A Banner Event?

When the Independent Features Project/West acquired the Los Angeles Film Festival two years ago, it aspired to do what no one had ever done: build a world-class film festival in the heart of movieland. Almost immediately, executive director Dawn Hudson started to hear passionate and disparate opinions of how she should proceed.

“Someone said, ‘You should just show documentary films.’ One person said we should make it like a filmmakers’ campus and focus on the art, not the business of filmmaking,” she recalled. “Another said it should be only a festival for the industry. A filmmaker said, ‘Just make sure you have all the agents there. We want our films bought.’ Another said it should be for the general public only, a film lovers’ festival. Another person said, ‘You should be Cannes in L.A. and have a market and a festival and put it on the beach.’ ”

On Thursday, the IFP/West, a respected nonprofit known for its Independent Spirit Awards and support programs for indie filmmakers, will open a reinvented festival with something for almost everyone. “We’re moving from a niche festival to a more general film festival,” L.A. Film Festival programming director Rachel Rosen said. “We’re stretching any number of ways.”

Even among well-wishers, however, questions abound. For one, the metamorphosis comes amid an explosion of film festivals, which have multiplied an estimated fivefold during the past five years. There are now 1,600 festivals around the world and 650 in the United States, according to Filmfestivals Entertainment Group, an international organization that provides Web and television support to film festivals. None of the more than two dozen festivals in Los Angeles ranks in the top 10, a list dominated by Sundance, Cannes, Toronto, Venice and Berlin, said Bruno Chatelin, Filmfestivals’ chief operating officer.

For another, it’s unclear whether L.A. can support--or even wants--another film festival. New festivals seem to pop up all the time around Southern California, whether to promote tourism or to draw specialty audiences.

“On the one hand, you could make the argument that perhaps no other city in the world is more able to support such a divergent mix of film events,” said Christian Gaines, director of the AFI Fest, the American Film Institute festival, one of the largest and most respected of Los Angeles’ existing festivals. “On the other, you can argue it contributes to disorientation and confusion among the film community as well as the general public. Their feelings are, ‘There are too many film events and I can’t quite keep up with them all.’ ”

As the world’s film center, Los Angeles needs a film festival less than almost any other place in the world, said film critic Roger Ebert. “There’s no need for one in a town where every commercial release plays usually before it plays anywhere else,” he said. “It’s a company town that doesn’t want anyone else managing the company softball team.”

Despite the proliferation of local film festivals and the presence of one of the world’s three top film markets, the American Film Market, Ebert said Sundance has become the “de facto Los Angeles film festival.”

The city just doesn’t provide the same cachet as far-flung locales, said Dawn Moyer-Sims, marketing manager of Outfest, Los Angeles’ gay and lesbian festival, which takes place in July. “People here want to go somewhere else to do it. It’s exotic to go to Sundance with a bunch of people hopping on a plane with their newly purchased parkas and seeing what this snow stuff is all about. It’s exotic to say ‘I’m flying off to Cannes and you can reach me on my cell phone,’ rather than ‘I’m going down the street to the Directors Guild of America.’ ”

The very nature of Los Angeles--sprawling, chaotic, culturally diverse, professionally jaded--raises the question of whether anyone could create a world-class festival in the world center of the entertainment industry. Jon Fitzgerald, a former director of the AFI Fest, said, “In Los Angeles, you’ve got the unique combination of being in the industry’s backyard, but you have a very diverse cultural community. It’s really hard to have something for everybody.”

At the same time, festivals have become an increasingly important tool in getting audiences to see films--particularly smaller independent films. “The more the film studios are in the clutches of multinational companies, the fewer opportunities are in the mainstream to make anything quirky,” said “A Hollywood Education” author and screenwriter David Freeman.

“As long as festivals keep popping up, there’s a chance that some of this newer, more interesting work gets to be shown to the public.

“This is one of those problems that is bigger than show business,” he added. “This is a cultural issue that cuts across national lines. Anything the country does that provides the best of what we can make is valuable, and should be treasured and encouraged.”

Filmmakers naturally are also looking for career-boosting deals and distribution. Large festival audiences, especially cinema-literate ones, can generate the kind of word-of-mouth that is “gold to any marketing campaign,” he said.

Besides a strong mix of films (153 in all) and related events, IFP/West-Los Angeles Film Festival leaders know that their grand ambitions rest on their ability to sell the 10-day event--Thursday through June 29--to audiences beyond the usual film festival crowds. “The biggest key to having a successful festival in Los Angeles is having the ability to market to the general public,” festival director Rich Raddon said. To do that, they lined up high-level sponsors, Target and In Style magazine, and by the spring had unrolled an active marketing campaign. Hudson said the festival could never have pulled off a publicity campaign on a similar scale on its own.

“We couldn’t be marketing the festival on our limited resources in this city, given that people spend millions and millions to open a film here,” Hudson said. The festival’s $850,000 budget has been augmented by an equal amount of in-kind donations, Raddon said.

The dream of creating a major film festival in Los Angeles goes back more than 30 years. One of the first to push for a festival was the late director George Cukor, who in 1970 tried in vain to persuade the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to take responsibility. His supporters hoped for a world-class event that could challenge Lincoln Center’s New York Film Festival artistically and Cannes as a spectacle.

