Hollywood’s Film Fest SigAlert

The world’s leading film festivals are held far away from Hollywood, in such locales as Cannes, Berlin, Venice and Toronto.

So when the American Film Institute announced plans to upgrade its Hollywood-based event, it seemed that the movie capital was finally on its way to having a film festival to rival the best anywhere.

But this year, AFI finds itself competing for attention not only with elite gatherings in distant cities, but with an upstart group in its own backyard.

The first Hollywood Film Festival opens a five-day run today. Less than a week later, the 11th annual AFI Los Angeles International Film Festival gets underway on Oct. 23.

With two film festivals bowing almost back-to-back, some wonder if the specter of dueling festivals will lead to confusion among the film-going public.

“Why would you want to confuse the industry and the local community by putting on another festival in the same month?” asked Jon Fitzgerald, the new director of the AFI festival. “People are calling and asking, ‘Who are these guys?’ ”

The AFI festival is supported not only by all the major studios and their top brass, but also by such well-known industry titans as Steven Spielberg, Gregory Peck and Charlton Heston.

Yet, while it could be judged as a brazen upstart, the Hollywood Film Festival has also attracted the endorsement of key movie industry people as well as corporate sponsorship from the New York Times and other companies.

The list of “co-founders-chairs,” for example, includes actor Gene Hackman, Paramount Pictures chief Sherry Lansing, former TriStar Pictures chief Mike Medavoy and directors Rob Reiner and Mark Rydell. But some of those have expressed concern that the two festivals are scheduled back-to-back.

Medavoy, whose production company, Phoenix Pictures, chose the AFI festival for the U.S. premiere of its film “Swept From the Sea,” said he had not been aware that the Hollywood Film Festival would be scheduled so near to the more established AFI event when he agreed to lend his name.

“Had I known at the time, I probably would have held off,” Medavoy said, but added that he had no misgivings. “People who want to go to this will go to it, and those who don’t, wont.”

Lansing also expressed concern about the timing of the events, sources said.

Cody Cluff, the mayor’s liaison to the film industry, said the two festivals really serve different markets and, thus, shouldn’t lead to confusion. “L.A.’s a big town,” Cluff said. “I think there is room to support both events.”

The Hollywood Film Festival is the brainchild of Carlos de Abreu, a former marketing executive at Cartier and author of “Opening the Doors to Hollywood.”

“I don’t think anyone can compete with an institution like AFI,” De Abreu said. “This is a huge city, a huge country. It’s like saying, ‘Don’t open a restaurant across the street from my restaurant.’ I believe in inclusion. I certainly don’t believe in competing with anyone.

“I wish good for everybody,” De Abreu added. “Maybe next year, they will do this in September, ahead of me.”

The specter of competition could not come at a more inopportune time for AFI, which hired Fitzgerald to develop an event that would attract worldwide attention.

“Though its history has been spotty, the AFI festival has the virtue of longevity and is currently the top festival in town, though the L.A. Independent Film Festival is gaining on it every year,” said Kenneth Turan, The Times’ film critic. “As an unknown quantity, the Hollywood Film Festival still has to prove itself, to create an identity of its own.”

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Past AFI festivals focused on foreign films, said the 30-year-old Fitzgerald.

“They really didn’t pay a lot of attention to young, independent American filmmakers and that is something that needs to be recognized here,” he said.

With that in mind, Fitzgerald said, the AFI festival has established a category for American independent lower-budget films called New Visions.

“I felt, why doesn’t Los Angeles, as the film capital of the world, have an internationally recognized, premier festival like Cannes, Berlin, Toronto and all these other amazing festivals?” Fitzgerald said.

Film festivals are not uncommon in Los Angeles. The Los Angeles Independent Film Festival, for example, will hold its fourth event next April. And for years the city also played host to Filmex, a cultural fixture until the mid-1980s, which presented as many as 200 movies during its annual two-week expositions.

Fitzgerald himself was once considered something of an outsider as far as festivals go. He gave fits to the famed Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, when, in 1995, he organized an alternative event called the Slamdance Film Festival and invited newer, lower-budget filmmakers who couldn’t get into Sundance.

When Fitzgerald got the AFI job, he suggested “it might be worth moving in different directions to generate more excitement in the industry and bring the industry into the fold.”

For his part, De Abreu said it has long been his dream to host a film festival, but didn’t decide to pursue it until he contacted the State of California and found that no one had ever obtained the rights to the name “Hollywood Film Festival.”

A man of Portuguese descent who was raised in Mozambique and later became a U.S. citizen, De Abreu is married to Janice Pennington, a model who displays prizes on “The Price Is Right.” Pennington is a co-founder of the Hollywood Film Festival, which has as its motto, “Bridging the gap between Hollywood, emerging independent filmmakers and storytellers.”

De Abreu said the idea for a film festival came to him last November while he was having lunch with director Ted Kotcheff (“Weekend at Bernie’s”), who had expressed an interest in two scripts from a screenplay contest organized by De Abreu, the Columbus Screenplay Discovery Awards.

“Ted asked me, ‘Anything else we can do together?’ ” De Abreu recalled. “I said, ‘Ted, I have the Screenplay Discovery Awards. What about the Film Discovery Awards?’ [Ted] said, ‘What do I have to do?’ I said, ‘You don’t have to do anything. Just contact people in Hollywood. I’ll do everything else.’ ”

While the Hollywood Film Festival and AFI festival stress their differences, each will offer an array of programs, panel discussions and awards. The AFI, for example, will hold a tribute to Jessica Lange, while the Hollywood Film Festival will give a lifetime achievement award to Kirk Douglas.

The AFI’s Fitzgerald said the competition, if any exists, doesn’t bother him.

“I’m not intimidated by them or worried about them,” he said, “but I do think there could potentially be some confusion in town.”

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SNEAK PREVIEWS: A closer look at the movies and special events at both festivals. F10