After the actors’ strike muted the 2023 edition, this year’s event is being powered by stars like the “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” actress and her castmates.
On Wednesday morning, several hours before Tim Burton’s “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” opened the Venice Film Festival, dozens of young people were already camped out by the Palazzo del Cinema in the hopes of seeing one of the film’s stars.
As I surveyed the scene, a teenage boy pulled up on a bicycle, accompanied by his parents. All three craned their necks to check out the still-empty red carpet. “Jenna Ortega is going to be here?” asked his father.
The boy nodded shyly and his parents exchanged grins. “That’s his great love, you know,” the father said.
Just as casting Ortega, the popular star of “Wednesday,” helped juice interest in Burton’s sequel, so too do glamorous movie stars turbocharge a film festival. Last year, Venice had to make do with precious few A-listers since the actors’ strike barred anyone who had appeared in a big-studio film from doing press for it.
That meant the Zendaya tennis romance “Challengers,” planned as the glamorous opening salvo for last year’s festival, was yanked from the lineup and replaced by the Italian war drama “Comandante.” While that movie had its scattered highlights, it didn’t exactly have teenagers lining up for it at 11 in the morning.
At a news conference Wednesday afternoon, the festival’s artistic director Alberto Barbera recalled experiencing “this terrible feeling — this bereavement, if you like” when the strike sapped his event of its opening film and most of its stars.
“It was a great blow we were dealt,” he said. “There was a lot of concern, of course, that the lack of the talent may somehow undermine the efficacy of the machinery of this festival, which is also associated with strong promotion.”
In other words, while cinema is the lifeblood of any film festival, celebrity is what really sells it. Barbera asserted that this year’s starry schedule will be the exact opposite of the previous edition: “We have the longest list of talent attending, who will actually walk along our red carpet, in years.”
The “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” news conference provided a fitting sneak preview of what’s to come: When Ortega, 21, took the dais alongside Michael Keaton, Winona Ryder and the rest of the cast, she said it was she who felt intimidated by the others’ combined star power.
“I just kind of tried to mind my business in the corner,” Ortega said, “making sure I didn’t rip off the lovely Winona’s work from back in the day.”
The sequel needed more than 35 years to mount in part because of the busy schedules of Burton and his big stars. Knowing that, would the director ever consider a third installment?
“Let’s do the math,” he said wryly. “It took 35 years to do this one, so I’ll be 100. I guess it’s possible, with medical science these days, but I don’t think so.”
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
