Hamptons Film Festival Aims to Be a Serious Player

When Steven Spielberg speaks, people listen.

Of course, Spielberg is listed merely as “special adviser” to the new Hamptons International Film Festival. But who could doubt that he and other members of the honorary board--Alec Baldwin, Alan Alda and George Plimpton among them--are part of that special mix of star power, intellectual cachet and deal-making that turn a series of screenings into a festival?

Though it’s jostling with hundreds of competitors, the Hamptons Festival, making its bow today through Sunday in East Hampton and Sag Harbor, Long Island, clearly aims to be a serious player: With a program of about 40 features, an equal number of short films, a schedule of seminars and panels (one, on Friday, reportedly being hosted by Spielberg and Martin Scorsese, on film preservation) and an expected roundup of stars, star-makers and star-gazers, the festival has trumpeted its intent to turn the off-season East End of Long Island into a mini-Cannes, with fall foliage.

That scenario, however, has up-to-the-last-minute tinkering. On one recent, gray day in East Hampton, for instance, the phone kept ringing at the festival’s cramped offices, bringing its artistic director, Darryl Macdonald, a flurry of good news and bad.

Good news: The distributors of a sought-after Australian film were committing the movie to make its U.S. premiere at the festival. Bad news: A French distributor was threatening to pull his film from the festival, citing a scheduling conflict with another festival in France. Good news: The French-film problem was resolved through some creative scheduling by Macdonald, and the film stayed in. Such are the vagaries of running a brand-new festival.

“Circumstances change daily,” said Macdonald, a veteran of the Palm Springs, Vancouver and Seattle film festivals. “You can have a film confirmed and all of a sudden have the rug pulled out from under you. . . . Nobody ever really comes out and says, ‘You’re a first-time festival, why should I give you my film?’ ”

The final lineup includes 19 U.S. premieres and three world premieres. Among the latter will be the opening film, “A Home of Our Own,” directed by Tony Bill and starring Kathy Bates as a financially strapped mother of six. Closing the festival will be “George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker,” with Macaulay Culkin as the Nutcracker Prince. And on view Friday and Sunday will be the newly restored “A Streetcar Named Desire,” including footage cut from the 1951 classic.

But with so many festivals already competing for attention, does the world really need another one?

Macdonald, who confesses to having wondered the same thing, says the Hamptons’ growing stature as Hollywood East makes it ideal. The roster of honorary board members (most with homes in the Hamptons) would tend to support that: Spielberg, Baldwin, Alda, Plimpton, Roy Scheider, Patricia Kennedy Lawford, producer Keith Barish (“The Fugitive”) and painter Eric Fischl. The festival’s board chairman is Toni Ross, daughter of Steve Ross, the late chairman of Time Warner.