The Secret Film Festival celebrates its 10th anniversary
y
The movie gods giveth, and the movie gods taketh away. That’s what organizer Scott Griffin of the Nickelodeon Theatres has learned in 10 years of doing the Secret Film Festival.
The 12-hour festival starts at midnight at the Del Mar and ends at noon the next day—this year, that’s midnight on Saturday, March 7, until noon on Sunday, March 8. In addition to the six or so movies that Griffin plays in the Del Mar’s main theater, there are usually four or so alternatives playing at the same time in an upstairs theater over the course of the night. That’s 10 movies that Griffin usually has to secure for the festival.
The secret part is that Griffin doesn’t tell the audience what movies they’re going to see until their butts are in the seats. This is admittedly daunting when it comes to marketing, but sometimes it allows him to book movies that the distributors wouldn’t be able to let him screen before their general release if the names were publicized. More than that, it puts the adventure back into the movie-theater experience—both for the audience, who see movies they might never otherwise see, and for him, as he starts from scratch every year to build a festival in a few weeks.
“I think with the secret nature of it, the positive is that you can get a movie at the last minute—and sometimes it ends up being the most popular movie. The year we got ‘Mud,’ we got that a week before the festival,” says Griffin. “A lot of times I’ll say ‘Oh, this movie will work perfectly,’ because it’s a movie we’re opening in three weeks, and it’s got all these elements that make it seem like it’s the kind of movie the studio will want to get in front of this audience, and then it doesn’t work out, for one reason or another. But sometimes I’ll get an alternative from them, like ‘We can’t give you this, but we could give you that,’ and the alternative turns out to be way better than the movie that would have ‘made sense’—it’s more unexpected, more surprising.”
That very thing happened last year, when Griffin was pushing to get the then-unreleased Scarlett Johansson weird fest Under the Skin. The distributor couldn’t give him that, but they did offer him Gillian Robespierre’s Obvious Child, which wasn’t going to be released until two months after the festival.
“They had just bought that movie, and all they had was the digital file of it,” says Griffin. “They didn’t have a screener, they didn’t have anything to send me. And they were like ‘But it’s so good. Trust us, it’s so good.’ And it was perfect.”
However, Griffin watches all the films beforehand just to be sure. And with good reason.
“I feel a responsibility to these people that are going to be spending all night in the theater. I’m going to be with them all night, too, so if I book shitty films, I’m going to be in the theater with them all night while they’re watching shitty films,” he says. “I don’t ever want to be sitting there saying, ‘Even though everybody said this movie was awesome, this movie is not awesome. This movie sucks.’”
People have responded to the care he puts into it, and the mix of genres he books every year. There are some genre flicks that are aimed at the midnight-movie crowd, for sure, but he has also gotten a rep for finding quirkier films with wider appeal that turn out to be indie sensations when they’re finally released—The Squid and the Whale, Lars and the Real Girl and The Darjeeling Limited all made their advance Santa Cruz debuts at the festival, to name a few. This year’s festival is already halfway sold-out, and many of those attending come every year, possibly dressed in their pajamas.
“I start getting emails in December that say ‘When’s it going to be this year, because I want to buy my plane tickets while they’re cheap,’” Griffin says.
Studios and distributors have also taken notice of what he’s doing, which makes the booking end of it a bit easier.
“It’s always harrowing, but after doing it for this long, I’m talking to a lot of the same people, so it’s not a new concept to them. And a lot of times I’ll have people say ‘This one would be a good one for that festival,’” he says. “One of the ones we’re playing this year, when they were booking it for the theatrical run they asked ‘When’s the Secret Film Festival?’ I told them the date, and they said ‘OK, let’s put it in for this other date that’s after the festival, so we can play it at the festival.”
Looking back, Griffin thinks the inspiration for the Secret Film Festival was probably Donnie Darko, a film that absolutely no one went to see when it was released, but which has since become a cornerstone of his midnight-movie series at the Del Mar.
“If you can just sit someone down in front of that movie, they’ll realize how awesome it is,” he says. “But you almost have to be like, ‘I’m not even going to tell you what it is. You just have to sit here and watch this.’”
Info: 11:59 p.m., Saturday, March 7, Del Mar Theatre, Santa Cruz; $21. PHOTO: Jenny Slate in Obvious Child, which was a hit at last year’s Secret Film Festival two months before its general release.
