At the Rome Film Festival, a Virtual Red Carpet

The 7th edition of the Rome Film Festival is in progress this week and for once, even if you?re not a movie star, you are welcome to be a part of it. Marco Mueller, director of the festival, has changed the rules of the game by using the Internet. Viewers can register and follow festival events online, from the red carpet, to press conferences to movie presentations, taking the festival outside the usual boundaries of roped-off stages, VIP passes and the insider atmosphere.

Mr. Mueller contends that YouTube users are as important an audience as the festivalgoers: ?I see them as the defenders of a certain idea of cinema, a multitude that represents a real audience, curious, active and that goes looking for cinema wherever it?s hidden,? he said.

Two of the movies presented at the festival are also creatures of the Internet: The director Larry Clark will distribute his film ?Marfa Girl? through the Web, not in movie theaters. And the script for the Dutch director Paul Verhoeven?s ?Tricked? was written using scenes from 700 online submissions. The writer Kim Van Wooten produced the first five pages of the script, which were made available to anyone who wanted to write its next scenes. Mr. Verhoeven, best known as the director of ?Robocop,? then compiled fragments of each submission to make the final product. ?Tricked? too lives online, on a mobile app and as a Web series.

Mr. Mueller seems to have a taste for American directors for this year?s selection:
?A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III,? Roman Coppola?s
second feature, which stars Charlie Sheen as an eccentric graphic designer, is on the program. Another film premiere was hoped for but didn?t materialize: Quentin Tarantino?s spaghetti western
called ?Django Unchained.? Tarantino fans will have to content themselves for now with the trailer on the film?s Web site: another instance of cinema online.

Source: http://rendezvous.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/16/at-the-rome-film-festival-a-virtual-red-carpet/

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