Do It Again

I heard about Withoutabox last fall. Rob mentioned it to me in a sort of matter-of-fact way. He had asked me if I had an account yet. What’s Withoutabox? I asked him. And I got one of those stares where his glasses slide down his nose and his eyeballs look up at me. That stare that says, “why are you wasting my time with such a dumb-ass question?”

So what is Withoutabox? It’s an online clearing house through which you can apply to 98 percent of the film festivals exist. (Snooty fest like Cannes remain, er, outside the box.) You enter all the data about your film once – synopsis, cast list, technical specs – and to apply to each festival, all you have to do is click through a few pages of an entry form.

But what I’ve grown mildly addicted to are the message boards and particular the one labeled “the waiting list.”

Here, filmmakers speculate on when festivals will send notifications and then, when the notifications come, they grouse about the rejection process.

For example:

“Up to now, the relief of having ’said’ something about this world has been enough that the rejection letters haven’t really hit me in any way. Until today that is. With the news of Full Frame I scanned through my submission status page and had to search for the one undecided festival remaining and for the first time I faced the very real question ‘what if, beyond a handful of people, no one sees my film?’”

It’s a common feeling, whether we’re getting rejected by Sundance or Uncle Larry’s Thursday Night Screening Hour.

And reading that board, I did allow an idea to enter my mind that, frankly, should stay in the compartment of non-executed thought bubbles. Why not create the International Film Festival of Rejection? To qualify, you would have had to have been rejected from at least 20 festivals and not accepted into a festival deemed (by me) to be of great industry significance. A great idea, until I realized that (a.) no filmmaker would consider it a badge of honor to have a laurel that featured the word “rejection,” (b.) I’m not really interested in administering a festival and (c.) that many films rejected across the board are rejected because, well, they’re not good.

So I’ll continue to lurk the message boards, taking satisfaction in our successes, feeling a vicarious connection to every failure, and admiring just how many people have tried to do this movie thing before, and will keep trying, whether they’re told to keep going or shut out, ignored, and rejected.