MEA Film Fest: Come for the Movies, Stay for the Connections

Chip Conley (0:00)

Hollywood has had a huge impact on the world's point of view on everything. Yeah. Including ageism, including the fact that until very recently, Hollywood's point of view on age was the golden girls. Yes, yeah. Which was funny, but the reality was those golden girls were the same age as the Sex and the City women when they made their movie. So they're-

Derek Gehl (0:21)

Oh my God, you're right.

Chip Conley (0:22)

Yeah. The way we've tended to treat older people in movies has been unfortunate.

SPEAKER_3 (0:27)

This is The Midlife Chrysalis.

Welcome to Wisdom Wednesdays with Chip Conley and Derek Gehl. Your weekly conversation about thriving in midlife. Together, we explore the questions, insights and practices that help you live this chapter with more purpose, vitality and joy.

Derek Gehl (0:45)

Welcome to Wisdom Wednesday here at The Midlife Chrysalis podcast. My name is Derek Gehl. I'm the CEO here at MEA. I'm with our founder, Mr. Chip Conley.

Chip Conley (0:51)

Welcome back. Thank you. It's getting darker.

Derek Gehl (0:54)

It is getting darker.

Chip Conley (0:57)

It's good movie weather.

Derek Gehl (0:59)

It is. It's good. Light the fire, watch a movie.

Chip Conley (1:04)

Part of the reason we created, we're going to talk about it, the MEA Film Fest was because right before Christmas each year, it gets dark. We're in Santa Fe. The Baja campus stays lighter later. But in Santa Fe, it starts getting dark, it's getting colder.

You want to sit.

Derek Gehl (1:21)

Popcorn blanket movie.

Chip Conley (1:23)

Exactly. A hot toddy or whatever you're going to have.

Two years ago, because I'm passionate about films, we created our first MEA Film Fest and it was so successful. More than half the people who came signed up for the next year. Next year, we doubled the size and then now we're doing our third. Well, let's talk.

Derek Gehl (1:44)

Where the hell did this come from? Before Hotels, before Airbnb, before MEA.

Back in your 20s, you wrote a screenplay?

Chip Conley (1:51)

So I talked about it on a past podcast, so I won't say too much about it, but I went to a 12-month-long screenwriting workshop every weekend, once one month per, one weekend per month, with a guy named Sid Field and wrote a screenplay. But by the time I'd finished the screenplay, I decided I was going to create the Boutique Hotel Company, so I didn't really do anything with the screenplay. But I've always been interested in films, and when I was at high school, I wanted to be a film critic, and long story short is I just love the medium. What I saw was AARP has something called Movies for Grownups, and it's their annual list of the best movies for grownups, basically for older people. I always felt like the list was just not that great. I mean, it was sort of obvious movies and it didn't have art film that thought to be perfect. And so the premise of the MEA Film Fest beyond just me wanting to see a lot of great films with friends and talk about them, was what if you actually create a workshop format for a film festival? So instead of like you buy individual tickets for a to be in a theater to see one film in a film fest, you buy the whole workshop experience. So you're staying on site unless you're a commuter, we have commuter rates, and you stay on site eating three meals a day on site, drinking alcohol at night, hanging out in the hot tub with people, doing yoga, going for hikes, going and playing with the horses, and you're doing that with the filmmakers. Yeah. So at this year's film fest, which is December 14th through the 19th, we have literally with 40 filmmakers, I'm sorry, 30 filmmakers or artists or actors, everybody from Rita Moreno to Dr. Bob Waldinger, who's the famous Harvard professor who created The Good Life. Yeah. That book and the whole Harvard study around what are the commonalities around live your own life because there's a new movie called The Good Life which is a closing film. So let's see, it's 50 attendees, 30 filmmakers, and 40 films, and so it's just a beautiful experience.

Yeah, and we have a lot of great filmmakers coming this year, and a lot of actors and Alicia Reiner from Orange is the New Black, Roda Blank whose film The 40-Year-Old Version, not The 40-Year-Old Virgin, The 40-Year-Old Version is so good. She's an African-American woman and it's just a fierce film about someone in her 40s who decides she's going to become a hip-hop DJ, which is a very male dominated thing from guys in their teens and 20s.