Though it isn’t always official, every party has a guest of honor. And on a
recent Saturday night at the Alamo Drafthouse theater in Austin, I
found myself sitting next to him. Tom Quinn is senior vice president and head
of acquisitions for Magnolia Pictures and a longtime attendee of the
South by Southwest festival, held here every March.
For most of its 25-year history, SXSW has been primarily a massive,
scruffy gathering of musicians and their fans, and while its movie
showcase began in 1994, it has only recently become an influential stage for filmmakers to gain distribution. It used to be
that acquisitions execs would wait weeks to bid on movies that had screened at SXSW, if they attended at all: usually a junior staffer would be dispatched
on a scouting mission and, if something appealed to them, would ask for a copy to be sent to offices in Los Angeles, London or New York City. This year offered a very different scene: senior
buyers from both coasts, as well as France, Italy and Australia, were on
hand; festival submissions, meanwhile, were up 33%, with four additional
theaters rented out to accommodate growth. Much of that is thanks to Quinn.
Quinn shook things up at the 2010 festival when he bought the
barely finished film Monsters, a British-made love story–alien
invasion film set along the U.S.-Mexico border, from an unknown
writer-director the very night that it debuted, in a 12 a.m. slot
reserved for horror/sci-fi films. It was the first time at SXSW that a movie had been snapped up so quickly — what’s
called an overnight acquisition — and it helped jump-start a lot
more buying interest. “Last year, Monsters sold the same night it
debuted, and I wasn’t there,” says IFC’s head of acquisitions, Arianna
Bocco, who returned this year with checkbook in hand. As Quinn put it
before leaving for the festival from his New York City office in early March,
his competitors “won’t make the same mistake twice.”
So it was that Quinn was back in the same theater, for the same time
slot, this time bringing with him the founder of Magnolia, Eamon Bowles.
Quinn and Bocco greeted each other heartily before the lights dimmed and
Tim League, owner of the Alamo Drafthouse and the evening’s programmer, stepped out onstage to get
the crowd amped up for the evening’s main event: Kill List, a
horror film featuring an assassination assignment that goes bad, a pagan
death cult and a marriage in trouble — the sophomore effort from
another promising British writer-director, Ben Wheatley.
In place of a traditional introduction, League arranged a beer-chugging
contest between Texan and British filmmakers — the largest groups
in the room — leaving everyone sticky and breathless but also
considerably more energetic, despite the hour.
As the two groups chugged, Quinn sat in the middle of the theater in an aisle seat,
behaving as an ideal audience member: whooping, cheering and totally
engaged. When the film came on, he was silent and on the edge of his
seat, zoned entirely into the world of the movie. While I gasped and covered my eyes at the assorted animal sacrifices and gunfights — not to mention a disturbing scene that involved the business end of a hammer — Quinn kept the same enthusiastic look of interest on
his face.
“The thing is, I don’t want to overthink my swing,” he said earlier
about his approach to movie watching. “You know exactly what you love
within 30 seconds of the movie. You can immediately sense what you’re
dealing with, so I just want to enjoy and appreciate what is going on as
a generic moviegoer — without having overstudied the
program.”
Acquisitions executives are professional audience members. They are sent
by distribution companies to evaluate films at festivals, and their
opinion plays a large part in determining which independent movies make
it to your local Cineplex. If you love Barton Fink, Pulp
Fiction or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, you have an
acquisitions executive to thank for discovering it and helping it get
funded for wider release.
See what could be the new Twitter or Foursquare from this year’s SXSW.
