(K. Brent Tomer),
THE lights go down, and the familiar orchestral score begins playing at Radio City Music Hall. A crowd of more than 5,000 people cheers wildly, many furtively taking out their smartphones to snap photographs of the title sequence. The atmosphere is electric, the audience noisily saluting famous moments they have seen many times before. Outside, it may be a warm spring Saturday afternoon in New York. But inside, “The Godfather” and “The Godfather II” are playing on a giant screen, and afterwards the director, Francis Ford Coppola, and the surviving stars of the films will appear together on stage. This is too big to miss.
In the age of Netflix and the iPhone, when any form of entertainment or distraction is a notification away, it is no mean feat to hold people’s attention. The Tribeca film festival managed it a few times this year, including two sell-out events at Radio City Music Hall: the Godfather event and the opening night, when Aretha Franklin led a concert to mark the premiere of “The Soundtrack of Our Lives”, a documentary about Clive Davis, a legendary music producer. On April 28th, the evening before the Godfather event, more than 2,500 people filled the…Continue reading
K. Brent Tomer 