally as good.
And it's, you know, it was made in Ireland, and we don't have an Irish film yet.
So we're going to grab this one.
Whereas these other three, like we, they're from countries that we already have represented.
Or, you know, it might be that we have a couple of films, and one is like a little bit more,
maybe like action oriented, and we don't have really any other action films that we, you know,
in the festival program yet, so we might grab that one.
So we're really looking to, you know, do like a breadth, but also a depth of programming.
With the local films, it gets incredibly difficult because this year, for example,
I think, oh, I want to say that we had five or six times as many films as we could program,
coming out of the M7 region.
And so we have not quite 50 films that were made in Milwaukee,
Kenosha Racine, like those areas, but we could have them programmed an entirely different set of films,
and still had plenty to choose from.
There's just so much great filmmaking going on in Wisconsin right now.
So it's kind of the, you know, the wealth of, or there's like a French term for the burden of plenty,
you know, it becomes, those choices become very difficult, especially when it's folks we know,
and folks who are doing great work, but it's the same kinds of considerations.
You get a lot of people bothering you leading up to the festival, kind of pushing their films on you,
but it's like radio stations, you'd have record, we call them record pluggers,
used to bother the program director day, and I want you to put my song into the rotation.
Do you get that kind of stuff?
Yeah, I mean, it's not, I think we, I think we don't mind it so much.
But the issue is just that we usually can't, we usually can't watch things that are just sort of sent to us.
So a lot of times filmmakers will reach out and they're like, hey, I've got this film.
It's, you know, it's only 10 minutes, can you watch it?
Or, hey, I've got this feature and it's a rough cut.
You know, here's, you know, here's a cut, can you watch it?
And usually, if it's not in the rotation of our actual programming duties,
it's really hard for us to, to be able to sort of watch the film outside of that programming,
kind of the, the setup that we have for doing that, because it can be,
it's, I think people aren't, like until you've watched 100 films,
you don't understand how, you know, people are like, oh, I want to watch movies for a living,
and you know, then you start doing it.
And it's, it can be very tiring and you want to make sure that you bring your fresh eyes to every film that you watch.
So, so that's where it can get more difficult, I think.
Cisco and Ebert were being interviewed once and everybody was saying to them,
oh, this is a wonderful, they can see movies all day.
He said, for every good movie, I got to sit through four terrible movies.
And when they're two hours, you're spending your whole day winning for this movie to end because it's so bad.
He said, yeah, the good ones are great.
I'd like to see the Godfather three times.
But for every Godfather movie, there's some dog you got to see.
And it just is terribly said, just to sit through these bad movies.
You ever sit through a bad movie and you couldn't wait for it to be over?
Oh, absolutely.
And it's funny that you bring that up.
I was my first sort of film reviewer job.
I was in college.
I went to school at University of Texas in Austin.
And this was on film reviewers.
You know, we got the advanced tickets, so we went to the theaters.
And we had the little light up pens and everything.
I started my, it was an internship.
And I started my internship at the end of January,
not really understanding the cycles Hollywood goes through,
where a lot of times they put the films that they know are not going to be very good
into like a February slot.
And so the first month of my job there was going to just film after film after film.
That was, I mean, I'm not even going to name them.
They've all mostly been forgotten, I think.
But I was like, oh, this is not what I was expecting.
I know.
It's awful when you got to sit through a bad movie,
especially have a date with you that loves the movie and you're going to sit there
and just roll your eyes.
Yeah, or you have to review it.
And then you're, you know, now what do I say about this?
You know, I had the, you know, the fact that everybody knew them and respected them.
That's even that easier than, you know, man, this is my first review out.
And I have to find something to say about this film.
I only walked out of one movie.
It was back in the 70s.
I think it was North Dallas 40 with Mac Davis.
No, Bert Reynolds was in it.
Yeah.
It was so bad.
I actually got out of the theater and walked out and people were looking at me.
It was, I couldn't sit through it.
I just, you know, and I paid my money.
I sat through about 40 minutes.
I always said, I can't sit through this.
And I walked out and that's the only film I ever walked out on before.
I just was so bad.
At least that, you know, I made a lot of money, but wasn't my cup of tea.
Now, yeah, go.
What are filmmakers?
