Beach Film Festival Gets Sand Kicked in Its Face--and Lives

The banker brought his kids. The biker backpacked a beach chair. Beach bums arrived bearing blankets.

It was billed as the quintessential California film festival. A full-length feature on the beach. A projector placed on the pier, a 10-by-20-foot screen set up on the sand. The only instructions: Bring your own beach chair.

Instead, the opening of the first Hermosa Beach Film Festival on Thursday night turned out like a scene from “Twister.” Fierce winds forced festival organizers to move their movie indoors to the Hermosa Beach Community Center, turning the event into more of a Midwestern-style movie screening. A high school marching band performance was canceled. The Hollywood hoopla blew away with the sand.

The seaside screening of the aptly named “Pie in the Sky” has been rescheduled for Sunday at 8 p.m., although other events in the first-time festival are moving forward indoors--largely as planned.

“It’s certainly a bit bass-ackwards, but I didn’t want to be remembered as the man who killed 24 people at the Hermosa Beach Film Festival,” said festival director Mike Kerrigan on Thursday night, after moving indoors to escape the whipping winds. “That would certainly put us on the map, but that’s not exactly how we want to be remembered.”

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Hermosa Beach’s four-day film festival has been nine months in the making. A community group charged with bringing arts to town first hatched the idea last summer. The City Council pitched in $5,000 to get it started, and local businesses followed in the name of civic spirit.

Hawthorne Savings, for one, donated $25,000 to buy projectors to run the 42 full-length and short films that are screening from morning to midnight. Skechers, a local shoe store, printed up about 40,000 fliers, and Domino’s delivered them on the same South Bay takeout pizza boxes that bear pepperoni and cheese, anchovies and onions.

The idea was to make the event, which concludes Sunday, a burgeoning version of the world-renowned Cannes Film Festival in France. After all, there are many similarities between the festival sites. The French have the Riviera, Hermosa too has a beach. Both have Hollywood hobnobbing, although at Cannes, A-list celebs do most of the wheeling and dealing, while in Hermosa, the city’s diligent parking meter attendants do the honors.

Oh, and they both show lots of films.

That’s where the similarities end and the unparalleled identity of Hermosa Beach begins. Where else could you have a movie shown right on the beach? And an event where black ties and designer dresses are passe and swim trunks, slippers and sweatshirts are in? Only in a place like Hermosa Beach, where the City Council members don the same dress to attend their weekly meetings.

“This is so Hermosa Beach,” said Candice Livengood of Redondo Beach, who brought a blanket, beach chair and sunglasses to the event and plans to return for Sunday’s sunset screening. “It sums up all the South Bay. It’s just a laid-back place.”

Organizers had planned to show the films at several theaters around town. But in recent months, the city’s lone art movie house, the Bijou Cinemas, closed and the operators of a six-screen AMC multiplex backed out, Kerrigan said. The festival staff was forced to be, well, creative.

The oh-so sterile City Council chambers have been converted into a movie theater for the weekend and the spacious Community Center auditorium-- where the icky prom queen scene from the 1970s thriller “Carrie” was filmed--has been turned into the festival’s main theater.

All traces of the pig blood that was purposely poured over Carrie are gone, much to the chagrin of festival organizers who joke that they could have used any remaining props to finance the festival.

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Easy-going beach dwellers tend to take life with a grain of salt air.

Recognizing that the inclement weather Thursday night was no one’s fault, save Mother Nature, the bastion of beach-goers who turned out for the event handled the postponement as matter-of-factly as a cloudy day at the beach.

Many hiked up the hill to the hastily arranged indoor screening where a stiff Community Center policy of no food or drinks was enforced. Slick beach-goers sporting sweatpants and sunglasses were able, however, to sneak in their previously popped popcorn.

The screening had a few stops and starts because the projectionist hired to operate the beach event wasn’t familiar with the more state-of-the-art equipment at the Community Center. The laid-back audience took the technical difficulty in stride, as if it was simply the seventh-inning stretch at a Dodgers’ game.

“We’ll have to come back Sunday to see the other half,” joked a viewer when the projector jammed.

The house lights dimmed soon afterward for the final reel.

Some would-be moviegoers never made it from the beach to the nearby Community Center, suddenly getting thirsty as they moved past the stretch of Pier Avenue bars hosting happy hours. Others simply skipped out on the event, intent on returning Sunday for a true Hermosa Beach film fest experience.

“We were really looking forward to this,” said Eve Hopkins, 26, of Redondo Beach, who came with a bunch of old high school friends. “It’s almost like going to a drive-in movie, like old times. It’s totally Hermosa Beach, so we’ll definitely come back.”

Pulling a plastic wagon stacked high with beach chairs, blankets and a barbecue chicken picnic dinner, Michelle White and pal Paula Redmond echoed the same sentiments as they continued down the Strand for a whirlwind picnic, opting to return Sunday for the movie.

“I paid $25 for a baby-sitter,” White, of Manhattan Beach, said. “Might as well have fun.”