The announcement was made in the middle of the Fest; Moontower is merging (their term) with the older, better known Just For Laughs comedy festival in Montreal. JFL as its readily known by, started in 1983, well before the Comedy Boom and survived the Comedy Bust in the early Nineties.
Personally, I smell a rat. A Quebecker rat who smells of poutine and bullshit. I already don’t think the people who oversee Moontower, the same who bumble the numerous special events at the Paramount, yeah, I’m still pissed over their fuck up with my last time to see MST3K’s farewell to Joel. So my biggest concern is how they want to change a relative newbie festival (10 years) from being a nice four-day, long weekend event and make it 10 days. Four is perfect. Ten is exhausting and will be laden with FOMO shit.
Too much of a good thing already made SXSW shittier. It sucked big time when it transformed into an Industry Elites Only gathering, we local peasants weren’t welcome to see the world premiere of Us and other stuff. Now the music element at SXSW is as pathetic as comic books are at San Diego Comic Fest. SXSW starts well before UT’s Spring Break with all the multimedia crap (computers, film, etc.) and then closes with all the little venue shows in which the dying Music Industry tries to tell us, please like this, Taylor Shit and Billie Mumblecore aren’t enough to cover our cocaine expenses.
I fear Moontower will be dictated by the now foundering Comedy Industry via Comedy Central, the network which only shows marathons of The Office when they don’t have a new episode of The Daily Show. Throw in Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime pushing for eyeballs, I think getting an all-access Satellite-level badge will become pointless. They already cut those off from accessing unfilled seats at the shows booked at the Paramount or State theater a couple years ago. Just as an “all-access” wristband at SXSW suddenly turned into a NOT ALL-ACCESS to everything over a decade ago, I predict the JFL assholes will do the same. Meanwhile, Moontower’s focus on stand-up comedy involving our local talent (Mac Blake, Vanessa Gonzalez and Avery Moore) while become secondary, then tertiary as the Industry will refocus the fest into a plugfest for new SitComs and other works with higher production costs.
I do hope I’m wrong. We’ll see what is the plan quite soon. Moontower is expected to return to its original time slot of April in 2022.