Festival Supreme | 10.19.13
Well it took some convincing, but the night before Festival Supreme I was able to get a photo pass. Special thanks to Steve Agee for helping me wrangle that up.
Notes from Festival Supreme.
- Triumph with special guest Conan O'Brien calling cats cunts.
- Barrett’s Lemonade. seriously, I really liked their strawberry lemonade.
- Neil Hamburger’s One Man Show was literally a small tent with him performing comedy for one person at a time.
- Standing next to Tim Robbins
- Standing in front of Matt Groening
- Complaints. 9,000 people make it frustratingly impossible to access the restrooms, get food, or see the comedians they paid $100/$250 to see due to fire codes and capacity issues.
- Also not the festival for being short.
- During Mr. Show’s set, the video feed flanking the stage was stuck on Adam Sandler’s set. 15 minutes in, it finally took a call from Jack Black himself to switch the video feed to what was happening on stage at Mr. Show.
With a photo pass, I had the same access as the VIP ticket members + access to 5-10 minutes in the pit at the beginning of each performers each set. That’s fine, I had the same rules for GWAR the night before and it was an absolutely awesome time.
Unfortunately, having to wade through thousands of people to get to each stage’s pit for those couple minutes at the beginning of each set made things a bit of a nightmare. In the end, I was resigned to staying at the Mighty Tent.
As a result I completely missed Triumph, Tim & Eric, Princess, and Sandler. I also missed every single comedian in the Intimacy Tent, one of which was Will Forte with guest Jason Sudeikis doing a duet of James Ingram’s Come to Me.
Once Tenacious D started, I ended up on the left side of the stage and had to push my way through the sardine crowd to get the stage right entrance because one of the media liaisons (whose job is to kick press out of the pit after 5 minutes) wouldn’t let me walk with him behind the barricade to the check-in, even though we were both heading to the same place.
Halfway through Tenacious D, I decided to take an instagram photo, only to be told “no personal photos” as people directly behind me on the barricade snap away on their phones. Then they went ahead and used one of my instagrams to promote the show on their Facebook.
Their instilled rules seemed very arbitrary.
I guess in the end I’m spoiled by the well oiled machines that are SFSketchfest and Riot LA who just give me free reign to do what it takes to capture the shows. Speaking of which, tickets to that are already on sale: http://riotla.com
While everyone had their gripes, everyone could not dismiss the fact that the lineup and talent was pretty damn amazing, I really do hope they their shit together next year.