SBIFF Women’s Panel 2012

Reviewed by Angel Martinez. Viewed at the Lobero Theater, Santa Barbara Film Festival.

The Women’s Panel this year, titled, “Creative Forces Women in the Biz” were composed of producers which included: Denise Ream (Cars 2), Leslie Urdang (Beginners), Melissa Cobb (Kung Fu Panda 2), Dede Gardner (Tree of Life), and Julia Louis Dreyfus of Seinfeld fame who was promoting her self-produced short film, Picture Paris, at the festival. The discussion was moderated by Madelyn Hammond, an owner of a marketing and branding agency specializing in both entertainment in media, and has links with the magazine Variety.

Seeing as how this is a women’s panel, the first question posed by the moderator was directed towards Gardner asking if she felt equally treated in the industry, which Gardner replied that she never had experiences where she was looked down upon on or stopped because the fact that she was a woman, but felt that more women were becoming producers because they had qualities such as being able to multitask and were patient. Dreyfus joked that being a woman has its benefits that the positive side of being a woman is that you can wrangle people without them knowing they are being wrangled.

With this inevitable question being put out of the way, Cobb revealed that her road to producing was more personally difficult because she had to find and develop a voice because she was a shy person. While she still contains some that shyness, she admits that the responsibility of the film and the people working on the film gives her the strength to be able to handle what comes her way.

Leslie Urdang came in explaining that she has been an independent producer her whole life and the difficulties in getting Beginners made. For this film she had an investment partner, but knew that her primary difficult was that she knew describing the story itself wouldn’t reel them in. Still, her instincts told her that she had to make this movie. Ream who works on the totally opposite spectrum Urdang and is employed by Pixar talked about how there is less financial worries and how Pixar’s main goal is to try to make great movies, adding that Pixar does not feel very corporate at all. Cobb who works in the animation world as well and produced Kung Fu Panda 2 talked about how the process of animation takes considerably longer than live action films, listing both the pros and cons of this. The extra time allows them to constantly be rewriting the movie and change the structure, but that it’s easier to get lost with so many people than in live-action.

Urdang near to the end touched upon the new formats and windows that we are dealing with today and how these are huge transitions in the industry, and how they carry with them both opportunities and obstacles. She acknowledges that film is changing and that some windows have slightly shut such as the movie theater, television and DVD sales, but that others have opened such as Youtube and Netflix. She urged new film makers to focus on the opportunity of these windows and pointed out that some stories do not necessarily need a theatrical showing, but could instead be much better utilized in these new formats.