The Tribeca Film Festival was founded in 2002 by a crew headed by Robert De Niro producer Jane Rosenthal. The first festival, thrown together after some four months of planning, was conceived in part as a response to the 9/11 attacks, an attempt to help revitalize and repair the economy and culture of lower Manhattan. In the years since, the Tribeca Festival has taken on its own identity as a sort of spring time counterpart to the New York Film Festival, with a more populist attitude towards celebrity glitter and commercial blockbusters. (That year, Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones was among the premieres.) The festival has continued to develop its own identity, and a certain amount of sprawl has come to seem a part of that. Last year, there may have been a bit too much sprawl; the 160-feature program, which wandered outside the bounds of Manhattan, reminded some observers of the critic David Chute's line about another messy film festival that seemed to have been designed along the lines specified by Monty Python's Mr. Creosote, everything mixed together in a bucket with an egg on top. Jane Rosenthal wants prospective festival-goers to know that they have heard your pleas, and they are responding. She told S. James Snyder that "as a producer, you learn that whoever has a good idea about something, no matter where it comes from, you should listen to it. So this year, we’ve listened to what people had to say last year, and that’s really part of the maturation and curatorial process, as the event grows and learns about its audience...Clearly, a problem for our festivalgoers in the past has been that there’s too many pictures, and they haven’t been able to find the pictures in an easy way. After our first two years, we seemed to lose our hub, and this year we’ve restored that. We’ve made the festival easier to maneuver and slimmed down a slate that is still very large and diverse by any measure.” This year's festival program, which will stick tight to the Tribeca-East Village area, is down to a lean, mean 122 features, and the average ticket price, which rose to $18 last year, is down to a more crowd-pleasing $15, which late night and weekday matinee screenings down to $8. This year's Tribeca Film Festival begins April 23.
