McPhillips shows keen eye in film choices

The Island Now

Sean McPhillips has dreamed of a career dream as a film director but in his current job as senior programmer for next month’s Gold Coast Film Festival he is helping a long list of directors achieve their dreams.

McPhillips, who also has been programming the Furman Film Series for the Great Neck Arts Center for the past two years, has lined up 45 domestic and foreign feature films and 20 short films for the festival. The films will be shown at five Clearview Cinema locations in the Town of North Hempstead – Great Neck, Herricks, Great Neck, Manhasset and Port Washington – from June 1 to June 5.

The film festival was spearheaded by Regina Gil, the executive director of the Great Neck Arts Center who holds the same title with the film festival. The town is among the sponsors for the event.

“A film festival is a massive undertaking,” McPhillips said. “For a first-timer, it’s very, very hard. If I knew the odds, I might not have gotten involved.”

McPhillips has been lining up the feature entries for the Gold Coast International Film Festival while Joe Bakhash, associate producer for the Gold Coast Film Festival, has been handling short films.

And 45 feature films and 20 short films later, McPhillips sounds elated about the results.

“We ended up with so many great movies. It was just timing. When you have a first year [film festival], you don’t have the previous year’s lineup to entice everyone,” he said.

British entry “Submarine” and Israeli entry “Infiltration,” are both based on novels, consistent with the festival’s intent to feature movies based on literary works. That’s part of the Gold Coast formula, drawing on the rich literary tradition of Long Island’s Gold Coast, which has been a haven for writers and provided the physical backdrop for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby.”

McPhillips is particularly pleased that he got “Chasing Madoff,” a documentary about the investigative team that brought the Ponzi scheme artist to justice, because the nefarious scam played itself out on the North Shore.

“There’s no better place to premiere that,” he said.

The festival also will include the New York premiere of “My Afternoons with Margueritte,” a hit French film.

McPhillips just completed his work on the lineup last week, adding two features that were well received at the Tribeca festival: “Janie Jones” a U.S. film starring Abigail Breslin, and a “Matter of Taste” about the career comeback of a well-known chef.

“For us, we have to wait until they’re ready,” said McPhillips, who explained that filmmakers will typically not commit to screening their films at a festival until three months before it’s slated to kick off.

“We have more movies than most festivals have. We’ll have so much to choose from, I hope people will take advantage of it,” McPhillips said.

He said he’s in the process of “nailing down” speakers for film panels.

If the Gold Coast Film Festival’s recent pre-festival event is any indication, the speaker lineup should be an impressive one. Isabella Rossellini, unable to present several short movies she’s written and produced at the festival, presented them at a New York City event last week.

The Furman experience has given McPhillips a good sense of the audience on Long Island’s North Shore. And cruising the film festival circuit while in acquisitions at Miramax Films prepared him for the job he’s doing now.

Ironically, McPhillips never aspired to be senior programmer for next month’s Gold Coast Film Festival, or any other film festival for that matter.

“I never had any intention of becoming an executive in any way because I wanted to be a filmmaker,” McPhillips said.

But McPhillips career took an unexpected turn after he accepted an internship at Miramax Films in 1996, shortly after his father passed away.

He became a temporary employee and then assistant manager of acquisitions at Miramax, while he considered what he would do next.

“I figured I would stay there another year and depart. I needed to make movies,” McPhillips recalled. “I had a lot of good co-workers and I learned a lot.”

But McPhillips kept advancing, from assistant manager to manager of acquisitions, then director, and in 2003, vice president of acquisitions under the legendary Harvey Weinstein, head of Miramax.

McPhillips was at Miramax during a particularly successful in the studio’s history, when its releases included “Life is Beautiful,” “City of God,” “Amelie” and “Princess Mononoke.”

He spent a lot of time at film festivals, and was directly involved in acquiring the critically-acclaimed “Baran” by director Majid Mijidi, Yuen Wo-Ping’s kung fu debut, “Drunken Tai Chi” and several Pokemon sequels. Ultimately, McPhillips became co-producer of another Japanese animation film, “Tokyo Pig.”

McPhillips recalls that Weinstein could be “intimidating and scary” in meetings because he had such a thorough knowledge of everything about the film business, along with a notoriously short fuse. And he vividly remembers a day when Weinstein, frustrated after a phone call that didn’t get him the result he wanted, offered his staff a succinct, but telling, business lesson.

“You can’t let people tell you that you can’t do this or that,” McPhillips recalled Weinstein saying. “Sometimes you don’t need to know everything to attempt something. If you actually go for something, you can make it happen.”

McPhillips took those words.

McPhillips later left Miramax, took an intensive summer of classes at the New York University Film School, and started New York-based Secret Hideout Films in 2007 with a partner, Joe Bakhash.

The duo had early success, as McPhillips wrote and directed a short film entitled “Cupcake,” which debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival in May 2008. “Cupcake,” about a young woman who faces a conflict between her desire for cupcakes and her yearning for love, made a positive impression at Tribeca and made its way around the world at other festival screenings, climaxing with a showing at the Lincoln Center atrium where composer Lev “Ljova” Zurbin created a live score to accompany the movie.

Their next effort, “Deadline,” about an ex-convict who seeks revenge on a guard who abused him in prison, premiered in Montreal and won the audience prize at the Santa Monica Film Festival.

But the “Secret Hideout” duo hit a snag as they neared the end of production on a fifth film, “The Cubicle” in 2009, when one of the main actors in the movie had a heart attack during the last week of shooting. And the global economy crisis gained an ominous momentum that put their project on the shelf.

“Right when we were filming the movie was when the economy crashed. Everybody went into crisis mode,” McPhillips said.

That’s around the time Gil contacted Bakhash about working on the Furman Film Series. At first, when Bakhash broached the idea of he and McPhillips handling acquisitions for that seasonal film festival, McPhillips thought the idea was “crazy” but got excited about the opportunity after a few conversations with Gil.

“Unequivocally in my opinion, Sean is one of those rare creatures who is immersed and dedicated, lives and breathes film,” said Gil. “He has fabulous taste and he is very critical, so his standards are very high. So he was an easy pick as someone who is the last word in terms of the films he picked.”

Bakhash and McPhillips started working on the Furman series with Gil, and it proved to be an invaluable prelude to his current role with the Gold Coast festival.

“Programming is very similar to acquisitions,” McPhillips said. “Naturally knowing what fits for the audience is just like a requirement for the job.”

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