Now, the people who submit these films, what are they hoping their end game is going to be?
With these movies because a lot of them will never make it to mainstream movie theaters.
You won't be seeing them at the Marcus theaters.
You won't be seeing them wherever you see your movies.
I'm act theaters.
What's their end game with these movies?
Yeah.
It really depends on the filmmaker and the film.
So we actually do have a fair amount of people who will have their world premiere at the Milwaukee Film Festival.
And some of those films do go on to having, like, full theatrical and, you know, DVD, Blu-ray distribution
and getting on to a service like Netflix or, you know, Hulu.
Some of them have theatrical runs.
So some films do start with us and then they do really launch into, you know, into what we would think of.
Not necessarily, you know, they won't get the push that, like, an Avengers film will.
But they do have the theatrical run, you know, around the United States and sometimes, you know, in different countries as well.
Other films might be kind of wrapping up their festival run.
And so we might get them just before they, you know, they show up on Netflix or Hulu or, you know, sometimes even PBS wherever it is.
And those, you know, it's really individual at this point because I do think that, you know,
most people are hoping that they can use Film Festival to launch their visibility as filmmakers and their film in general.
So Film Festival is a really good way to do that, to connect with audiences, to, you know, get press around your film that you can then leverage,
to grow your social media so that you can prove to distributors like, hey, we've got an audience for this movie.
I think one of the things, too, is that filmmakers who attend Film Festival, like even, you know, showing up and just not just doing the Q&A but going to, like, the networking events and things like that,
you meet people from other areas of the country that you wouldn't necessarily meet or other areas of the world that you wouldn't necessarily meet.
And you never know when those connections are going to come back to help you.
So I've, you know, I've definitely met people at Filmmakers Festival, you know, just had, like, a beer with them or whatever.
And there'll be a year or two later and they'll get in touch and be like, hey, I'm that you're here, you know, I'm doing a job in the city.
Do you happen to know anybody that X, Y, and Z? And so you can kind of keep those connections going in different ways.
And you do start to run into the same people. It's very cool. It's like a little, it becomes sort of a little family on the Festival circuit.
You know, everyone's in a while. I'll hear about a movie that sounds good, but I never heard of it before.
And the case in point about three years ago, four years ago, no madland won the Academy Award for Best Picture in the Year.
I never heard of it before. So I said to my wife, let's go see it. And we saw it and we saw it four times. It was that good.
But I never heard of it before. I just took a chance on it because this looks interesting.
And one best picture. So it can't be that bad. Although I take it back because what was that Asian film that won Best Picture about two years ago?
Oh, Parasite. No, no, that was excellent. No, no, no, that was good. I thought Parasite was great.
No, that was excellent. No, no, no, Parasite was good. It was the one after that. It was the one with Michelle Yo.
Yeah, everything everywhere. All at once. 10 minutes. I had to shut it off.
Oh, no, I love that movie. I couldn't even sit through that for 10 more minutes. I said, this is awful.
And so I closed. I said, how did this ever win Best Picture?
And the people I'm spoken to about it, I haven't found one person except for you now that actually liked the movie.
Now that brings me another point. These people put a lot of money into this a lot of time and effort into these films.
Yeah. Now it's not like Disney spends 200 million on Snow White to make about $40 million.
Disney can take the loss on it and try to market it in other ways.
But when you put money into one of these films and it doesn't go anywhere, whoa, that's a financial hit.
Yeah, yeah. A lot of independent films are labors of love.
And it really is some folks see them as a calling card. They want to make this film because they want to establish themselves.
Sometimes it's even, I need to get a feature under my belt so that I can establish myself as a commercial director or I can get an agent or whatever it is.
But I think one of the things I really like about working for a film festival is that you can honor that work.
And I do think that one of the difficult things about film is that every film is compared to, I'll say, the Avengers again.
Because, and that's not exactly a one to one, but what we're used to seeing are the really high budget Hollywood films.
You go to an independent film and it's going to be a little bit rougher around the edges and it's not going to be a slick.
And you hope that the story and the world that it's pulling you into gives you an experience that's equally as rich.
Because I don't think everybody wants the Hollywood films all the time, but they do have a rhythm and a cadence to it that makes them very, very easy to watch.
