Getting the Picture on Family-Oriented Fest

It still doesn’t rival Sundance or Telluride, but the Santa Clarita International Film Festival has proved as hardy as the region’s desert vegetation.

The seventh annual film fest starts this afternoon, and once again the event will offer a week’s worth of movies appropriate for families, along with industry panels, workshops and readings of original screenplays.

As executive director and co-founder Chris Shoemaker recalls, seven years ago naysayers predicted the festival would never survive because it refused to screen films that included gratuitous violence, nudity and most four-letter words.

But the critics were wrong. A film festival that you can take both your mother and your kids to may seem a tad quaint in an Eminem world, but it has grown increasingly popular.

The numbers tell the story. When the festival began in 1994, Shoemaker and his colleagues had to rent films to fill out the weeklong schedule. This year, 150 films were submitted for consideration, of which 54 will be screened. That’s 15% more than last year, Shoemaker says, which he finds especially heartening given the explosion in the number of film festivals worldwide.

Ten of the screenings will be premieres.

As you are reminded every time a new Disney movie opens, there are legions of parents, even in L.A., who want to have a say in their children’s media choices as long as they possibly can.

“As we’ve gone on, having a family-themed film festival has become even more needed and more sought after,” says Shoemaker. “It’s almost become an alternative film festival.”

From the start, Shoemaker and the others believed family fare did not have to be insipid. His theory is that good entertainment, even provocative entertainment, can be produced without explicit sex, violence and profanity. Hey, Austen and Dickens did it, why can’t contemporary filmmakers?

Violence is a special concern of the organizers. Obviously, being in the Santa Clarita lineup means never having to say “Fight Club.” As Patte Dee, the festival’s program director, puts it: “We need to find ways to solve conflict without violence. This is what I’m seeing in the films.”

But the festival does not limit itself to plain-vanilla programming. As an example of just how serious some of the work is, Shoemaker points to a short documentary titled “Monuments of Soap” that deals with one of the myriad horrors of the Holocaust. In the festival’s spirit of not popping any unsettling surprises on the audience, the film is being screened on Wednesday night and is clearly identified in the program as for adults only.

Shoemaker is also a founder and executive director of the new Burbank International Children’s Film Festival, launched last fall. Children’s programming has always been part of the Santa Clarita event, but the Burbank festival made it clear to Shoemaker that child-oriented films should be an even larger part of the Santa Clarita mix.

The organizers expressly solicited children’s films as well as family ones for this year’s event, he says. About a quarter of the films reflect a child’s point of view or are otherwise pitched to kids.

Shoemaker and his wife and creative partner, Suzanne, live in Santa Clarita and that’s one obvious reason for basing the festival there. But there were other reasons as well. Santa Clarita is an increasingly important center for film and TV production, in large part because it’s within the so-called 30-mile zone, which means that filmmakers get certain financial breaks. As a result, many residents make their living in the industry.

And, by and large, Santa Clarita is amenable to filmmaking in ways that many more jaded parts of Greater Los Angeles are not, Shoemaker says. You won’t find locals powering up their lawn mowers in order to harass production companies that dare to shoot on their street, as you do in some Southern California neighborhoods.

“Santa Clarita is film friendly,” he says. “That sounds like a cliche, but people in Santa Clarita are not beaten down and burned out on filming there.”

One of the draws of the festival is the closing gala at which industry stalwarts and others are honored. This year director Arthur Hiller is among the honorees, for such cult films as “The Americanization of Emily” and “The Hospital” as well as “Love Story” and other box-office successes.

The late Friz Freleng, one of the geniuses of Warner Bros. animation in its prime, was the first to receive the festival’s lifetime achievement award.

Since then the annual animation award has been called the Friz, and this year’s winners are Disney legends Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston.

Pals since they met at Stanford University in 1931, the octogenarian artists are two of the last survivors of the studio’s famed Nine Old Men.

You may not know their names, but you know their work. These men helped shape our psyches. Instead of a catalog of all their important creations, here are just two unforgettable examples: Thomas did the spaghetti-eating love scene in “Lady and the Tramp” and Johnston created Bambi’s buddy Thumper.

The Santa Clarita International Film Festival opens today and continues through March 16. All screenings are at the Edwards Cinemas, Valencia Town Center. For information, call (661) 257-3131.

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Spotlight runs each Friday. Patricia Ward Biederman can be reached at valley.news@latimes.com.