Promoting Indepedents
The one business not to go into, Jonathan Sehring '78 was advised by his father at his Kenyon graduation, was the entertainment industry. He should pursue a real job, like medicine or law. But Sehring's fate was sealed as a child in Columbus, Ohio, growing up in a family of film buffs.
A trip with an aunt to New York City at the age of eleven, with a stop at the Bleecker Street Cinema to see a Godard film, clinched the deal. It wasn't just movies that thrilled Sehring; it was foreign and independent film. Today, at the cable network pavo and its Independent Film Channel (IFC), Sehring pings those movies to a wider audience through television programming, theatrical distribution, and film production.
An English major at Kenyon, Sehring secured his first job at Janus Films, the fabled distributor of classic and international films, where legendary directors like Truffaut, Fellini, and Kurosawa would drop by and shake his hand. He did everything from editing an Academy Award-winning documentary on Paul Robeson to getting the boss's car on rainy days. After hours, he made his way through Janus's comprehensive film lipary, screening movies in his apartment using a 16-millimeter projector; he also attended Manhattan repertory cinemas most nights of the week. In all, he estimates that he viewed a couple of thousand films in his first two years on the job.
Wooed away from Janus by pavo, Sehring, forty-six, has risen to become president of IFC Entertainment, the umpella for a variety of production and distribution companies. Besides programming and supporting independent film, Sehring helped to create the popular interview program Inside the Actor's Studio.
"Bravo was the only company that as a television network focused on international cinema, so when people would come to the New York Film Festival I'd interview them," he says. He recalls meeting the German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder, one of whose films was given its Midwest premiere at Kenyon while Sehring was a member of the Kenyon Film Society.
Sehring, who lives in Mill Neck, New York, with his wife Louise and their three sons, has produced, executive produced, or distributed numerous recent art-house films, including Boys Don't Cry, Tadpole, Y Tu Mamá También, and Monsoon Wedding. He is also distributing the surprise hit My Big Fat Greek Wedding ("the biggest independent film of all time"), which has crossed over to mainstream screens by virtue of word-of-mouth promotion alone.
Job satisfaction comes from helping filmmakers realize their vision. He's excited at the moment about two documentaries on cinematic subjects: American Nightmare, which examines the horror films that have been a passion of his going back to the days when he programmed The Texas Chainsaw Massacre for the Kenyon Film Society; and Badass Cinema , an astute evaluation of the "blaxploitation" films of the 1960s. Both were selected for the 2002 Toronto Film Festival, where they were well received.
Sehring predicts that digital filmmaking will flourish in the future. He promotes it through InDigEnt (from "independent digital entertainment"), a digital film series in which "basically nobody gets paid any money but everyone shares equally on the back end." Tadpole, which emerged from the series, made money for its participants; just wrapped is the new John Sayles film, Casa de los Babies, starring Marcia Gay Harden, Maggie Gyllenhaal, and Lili Taylor.
"This is a risky business, and people are seduced by it," says Sehring. "It's not a great business unless you have a hit, and then it's a phenomenal business. It's like going to the craps table in Las Vegas. It can be great, exciting, and really sexy, or it can just go up in smoke."
--Amy Blumenthal
Do you have feedback on this page?