Abu Dhabi Dispatch. 1.

The Middle East International Film Festival opened on October 10 just more than a month after the announcement in Toronto of the ambitions of Imagenation Abu Dhabi, a wholly owned subsidiary of Abu Dhabi Media Company, whose stated aim is "to develop, finance and produce content for both the global and Arabic language markets." There could be some punch behind that statement of purpose - $1 billion over the next five years "in the creation of both full-length feature films and digital content."

It gets you wondering. Where were these backers/funders when Dreamworks or the various Warner distributors were in trouble? Already there is a deal with Participant Media (with Middle East stories like Standard Operating Procedure and Syriana under its belt) for $250 million to finance a slate of feature films - more money for a company that is already bringing capital to the table - which is reported to be for production and P&A "for 15 to 18 feature films which will entertain while raising awareness of issues that inspire social change."

Another partnership, announced at the MEIFF, was with National Geographic Entertainment to finance 10 to 15 films over the next five years that "that will deal with people's relationship to the world, their environment and encourage different cultures to come together."

The National Geographic deal is part of a broader initiative to launch a Media Content Creation Zone, involving partnerships between Abu Dhabi and the BBC, CNN, Random House, Harper Collins and the Thomson Reuters Foundation. The critical mass approach aims at training local media professionals (is that what journalists are called now?) and producing content in and for the Arab market. Press materials foresee growth in that market to be in double digits over the next five years - all of which is reflected in the real estate ad construction boom here which has fifty-story buildings sprouting like tall weeds everywhere.

Another part of the media project, branded twofour54 (Abu Dhabi's coordinates), is to produce more and "more accurate" content dealing with the Middle East, eventually by locals trained here. You can assume that any such plan has Al-Jazeera in nearby Qatar in the crosshairs. Al-Jazeera is already up and running, to put it mildly. So twofour54 is a work in progress that has just begun. If the starving media firms of the West were hungry for any such deal a month ago, they are desperate for it now, given the recent credit crash - which we might know more about if newspapers hadn't been laying off their business reporters over the last few years.

It was fitting, then, that the festival had the Middle East premiere of Every Little Step, the documentary by James D Stern and Adam Del Deo about the casting for the 2006 revival of the hit backstage Broadway musical, A Chorus Line. If there is an industry that revived theater in New York, this is it - and with companies performing the show in two dozen languages all over the world, some as we speak (or type), it is the kind of franchise that might interest the kind of entrepreneurial bankers making deals here. I did meet people - not locals - who are determined to create international theater here - another work in progress.

With Every Little Step, all the deals seem to have been made already for the film that chronicles its own Chorus Line of the revival. The documentary will be released by Sony Pictures Classics in the spring, and in Japan on October 25th. According to co-director Stern, Sony pulled the film from most of its festival commitments after acquiring it. This seems to have been MEIFF's gain - the doc was warmly received in Abu Dhabi, which points to the audience's willingness to accept a film about play that brought a discussion of homosexuality, among many other things, to the Broadway stage. A Chorus Line was also nothing if not a leveraged entertainment product. Its profits on Broadway kept the Public Theater going for at least a decade after the showed moved from its downtown origins. If done right, the eventual DVD of Every Little Step's some 400 hours of footage (plus archival tape with the show's creator, Michael Bennett) will be an essential source for Broadway history.

Stern on A Chorus Line's economic impact on the business of theater: "It had an enormous effect on theater. Not only was Broadway itself really in serious trouble in the 70s, but Off Broadway, which is much more where the artistic heart and soul of theater in America comes from, was in serious trouble as well. The theaters that ultimately sprang up - whether it was the Manhattan Theater Club or Playwrights' Horizons, all the smaller theaters which have produced so many great works in American theater - all came into existence on the strength of the Public Theater. The Public Theater was tottering, and only when it got the revenues from A Chorus Line did it solidify for the next decade at least. All these theaters then came up because of the Public Theater, so you could really argue that A Chorus Line saved theater in America."

Stern on making and releasing a documentary in what appears to be a hostile environment: "We tend to lump documentaries all together, as opposed to feature films. Doing a film on A Chorus Line is a more commercial venture than doing a film on war-torn Africa. This had a broader reach. It allows us to have a larger core audience than some other documentaries may have."

Adam Del Deo in response to a questioner who, at the post-screening press conference, said that after "the accident on September 11," ... "95 per cent of films are against Islam," an odd question directed to the co-director of a film tracking aspirants to roles in the 2006 revival of A Chorus Line, many of whom are shown praying to get those parts: "When we were making the movie, we were following thousands of dancers in New York trying to get a job on the production of A Chorus Line. It wasn't something we were thinking about at all.  It wasn't through the perspective of any religion. It was more about following the struggles and the day to day events of what it's like to be a dancer in New York. It had nothing to do with Islam or any religion."

- David D'Arcy

Posted by dwhudson at October 15, 2008 8:09 AM