My Two Cents: This Is The Era Of Summits

By Dom Serafini

This is the year of the . . . Summit. Summits everywhere: the Telenovela Summit, the SARS Summit, the Earth Summit, the Upfront Summit, the NATPE International Summit, the ITU’s World Summit on the Information Society, the Publishers Weekly’s First Annual Summit and the 2nd annual Digital Studio Summit, which was probably inspired by the 2001 Beverly Hills Summit, just to name a few. There is even a town in the U.S. called Summit, located just west of Chicago, Illinois.

All these without even considering the various yearly G7, G8 and G10 Summits. Each summit varies in scope, exclusivity and cost. Television Week’s “Upfront Summit,” for example, asked $495 from each participant. NATPE only asked $100 from members and $200 from non-members, lunch included. The Telenovela “Cumbre” (Spanish for summit) attracted some 150 people and Brazil’s Globo TV even paid for lunch. At the Digital Studio Summit, organizer, iHollywood Forum, Inc., asked $695 at the door. Some, like the one in Evian, France, even brought about demonstrations.

President Bush got two people for his Summit in the island of Terceira in the Azores (which was billed as the new Yalta, but became known as the next Yale Bonesman frat party): Tony Blair and Jose Maria Aznar, since the premier of Palau couldn’t attend because the island nation was too late in joining the “coalition of the willing” to fight the “Bush war” in Iraq.

In the recent past, at the Beverly Hills Summit, the White House asked Hollywood producers to get with the program and support the government propaganda machine.

In the beginning there were “forums” (or fora), which were very democratic since they referred to a place of meeting for public discussion with authorities. Later, around the year 1527, these fora developed into “conferences,” which indicated a certain exclusivity as a meeting for discussing matters of common concern.

These evolved into mass-appeal events with the terms congress, seminar and symposium. Now we have the “summit,” which, basically, reflects the CEO syndrome. The “chief” wants only the “top” (or summus, Latin for the highest point). In the process, the word “market” has lost some of its original appeal. Nowadays, NATPE is not just a market, it’s the National Association of Television Program Executives. A few years back it dabbled with NATPE International, but the name didn’t take.

Back to the “market,” for MIFED’s meaning has been lost just in the nick of time: the American Film Market wants to be known just as the AFM and MIP is simply a “marché,” which, being in French, adds a certain prestige -- sort of like instead of saying a dish of calf’s brain, one says “le cervelle de veau.” Plus, instead of “market,” some are increasingly using the term “screenings” : witness the Cologne Screenings, the French Screenings and the mother of all screenings, the L.A. Screenings. At one point it even looked like “screenings” -- the MIFED Screenings, the London Screenings and the AFM’s Premiere Screenings -- were bound to be all the rage, but they later fizzled out.

So, is the summit the best we can expect for the time being, or are marketing gurus working on a new super-exclusive conclave definition? Perhaps we’ll soon be referring to MIPCOM as the MIPCONCILIUM (especially for those to whom the TV biz is like a religion), since the overused “summit” is already losing some of its gold patina. But, on the other hand, the International Council just changed its name to the International Academy.

Dom Serafini