The $11 Billion Year
Description
Using her new book The $11 Billion Year as a starting point, film critic/reporter Anne Thompson will moderate a spirited discussion about the future of the film industry with Co-Founder & Chief Content Office of Fandor Jonathan Marlow, Gary Meyer of Telluride Film Festival and Eat Drinks Films, and SFFS Executive Director Noah Cowan. A book signing will follow the salon.
Born and raised in Manhattan, Anne Thompson grew up going to the Thalia and The New Yorker and wound up at grad Cinema Studies at NYU. She worked at United Artists and Film Comment before heading west as that magazine’s west coast editor. She wrote for the LA Weekly, Sight and Sound, Empire, The New York Times and Entertainment Weekly before serving as West Coast Editor of Premiere. She wrote for The Washington Post, The London Observer, Wired, More, and Vanity Fair, and did staff stints at The Hollywood Reporter and Variety. She eventually took her blog Thompson on Hollywood to Indiewire. She taught film criticism at USC Critical Studies, and continues to host the fall semester of “Sneak Previews” for UCLA Extension.
Fandor co-founder Jonathan Marlow is an accomplished cinematographer, curator and composer as well as an occasional director with over a dozen films of assorted durations to his credit. In the two decades prior to his role as Chief Content Officer at Fandor, Marlow was affiliated with numerous film exhibition institutions, film festivals and technology-centric film distribution companies (such as Amazon, VUDU and others). Concurrently, Marlow frequently writes about cinema for Keyframe and a number of other publications. He is also known to host screenings throughout the world showcasing remarkable works that are generally unavailable elsewhere.
Noah Cowan has been Executive Director of the San Francisco Film Society since March 2014. Prior to joining SFFS he was founding Artistic Director of TIFF Bell Lightbox, the landmark cinema museum space which serves as home of the Toronto International Film Festival. Cowan’s previous positions include Codirector of TIFF (alongside Director and CEO Piers Handling) and founder of both independent film distributor Cowboy Films and the Global Film Initiative in New York.
Gary Meyer got the movie bug when he was a kid, making a monster movie in the family barn and showing it on location. This was the start of his first cinema, The Above-The-Ground Theatre that he operated through his teen years. He studied motion picture production at San Francisco State University and became a film buyer for United Artists Theater Circuit after graduation. There he met his future partner, Steve Gilula, and in 1975 they founded Landmark Theatre Corporation, now the largest group of cinemas dedicated to showing American independent and foreign films. Meyer realized that his talents were better suited to helping those who completed the rigorous job of making a movie get their works on screens and promoted to audiences. The Landmark team helped launched the first films of many independent filmmakers while breaking most of the rules of theatrical exhibition.
From 2001-2012, Meyer owned and operated the Balboa Theatre in San Francisco and consulted on numerous film, venue and festival projects. He has produced, programmed and marketed dozens of film festivals and collections of shorts.
Meyer attended his first Telluride Film Festival in 1975 and later served as programming consultant and resident curator from 1998-2006, eventually becoming the festival co-director with Tom Luddy and Julie Huntsinger. Now a senior curator at Telluride, Meyer is also launching a new concept online magazine, EatDrinkFilms.com in 2014, with the EatDrinkFilms Festival to tour nationally in 2015.