Civic Pride Fuels Mania for Festivals

From Leipzig to Lone Pine, Tokyo to Temecula, the lights are going down and the screens are lighting up, part of a planetary infestation of film festivals.

“The rise of the film festival came along with the marginalization of art-house cinema, especially foreign films,” says Lucy Mohl of the Film.com World Wide Web site, which monitors festivals. “There was a cartoon in the New Yorker that showed people climbing over a mountaintop in Switzerland, looking out over the Alps, and saying, ‘What this place needs is a film festival!’ ”

“There are over 300 film festivals in the world now,” says Justine Ashton, who recently added another one, the alfresco Wine Country Film Festival in the Napa and Sonoma valleys. “This summer, we started showing films submitted to the academy in the documentary and foreign categories, because most people don’t get to see them. It’s frustrating to see the list on the Oscars and know you’re never going to get to see most of them. Besides, it’s 20 to 30 miles between theaters up here.”

But most film festivals don’t exist simply to fill a cinematic gap. They’re civic booster shots for the local economy.

“It’s good for the wine country,” Ashton says. “We’ve sort of become like a travel agency.”

Sarasota, Fla., did wonders for the French film industry by sponsoring a major annual fest for many years honchoed by heavy-hitter critic Molly Haskell; it also did wonders for Sarasota tourism.

A particularly well-documented fest-cum-tourist attraction is the Palm Springs International Film Festival, which recently was renamed the Nortel Palm Springs International Film Festival in honor of its corporate sponsor, in the manner of the Drambuie Edinburgh Film Festival.

“Palm Springs in January is not a shabby place to go, so that’s a reality we have to accept,” says the festival’s executive director, Craig Prater. “It was Sonny Bono’s idea when he was mayor in 1989 that it would be a great place for a festival. It originally started, quite simply stated, to bring business to Palm Springs.” As Prater rhapsodizes in the festival booklet, “Visualize hotel rooms in January booked years in advance and restaurant reservations impossible to obtain. Could this be possible only in the movies? I don’t think so.”

The Palm Springs bash has swollen from five to 18 days, and Prater says ticket sales have hit a quarter-million dollars.

“The budget is about $800,000,” he says. “The city gives us $150,000 each year, and we get $250,000 from Nortel. The rest is box office and general donations by sponsorships.”

“Nortel hired this independent marketing survey firm, Joyce Julius and Associates, to analyze their investment for what it’s worth,” says J.P. Allen, festival director of operations. “They drove us crazy!”

Crazy with joy, that is. The analysts calculated a cash value for each mention of the Nortel film fest in the media, based on what the exposure would cost if it were an ad. They counted 573 mentions of the fest creating 761,425,312 impressions on viewers, for a total payday--technically known as a National Television Impression Value--of $7,439,125.32. Not bad for a quarter-mil investment.

“They were hoping for maybe a million dollars’ worth of return,” Allen says. And even though officials take care to refer to it as the Nortel festival, “in the press coverage they don’t always mention Nortel, but they always mention Palm Springs, so the value to the city is even greater.”

The rich possibilities have other cities within a few hours’ drive of Hollywood wishing upon movie stars as well, including Temecula, Lone Pine, Santa Clarita, Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo, Hermosa Beach and Newport Beach.

“I did some research and I found that with 3 million people, [Orange County] was the largest area in the U.S. with no film festival,” says Jeff Conner, a real estate developer and film buff who remedied that oversight by starting the Newport Beach International Film Festival.

Festivals do well by city fathers, off-key mop-top pop singers-turned-politicians and corporate donors, but how about you, the viewer? What do you get out of all this festival proliferation, besides a sore rump and a chance to see worthy little movies that might get squeezed off your local cinema screen by mass bookings of “Independence Day II”?

Civic ambition and the allure of a free piece of paradise coincide in the Taos Talking Picture Festival, which graces the Oo-oonah Arts Center in the ancient New Mexico pueblo and six other film venues on April 10-13.

Taos, of course, has many artistic distinctions, including the only known artwork produced by D.H. Lawrence in collaboration with Michelle Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas. When she was married to Dennis Hopper, she touched up Lawrence’s faux-Indian paintings on the glass walls of the upstairs bathroom at the Mabel Dodge Luhan House, an adobe home Hopper once owned.

Locals are trying to make Hopper’s dream to put Taos on the movie map a reality.

“We’ve been given [land] by Jeff Jackson of Taos Land and Film Co.,” says festival spokesperson Mary Beth Kipp. “We’re trying to plant a new filmmaking community in Taos. Each year, we give an innovation award--last year it was to ‘Notes From Underground’ director Gary Walkow--to a filmmaker who works outside the formulas of traditional storytelling. And what it is, is five acres of land here in Taos. We’ll be giving away five acres per year until 2006.”

So all you have to do is make a rugged indie film and send it to Taos by Wednesday, and you could become a permanent part of the local economy. Go to the Taos film festival if you dare--you may never come back.

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Festival Seeding

Based on an informal survey of film executives, here are how some major film festivals rate in a variety of catagories, from their value as markets for distributors to acquire new films to how they accommodate non-industry movie lovers. Ratings are on a scale of 0 to 4:

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Festival Scene Stars Overall Quality Access for Acquistions of Films Film Buffs Toronto 3 3 3 3.5 4 Sundance 3.5 4 3 3 2 Cannes 3 3 4 3.5 1.5 Telluride 2 3.5 2 2.5 3 New York 2.5 1 1 3 3 Los Angeles 0 1 0 0.5 4

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Sources: Industry executives; Researched by JOHN HORN / SPECIAL TO THE TIMES