And so I just hope people give you know the range of films the chance because these are people's dreams on screen like every every film starts with a dream.
So I think it's cool that we get to honor that.
So true because you got to start somewhere.
Even I started as a janitor at a radio station when I was 18 years old.
I really got to start somewhere and get a resume built and then you get bigger and bigger and bigger.
Even Steven Spielberg, you know what his first movie was? He filmed his own bar mitzvah.
I mean, it got to start somewhere and that's crazy giving people a chance.
Real quickly, what do you think about this?
The new rules of the Academy Awards now.
You have to watch every single Oscar nominated film in the category you're voting in.
I can't believe they didn't watch him before. How could you vote on something where you didn't watch it?
That just sounds ludicrous. I heard this rule yesterday.
You think it's a good rule? You got to watch every film before you can vote on them?
I mean, ideally, yes, people are watching all of the films before they're voting.
That's what we would.
You would think.
I do think it's going to be pretty hard to enforce.
You know, I don't know how.
Yeah, I don't know how they're going to enforce that.
I think the reminder that, you know, this isn't just about like PR campaigns and this and that is probably.
Probably, probably not a bad one.
And what do you think about the other rule now?
AI, you know, AI, like they changed Robert De Niro's voice for a recent movie.
They did the same thing with the brutalist.
They changed that forget the lead actor.
You won the Academy Award.
Yeah.
They changed their party.
Yeah, they changed his voice with AI.
And the Academy says, AI is fine.
That's it. You can do it.
That sounds kind of weird that know you could change the performance.
You know, digitally and you can vote on it for best actor actors or picture.
Wow.
Yeah, I think with AI, I think there's just so much to work out that it seemed very different to me that.
You know, like some of the things that I as I understand it with the brutalist that they were doing.
We're with more about accents.
And so it wasn't like they were taking whole slots of like, you know, a whole monologue and changing it.
But it was sort of like working with details about accents and things like that.
I could be wrong.
But there's a lot of that technological tweaking that's already been happening.
And people just weren't talking about it in the same way.
You know, you think about like, I don't know, there have been films that have won for cinematography that have been almost entirely, not entirely.
But you know, a lot of like computer generated work has gone into it and yet they'll win for like cinematography.
And so you think about those kinds of relationships.
It's not all that different.
But I think we're just the industry is talking about it differently.
And I'm glad the industry is talking about it because I do think that we're at a moment where people just don't want everyone to take advantage of AI to totally replace.
Actors, for example, or writers, you know, you can, you can computer generate a screenplay in about, you know, two minutes.
It's not going to be any good that you could do it.
And so just, you know, how do we make sure that we're still getting human voices on screen and, you know, hearing human stories?
That kind of thing.
I didn't think about that.
Generating a screenplay.
Okay. So people want to go to the Milwaukee Film Festival.
The kick's off tomorrow runs for 15 days.
Is it through May 8th? Am I right?
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
Which, if you go to what's it?
M-K-E-Film.org.
Am I right?
M-K-E-Film.org.
Yeah.
M-K-E-Film.org.
And you'll see the beautiful bird art on the homepage.
You can click on that.
And that's going to take you to all things Film Festival.
You can look at the individual films by individual tickets.
We also have networking events.
If there are aspiring filmmakers out there, people in the industry that want to get connected.
Those are free for anybody to attend.
We have a bunch of panels.
We're going to have a, I don't have you heard of the film hundreds of beavers?
Jay?
No, but you're happy.
So they, it's a Milwaukee made film.
And Wisconsin made film.
Actually, they shot up North.
It's been sweeping the, I mean, it's kind of the indie darling right now.
They've made over a million dollars.
Oh.
Tributing.
And they're releasing a case study to talk about how they did it.
So that's, I think, going to be a really big event.
So yeah, panels and networking and lots and lots of films.
What do I know?
I wouldn't have invested one penny in a Minecraft movie.
That thing's made almost $400 million in four weeks.
I wouldn't have put a penny into that film.
Look at it.
So what do I know?
Okay.
This is great.
Susan Currens, executive director of the Milwaukee Film Festival kicks off tomorrow at the,
or the historic Oriental and Downer theaters.
Check out mkefilm.org for prices, all the movies.
Where to go?
How to do it?
Where to get your popcorn?
Okay.
