A Big Finish for Newport Film Festival

The Newport Beach Film Festival, whose fate was in doubt only seven months ago, wound up its eight-day run with a real Hollywood ending that has organizers already looking ahead to next year.

“I think it was a tremendous success,” said Gregg Schwenk, the festival’s executive director. “It exceeded our expectations.”

“We’re so excited,” said festival spokesman Todd Quartararo. “There was a huge learning curve for us this year. It was the first time out for this new group and we are so pleased with how everything went.”

The festival, which began March 30, ended Thursday night with a ceremony at the Orange County Museum of Art in Newport Beach; 11 films received awards in the shape of a sandcastle atop a film can. There were those last fall who were certain the festival had no more chance of surviving than a sandcastle at high tide.

Previously known as the Newport Beach International Film Festival, it ended its four-year run when founder Jeffrey S. Conner filed for bankruptcy in September. But a group of civic leaders, business professionals and film buffs refused to let it die.

An official attendance tally for the first Newport Beach Film Festival will be forthcoming in about a week, based on tickets sold through Edwards Theatres, tickets.com, will-call tickets and various sponsor and VIP passes, Quartararo said.

“We know by eyeballing the theaters that we were certainly pleasantly surprised by the attendance, which was great throughout the festival,” he said.

Midweek screenings, in which theater seats typically are hard to fill even with Hollywood blockbusters, drew nice-sized crowds, Quartararo said.

A free industry seminar series, sponsored by the city of Newport Beach, also proved popular. Quartararo said festival organizers weren’t sure how the seminars would be greeted.

But the first seminar, on screenwriting, started at 9 a.m. last Saturday and 190 of the 200 seats were quickly filled. And later that day, the world premiere of “Harrington’s Notes,” a romantic adventure directed by former Orange County resident John Mark Maio, became the festival’s first sell-out screening.

The West Coast premiere of “Long Night’s Journey Into Day,” a documentary exploring apartheid in South Africa, was another sellout.

Schwenk said the screening of the film, which won this year’s Sundance Festival’s Grand Jury Prize, was “one of the most memorable evenings at the festival.”

The film features a segment on Amy Biehl, a Fulbright exchange scholar from Newport Beach who was murdered in South Africa by a group of youths in 1993. Albert Van Rensburg, the consul general of South Africa, hosted the evening, which was attended by Biehl’s parents, Peter and Linda Biehl.

Organizers accommodated the overflow crowd for the screening with a little projection room trickery: They showed a single print on what is called an interlock system; the film runs through one projector on a tracking system to a projector in the adjoining theater.

The result: “We were able to release additional tickets for the second theater,” said Quartararo. “That sold out as well. So we had about 600 folks for ‘Long Night’s Journey Into Day.’ ”

That film tied with another documentary, “Americanos: Latino Life in the United States” for a special jury award for Outstanding Filmmaker.

Other winning festival films:

“You Can Thank Me Later” (best feature), “Just Melvin” (best documentary), “Ave Maria” (best foreign film), Hunt Hoe, “Seducing Maarya” (best director), Denis Crossan, “The Clandestine Marriage” (best cinematographer), Chi Muoi Lo, “Catfish in Blackbean Sauce” (best screenplay), “Starry Night (audience award, best feature), Dave Sperling, “Crime Scene Stealers” tied with Michael Horowitz, “This Guy Is Falling” (audience favorite, short), “The Cannibis Conspiracy” (visionary award, short).

By all accounts there were few glitches over the course of the eight-day festival.

Tony Curtis, citing illness, was a no-show for the “Sweet Smell of Success” tribute and three feature films failed to arrive due to shipping problems. But that’s typical of any festival, said Schwenk.

“Really, the problems were minor and as far as the festival, many of the changes [next year] will be more fine-tuning than radical overhaul,” he said.

The festival’s 20-member board of directors will meet in a week or two to begin discussing next year’s plans.

Says Quartararo: “As our budget grows, there are additional things we can do to help get the word out. We want to start a mailing list and do light-post banners, and those kinds of things come in time with a bigger budget.”

The budget for this year’s festival was $500,000, $100,000 of which was in cash; the remainder was in-kind products and services, said Quartararo, “so we’re going to immediately start our fund-raising efforts.”