Palm Springs Festival Opts for Offbeat : Movies: For five days, the town that epitomizes California glitz was deluged with art-house films, as Mayor Sonny Bono’s brainchild and would-be rival to Cannes was launched.

One of the official sweat shirts of the first annual Palm Springs International Film Festival, which ended its five-day run Sunday, bears a caricature of Mayor Sonny Bono, megaphone in hand, sitting in a director’s chair. The festival’s press kit includes a large, glossy post card with Bono, tennis racket in hand, proclaiming: “I want you babe.” To an outsider, Bono having a mayor’s title takes a bit of getting used to. A film festival in Palm Springs also takes a bit of getting used to.

In the works for over a year, the Palm Springs Film Festival was one of Bono’s most highly publicized campaign pledges. “My job as mayor,” said Bono at a security-locked, invitational party for the festival at his home Friday night, “is to put Palm Springs together and give it a product identity.” The festival director, Jeannette Paulson, who also runs the Hawaii International Film Festival, says she set out to “shape the festival for the needs of the community.”

Since the Palm Springs winter tourist season traditionally kicks off next weekend with the Bob Hope Chrysler Golf Classic, one of the “needs” the non-competitive film festival serves is to warm the coffers of hotels and merchants one week earlier than usual. According to the festival office, 3,000 out-of-towners booked hotel space specifically to attend the festival.

The festival coordinators may have artsy-altruistic reasons for doing what they do, but film festivals also are good for business. That’s why the city of Palm Springs kicked in $70,000 to get the festival going. Corporate sponsors added the equivalent of another $1 million.

Palm Springs has four theater complexes, totaling 23 screens, and none of them is in the habit of exhibiting foreign-language films. According to Marshall Stone, regional director for Metropolitan Theaters, which owns or manages all the movie houses in Santa Barbara, only nine foreign films have played Palm Springs in 13 years. In Palm Springs, a truly offbeat movie is something like “My Left Foot.”

So there’s something pleasantly hallucinatory about the idea that a community fabled for its lacquered luxuries should suddenly be deluged with art-house fare--movies about a modern Passion Play (the French-Canadian “Jesus of Montreal,” directed by Denys Arcand); a voyeuristic tailor (“Monsieur Hire,” based on a Georges Simenon novel); a German war bride married to an American crop duster (“Rosalie Goes Shopping,” directed by “Bagdad Cafe’s” Percy Adlon); and the closing of a movie theater (“Cinema Paradiso,” the festival’s enthusiastically received opening night movie, which is also Italy’s entry this year for a foreign-language film Oscar.)

Palm Springs may still reverberate with its reputation as Hollywood’s Golden Age romping grounds, and a glance at the San Jacinto Mountains puts one in mind of Gene Autry movies. But the film festival has wisely chosen to downplay the glitz and the corn, and instead waltz headlong into the esoterica.

Of course, not all the movies were high-toned. “Salutes” abounded--to the Hope-Crosby Road pictures, to the movies of Kirk Douglas, Lucille Ball, Frank Capra and James Stewart. An international panel of critics introduced their favorite comedies, and so Preston Sturges’ “Miracle of Morgan’s Creek” and “Theodora Goes Wild,” and “Auntie Mame” were aired out. The festival committee even had the wit to program the 1966 Sonny and Cher movie “Good Times,” William Friedkin’s first feature. But these were the exceptions in a 46-film lineup that included eight American premieres.

No world premieres, though. World premieres tend to go to world-class film festivals, and, for now, despite Bono’s devotion to the notion that Palm Springs will rival Cannes, many of its top-of-the-line movies, like “Jesus of Montreal,” “Monsieur Hire” and “Cinema Paradiso,” were Cannes hand-me-downs.

The Palm Springs Film Festival most likely has a fine future. If the films won’t automatically draw tourists, the weather will. Would the Cannes Festival be as popular if it relocated to Detroit? Good weather and beautiful scenery explain why California is overstocked with film festivals right now--not just the monster-sized AFI/LA Film Fest but, for starters, the festivals in Monterey, San Francisco, Santa Barbara and Mill Valley. They are scheduled far enough apart so that they don’t crowd each other’s terrain. Representatives from these festivals visit each other’s camp grounds, trade tips, swap personnel.

Maybe this explains the surprisingly well-oiled Palm Springs festival debut. All the tell-tale signs of an up-and-running festival were there. Instead of a Palm Canyon Drive clogged with schooled-out whoopsters, traffic was jammed with would-be cineastes honking their way to the new Argentinian film. The Desert Fashion Plaza was festooned with festival balloons and an assortment of “International” entertainment acts--strolling mariachi bands, Ukrainian dancers, the Canadian Navy Band, complete with lutanist (five Canadian movies were given their West Coast debuts).

Despite the wondrous tanning powers of the great outdoors, Palm Springs was giddy with an infiltration of film folk instantaneously recognizable by their grayed-out pallor--too many hours spent in sunless screening rooms.

The Palm Springs Film Festival may not be strictly necessary, but film festivals these days are practically the only places where foreign-language movies, and movies with budgets of under $1 million, get shown, or bought. At least a half a dozen distribution outfits, including representatives from Warner Bros. Columbia, Miramax and Skouras, poked through the offerings.

And at least two of the films seen, David Lynch’s ABC-TV pilot “Twin Peaks,” and James Toback’s documentary “The Big Bang,” were extraordinary. “Twin Peaks,” which is now scheduled to air on television in March, is like a shadow play on the same themes of small-town subversion as “Blue Velvet.” It has a crawly, ghastly humor.

“The Big Bang,” which is currently without a distributor, is a let-it-all-out collage of interviews with everyone from basketball’s Darryl Dawkins to a philosopher-nun to an Auschwitz survivor. It’s like a super episode of some cosmic talk show. These films have the kind of audacity that makes festival-hopping such a treasure hunt.

It’s enough to make anyone pro-Bono.