A Wide Focus

Back in the mid-’80s, the Santa Barbara International Film Festival kicked off, as new festivals are wont to do, with heady, high ambitions. The theory was that a festival in a tourist-destination burg close to Hollywood stood a good chance of entering the top echelon of international film showcases.

Reality settled in, and so did the event’s self-identity. At least as of the 14th annual festival, opening tonight and running for 10 days, the Santa Barbara Festival is not Cannes West, or anything with the visibility of Sundance or Telluride, but this little festival is a proud and diverse affair taking a respected place in the growing ranks of film festivals around the world.

Of late, the festival has evolved upward, partly from a new thrust of energy from new blood at the top. Renee Missel, a producer whose credits include “Resurrection” and “Nell,” took over the steerage of the festival last year, following a dozen years under the direction of founder Phyllis de Picciotto.

Part of the new director’s mandate has been to further solidify the link to Hollywood, including bringing industry people up for seminars and focusing on American cinema. At the same time, though, Missel doesn’t want to lose sight of a more global, art-house orientation, and some semblance of a showcase for the alternative film worlds of documentaries and short subjects. It’s a delicate balance, and a constant refining process.

Last year, Jodie Foster was toasted in an evening-long, this-is-your-life-like presentation. This year’s subject, Sally Field, shares with Foster the distinction of being a well-rounded industry figure, celebrated for her acting, but who has also ventured into directing and producing.

Field will be on hand Saturday at 7:30 p.m. at the Arlington for an on-stage Q&A; with clips. It will be followed by a screening of “Norma Rae,” for which she won the first of two Oscars. The second statuette was for 1984’s “Places in the Heart,” and her acceptance speech, with her exclamatory affirmation “You like me, you really like me” has taken its place in the Academy Award kitsch files.

Field is a survivor, and a happy hyphenate, as a TV-star-cum-movie-star, and now actor-director-producer, whose story by this point warrants a retrospective. The Pasadena-born actress, now 52, became America’s favorite teen in the ‘60s TV series “Gidget” and “The Flying Nun.” Still, making the transition to film, she recalled, “was virtually impossible.”

“I couldn’t get on a damn list to get in the room for an audition. It was a very different era from now, and being a celebrity on television did not translate to film at all. We were persona non grata. They didn’t even want you to drive on the lot. You had to really put your head down and make sure you wanted what you wanted really badly.”

Her first break into film came through the help of Bob Rafelson, whose wonderfully quirky “Stay Hungry” showed the world another side of Gidget. That role paved the way for a long series of solid film work, up through recent maternal roles in John Schlesinger’s retaliatory parable “Eye for an Eye” and as “Forrest Gump’s” can-do mother. Along the way, Field has ventured outward into other aspects of filmmaking.

As a producer, Field, through her entity, Fogwood Films, has been around longer than many realize. “I’ve had it [Fogwood Films] for a bazillion years and I’ve produced several films but I’ve never put my name on them in the past because in those days, I felt it would affect how people saw the films and I think it probably did. I produced ‘Murphy’s Romance’ and ‘Punchline,’ but I never put my name on them.

“Nowadays, I think women can put their names on films as producers and also be an actor. Nowadays, you can be the actor, the director, the writer, everything, and put your name on it. It doesn’t affect how the audience sees you in the role. We [as women] have moved some. Not enough, but some.”

Sometimes, the workings of Hollywood can wreak last-minute havoc for a festival. Originally, Garry Marshall’s “The Other Sister” was planned as the festival’s opening night film, but a switch in the movie’s release date invalidated its inclusion. (The film opened last Friday.) That led to booking the Quinn family fest, “This Is My Father,” directed by Paul Quinn, photographed by brother Declan Quinn and starring his brother Aidan Quinn, for tonight’s gala opening at the Arlington Theater.

Paul and Aidan Quinn and co-star James Caan have been invited to the gala, which will include a block party with music and food on a traffic-free State Street, starting at 4 p.m. The festival will also salute Elliott Gould (March 12), with a screening of “The Long Goodbye,” and Carl Reiner (March 13), with a screening of “Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid.”

Coming out from behind the scenes in Hollywood will be noted gagman Bruce Vilanch, the subject of “Get Bruce,” a documentary on the humorist who has written for the Academy Awards and countless other festivities. Vilanch will appear in person Sunday at 8 p.m. at the Riviera Theater.

From a more international, art film perspective, the festival features a six-film retrospective of the acclaimed Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien, and a Q&A; with Yugoslavian director Goran Paskaljevic, after a screening of his Oscar-nominated film “The Powder Keg,” Friday at 4 p.m.

The festival closes on March 14 with the film “Alegria,” a Canada-France-Netherlands co-production inspired by Cirque du Soleil and directed by Franco Dragone.

The range of topics in the numerous seminars include producing, screenwriting, film scoring, digital technology and the culture of pornography, with the provocative moniker of “Porn Again: Pornographic Film and Social Criticism,” on March 13. It’s all part of the festival’s better-living-through diversity plan.

BE THERE

The Santa Barbara International Film Festival, today through March 14 at Fiesta Five Theater, Arlington Theater, Riviera Theater and Granada Theater. Seminars and workshops are at Victoria Hall, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and the Riviera. Seminars are $15, general, and $10 for students, and tributes are $20. Film tickets are $7.50 for individual screenings; $45 for six screenings, “Take 6” package; full festival film pass is $225 and all-inclusive “Gold Pass” is $400. Information: (805) 963-0023 or visit the Web site at: https://www.sbfilmfestival.com.