GOINGS ON SANTA BARBARA : Premiere Event : A number of big names are expected to attend the annual international film festival. More than 90 films will be shown.

If you can get Kim Novak, Charlton Heston and Dean Stockwell to be guests at your film function, it’s likely you’re doing something right. Add to that trio James Caan, Jonathan Winters, Robert Mitchum and Jane Seymour and you can be just about positive you’re doing something right.

These and other screen personalities are expected be on hand during the sixth annual Santa Barbara International Film Festival, which begins Friday evening and runs through March 17.

More than 90 films will be shown, among them productions from the United States, Great Britain, Australia, Korea, Canada, Austria and France. They will include series on “Women Filmmakers,” “The Black Experience in Film” and 1990 Academy Award foreign film nominees. There will be a handful of North American premieres and a few world premieres.

It’s an extensive collection and one that took some time to compile, said Phyllis de Picciotto, the festival’s artistic director.

De Picciotto was particularly pleased with the Pacific Rim productions and the work of independent film makers in the United States.

“It’s very easy in this country not to think so highly of our own,” she said. “U.S. independents are very creative and resourceful. They’re not all making $60-million movies. They’re making them for a lot less and they are very good.”

The festival will start at 7 p.m. at the Arlington Theater with a showing of “The Josephine Baker Story,” starring Lynn Whitfield and Ruben Blades, both of whom are scheduled to attend. Academy Award-winner Heston and his son, Fraser, will be at the Victoria Theater Monday for a preview of “Crucifer of Blood,” directed by Fraser and starring his dad as Sherlock Holmes.

The Fiesta Five theater, Santa Barbara Art Museum and the Arlington and Victoria theaters will serve as film sites. For more information call the festival hot line at 689-INFO.

Can a troubled female surgeon find true love with a male nurse who moonlights as a barroom pianist? How does that relationship compare to the relationship between two geriatric patients? Find out in the Center Stage Theater production of “A Fine and Private Place,” running tonight through Sunday. It was written by local playwrights Robert Potter, a UCSB drama professor, and Ellen Anderson, winner of the Washington Theatre Festival Best New Play Award in 1989. For more information or tickets call 963-0408.

City College of Santa Barbara will open a 16-day run of its production of the Tony Award-winning play “Amadeus” beginning Friday night at the Garvin Theatre. The play will co-star UCSB student Jeff Mills as Mozart’s rival Salieri. David Ray, a City College theater arts student, will play the title role. For ticket information call the box office at 965-5935.

Ever imagine a NASA training program set to music? Well, the minds behind New York-based Theatreworks/USA did. In fact they’ve created an entire musical from the events involving the first Apollo flight to the moon. The group will perform the show, titled “Footprints on the Moon,” at UCSB’s Campbell Hall at 4 p.m. Saturday. Tickets are $6 general, $4 children.

Forget low pressure systems, humidity percentages, storm fronts--it seems the real credit for last week’s downpour goes to the promoters of the Santa Barbara Civic Light Opera’s production of “Singin’ in the Rain.”

To draw attention to the show, publicists invited 22 West Coast television and radio weather broadcasters to do a rain dance on the Lobero Theatre stage. Apparently, it worked. By the way, “Singin’ in the Rain” has been extended through March 24, so you had better hang on to your umbrellas.