Q&A: Jonathan Wolf

On the heels of last year’s attendance boost, the American Film Market (AFM) has expanded its lineup for this year’s event, slated for November 2 to 9 in Santa Monica. The market, organized by the Independent Film & Television Alliance (IFTA), has added a five-day conference series addressing financing, production, marketing, distribution and pitching; as well as an Industry Conversations strand delivering discussions with top-level executives. Jonathan Wolf, the managing director of the AFM, gives World Screen Weekly some insight into what attendees can expect from this year’s market.

WS: What led to the launch of the conference program?
WOLF: For the last ten years we’ve been doing à la carte seminars where we’ve invited organizations—the Directors Guild, Writers Guild, Producers Guild, Women in Film, BAFTA, a variety of others—to come in and program a seminar. It worked really well for a number of years and gave us a great diverse mix, but what we started hearing from our audience is they wanted a more structured experience, not one that was random. So we turned everything on its head, brought out a clean sheet of paper and we’re doing two things.

The first is the five-day conference program. Starting on Friday and running through Tuesday, it’s a half day each day. Our attendees don’t want to be in a conference room for the entire day when the show floor is so full of energy. The idea of having a conference in the morning and time for the show floor each afternoon will work best for everybody. We picked the five topics of most interest to our attendees—production, distribution, marketing, finance and pitching.

The second thing we did is, every afternoon, starting on the first day, we will have a series of intimate Industry Conversations. They’ll take place at 2:30 p.m. and 4 p.m. daily. This is a place where industry leaders can step in and talk about what they know best. It may be an Academy Award-winning producer being interviewed for an hour about a recent film they’ve done, it could be the Writer’s Guild and SAG talking to producers about how to make low budget films and use guild members.

The ultimate goal is to enhance the value to the attendee, and, if you will, the value of coming through LAX. This is not about how we can make things better for people who live in Hollywood—they get access to the Hollywood community all the time. This is about having the advantage of the industry’s global thought leaders all being in one place for a week.

WS: You’ve had steady increases in the number of non-English language films that screen at the AFM. Do you see that trend continuing?
WOLF: This is a decade-long slow tectonic shift in the industry. If we look back ten years ago, about 27 percent of the companies showing films were from non-English language countries, but last year it was about 37 percent. It’s a very slow shift but we see no sign of it abating.

WS: Are you seeing increases in the number of buyers attending?
WOLF: We’re measuring feet on the ground, we’re not actually measuring the turnover created by those buyers. So if you have two buying companies merge, you may have fewer individuals but they may be buying more product. As a show organizer, we like to look at that number, but it isn’t the only piece of data that’s important to us. It really is looking at the global export industry and watching how healthy it is.

If there is [an increase in buyer attendance], it will come from broadcasters buying directly from the producer, not buying from a local distributor that’s aggregating for them. What we’re slowly seeing is more of those broadcasters looking to cut out the middleman.

WS: Has the credit situation for producers improved over the last couple of months?
WOLF: Producers are a very tenacious lot and it doesn’t matter how bad the economy is, they seem to find ways to make movies. Having [the financing be] a little difficult, frankly, is okay. During the middle part of this decade too many films were made because financing was too easy. One of the great things about films that are sold at the AFM is the majority of them are presold. What a lot of people forget is that presale does two things: it creates a financing mechanism for the film to go to the bank and borrow and, may, more importantly, tell the producer and distributor that the film has been pre-accepted by the marketplace. This concept frequently gets lost on producers who are just seeking any form of financing or equity or subsidies to go make a film. In the middle of the last decade a lot of films were made with a little bit of equity, a lot of soft money and no presales, and the film would be done but nobody bought it. If they’d tried to presell the film they might have found out nobody would buy it and then perhaps the film wouldn’t have been made and maybe those who lost money wouldn’t have.