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| Charlie Prince of the Friar's Club (Photo by Carl Unegbu/ComedyBeat) |
Friars Club launches its own film festival to correct neglect
December 21, 2010
By Carl Unegbu, ComedyBeat
The Friars Club is the new kid on the block of film festivals. And it is taking film festivals to a place that neither the Cannes, Tribeca, nor Toronto festival had gone before. That place is the land of comedy. In the fall of 2009, the first Friars Club Comedy Film Festival (FCCFF) was launched with the goal of championing comedy and correcting what seemed like a neglect of comedy among the existing festivals. “It seemed like there was a festival for everything, Sci fi, documentaries, you name it, and it just seemed appropriate to have a festival for comedy,” said Charlie Prince, executive director of the Friars Club Comedy Film Festival. “We started organizing and we thought Friars was the place to do it.”
Working on the festival was entirely a labor of love among a bunch of volunteers and film lovers at Friars. According to Prince, a Manhattan entertainment lawyer, the idea to launch the festival was born about one year prior to the fall of 2009 when he proposed the idea to a couple of his friends at the Friars Club and then to the Board at Friars which liked the idea and gave its blessing to it. As time went on, recalled Prince, more Friars joined the core organizing group, which was then broken into various committees that handled different aspects of organizing the first film festival in the fall of 2009.
In many ways, the Second Friars Club Comedy Film Festival which was held in the fall of 2010 from September 23 through October 1 turned out to be a bigger event than the first festival. Among its highlights was the presentation of the festival’s Lifetime Achievement Award to comic legend Jerry Lewis, the current Abbott of the Friars Club.
During the nine-day period of the 2010 festival, vastly more movies were screened and the attendance was considerably greater than at the 2009 festival which ran just four days. In 2010, the festival showed over 50 films covering all genres of comedy films without discrimination. “What makes our festival different from others is that it is 100% comedy”, said Sue Constantine, an improv and sketch comedian, who served as the communications director for the festival. “We think this emphasis is important because we don’t think there are enough opportunities out there for comedic filmmakers and we wanted to provide a platform for these artists to showcase their talent.” This volume of comedy films is unmatched any place else, noted Prince, who said their guiding principle for films at Friars is: “If it’s funny, it’s eligible.”
And it seems they are pulling no punches in their desire to position themselves as the true vanguard of comedy films among the film festivals. In what looks like an advertisement of this frontrunner ambition, the organizers adopted the slogan “In Defense of Comedy” as the overall theme of the 2010 film festival. Everything comedy, that is.
To be sure, the comedy film fare at Friars is extensive. Aside from the commonplace competition category for short films, the festival also offers a brand new competition category called the “spotlight film” which screens the top comedy films from around the world in any given year, after pulling them together from all the various film festivals out there, including Cannes, Tribeca and Toronto. But that’s not all. To live up to its theme to “defend comedy,” the latest festival also served up a category of films that likely have not been shown anywhere before, usually because people are nervous about their controversial content. In 2010, for instance, they screened such foreign films as the Indian number “Tere Bin Laden” and the British film “Four Lions” both of which dealt with the tense subject of terrorism.
Plus, there was a major new outreach at the festival this past fall, one that has greatly excited the improv and sketch community. Despite the institutional bias of the Friars Club so many of whose members are stand up comedians, the 2010 festival added the popular FrISC program- the Friars Club Improv + Sketch competition, which gave out $10,000 each to winners of separate Improv and Sketch competitions with which they produced short films that premiered at the festival. This is considered to be the largest cash prize of its kind to competition winners in these groups. “It was the first event on our program to sell out at this year's festival, and we’re really looking forward to its second year”, said Constantine, who runs the FrISC program.
Five years out in the future, Prince said his team will seek to stabilize their current model of “curating” a tier of films from the top festivals as well as championing their own films at Friars, some of which may not be welcomed anywhere else because of their content.
After an impressive two years on the film festival block, the Friars Club Comedy Film Festival (FCCFF) seems poised to do even bigger things. Already, it has just made Moviemaker Magazine’s list of the “20 coolest film festivals.” And from all indications, for all the challenges of starting out in a tough economy, as its executive director noted, the festival so far is steering a pretty good course towards realizing Prince’s vision as a place that fosters the next generation of filmmakers.