Film Festival A to Z: The Complete Guide Starting and Running an Independent

Every year, thousands of first-time festival founders make the same mistakes - the ones nobody warns them about, because everyone who's already made them would rather talk about opening night than the spreadsheet behind it. Richard Tavernaro has stood on both sides of that curtain - as an actor, director, and producer submitting work and hoping for a yes, and as the founder and director of the Cobb International Film Festival, which grew from a one-day, eighteen-film screening into a four-day event held in partnership with Cobb County and hosting guests including Robert Patrick, Matthew Modine, Chandler Riggs, Gregory Alan Williams, Rachel Luttrell, and Steve Agee. Film Festival A-Z organizes everything that goes into building and running a festival into twenty-six clear, practical letter-chapters, sequenced to follow a festival's real lifecycle: - Founding a festival - team, mission, budgeting, venue, and dates- Building the program - submissions, legal structure, guests, insurance, jury and judging, local partnerships- Getting the word out - marketing and media relations- Running it live - onsite operations, programming, Q&As, red carpet, sponsorship and staffing, ticketing- Closing and sustaining - audience data, volunteers, wrap-up, crisis management, year-round engagement, and planning next year Every chapter follows the same shape: a real opening scenario, core guidance, a dedicated "On a Limited Budget" section for first-year and volunteer-run festivals, a working checklist, common mistakes to avoid, and a short takeaway. >Whether you're founding your first festival or trying to fix the one you're already running, this is the guide that tells you what actually goes into it - not the mystique, the mechanics.