2010 Theme: Fairy Tales
PRODUCER’S NOTES:
Fairy Tales! This theme was very exciting for us, but it was the first without original cofounder Jason Streff, and it was the year that almost broke the Fest (more on that later). Fairy Tales hadn’t reached the super saturation point they achieved just a few years later. We were at the beginning of one of the many Fairy Tale waves.
We had a huge film planned this year to play between the films. A grand musical of sorts where Doug was going to walk around and meet all sorts of Fairy Tale characters. Doug unfortunately hurt his leg shortly before shooting, which prevented us from diving in too heavy. In the end we had only one afternoon and only one camera to get the comedy sketches.
HOSTS: Doug Powell
LAUNCH: Doug Powell hosted his first Launch Party with a big throne and a storybook. We had a team of roller derby girls in costume hand out “Poison Apples” which were additional criteria elements like “Include an overturned chair”. We got scared we didn’t have enough envelopes on the wall…so last minute a few jumped into add some lesser known Fairy Tales into the mix. So of course filmmakers gravitated to those and we ended up with many obscure Fairy Tales while some very popular ones were left on the wall, unpicked. Still it made for a fun night to see how someone would completely rethink a tale.
The Night Of: We had screened films from a laptop completely free of jitters for the previous year but HD files and high-bitrate codecs shredded us the night of. Our judging went fine, but the computer was dying by the time the Fest rolled around and there was little we could do when a movie or two began to skip. The Host, Doug, had told everyone up front that if there was any issues to bare with us and to maybe just yell out “Clark” so he could jump in and fix. Most every glitch, including ones that were baked into the movies (as 72 Hour films tend to have glitches all their own) was followed by a few members of the audience yelling “Clarrrrrrk.” and after a while it was more than few people. After a couple years of therapy, Clark still refuses to run the films. Normally you can find him in the lobby biting his fingers and bargaining with the higher powers. Tim DeFoggi graciously took on reigns of “Man behind the Curtain” and starting with 2011 ran everything “off the box”.
To do this day “Clarrrrk” can sometimes be heard when glitches occur at the Weinberg Center, even on non-72 productions where Clark is not involved.