The plan’s foes, however, feared having their product labeled “art house” and believed most films could only suffer from debuting at a festival (this was well before a movie could benefit from “festival buzz”). Minus the studios’ cooperation, the festival would lack the necessary glitz to gain worldwide attention. What’s more, opponents worried that the more influential New York critics would dismiss a festival on the very grounds that it took place in the shadow of Hollywood.

“Back then, everybody was talking about it. [The supporters] thought the academy should do it, the county museum should do it. It was obvious that no one was going to do it,” said Barbara Smith, who now directs the American Cinematheque in Hollywood.

So a group that included Smith and “the two Garys”--Gary Essert and Gary Abrahams--set up an independent organization in 1971, the once controversial but now much lamented Los Angeles International Film Exposition, better known as Filmex. Local film lovers become misty-eyed now when they recall playful Filmex ads, the galas, the campy parades that included a baby elephant and a fire-eater, and the hundreds of rarely seen films and movie marathons.

In retrospect, Smith said, people are amazed that at its peak Filmex was filling two theaters in Century City, one with 1,400 seats and the other with 800, five times a day. “They forget that in the 1970s, there was only one cable channel in L.A., the Z Channel. There were no video stores. It was a very different time than now,” she said.

In many ways, Filmex is a kind of model for the new Los Angeles Film Festival, according to Raddon. “There hasn’t been anything since Filmex that captured the potential the city has to offer, a world-class film festival. That’s what we’re trying to do.”

Filmex died in 1983 from a combination of politics and administrative troubles. The AFI Fest grew from its ashes as other festivals proliferated--from ethnic and geographic ones in Silver Lake, Malibu and Palm Springs, to a method acting one in Pasadena.

In 1992, Robert Faust, a local entrepreneur who had been producing the IFP/West’s Independent Spirit Awards, decided to start a festival for American indie films. “For years, there were niche events like Outfest,” he said. “There was nothing for the masses that would garner both the public and the industry’s interest.” The Los Angeles Independent Film Festival, held in April, was timed to give filmmakers an alternative to Sundance, which is held in January.

After five years, Faust sold the festival to IFP/West, an organization he felt was well positioned in the community to attract the best new filmmakers. A name change dropped the word “independent” partly because to some it implied an image of lesser quality, he said.

As a former producer, Raddon understands filmmakers, one of the keys to running a successful festival, Faust said. “With IFP growing it more and perhaps taking it to the next level, I think the industry is going to pay more attention to it,” he said.

“There is a challenge in Los Angeles to get anybody excited about anything,” Faust added. “People see stars here when they go out to eat. It’s not as big a deal” as in Sundance, Toronto or Cannes, he said. “People in L.A. are jaded, and the industry as well, for sure.”

Former AFI Fest director Fitzgerald, a co-founder of the maverick Slamdance festival in Park City, Utah, said, “L.A. itself doesn’t care. People around Cannes love it when the festival comes. People flock to celebrities. Not us. We see them all the time....It’s hard to get L.A. to pay attention. When a festival is going on in Cannes, there’s nothing else going on.”

Even if there was more money behind the L.A. Film Fest, success wouldn’t be a slam-dunk, studio executives said privately. In a city where impressions often count more than reality, the festival needs to seriously work on its personality to get attention, they said: It needs more stars, more attendance, more acquisitions, more fun.

Ebert, who runs his own Overlooked Film Festival, said it would take someone with the stature and prestige of Steven Spielberg or Robert De Niro to create a major film festival in Los Angeles. “There are too many egos for an ordinary film fest-type person to prevail,” he said, adding that De Niro’s celebrity status helped the Tribeca Film Festival achieve instant respect upon its debut in New York.

According to one school of thought, the best way for Los Angeles to become a major international player is for one or more of the city’s biggest festivals to merge with the American Film Market, the annual marketplace begun 22 years ago by independent producers and distributors as an alternative to Cannes.

At first cool to the idea, the trade organization has begun to see the benefits, according to Greg Ptacek, communications director for AFMA, the trade organization that sponsors the market in Santa Monica. “Festivals bring in celebrities. Having celebrity is important even if all you want to do is business,” he said. They attract the international press, which in turn attracts more and bigger filmmakers, ultimately raising the bottom line for everyone, he added.

Ptacek said the organization is considering an alliance, but it is also thinking of hosting its own.

To some, this year’s Los Angeles Film Festival looks promising, with outdoor screenings, an expanded program designed by the newly hired Rosen, formerly of the San Francisco International Film Festival, and guest director Alfonso Cuaron (“Y Tu Mama Tambien”). Cuaron will be the host of a retreat for participating filmmakers in Ojai and, separately, will show festival audiences three films that have influenced him: “Adieu Philippine” (1962), “Canoa” (1975) and “Sunrise” (1927.)

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Nancy Utley, president of marketing for Fox Searchlight, was shocked last year when she attended the L.A. Film Fest for the first time. “I saw nametags, passes, question-and-answer sessions with filmmakers, everything you would see in a film festival. I wasn’t aware that happened here at home.”

Utley, like many others, said she had always found it odd there wasn’t a big festival in the industry’s home town that elicited the same enthusiasm as film festivals elsewhere. She called it a shame--particularly since a local festival offers small studios such as Searchlight the opportunity to premiere films to a built-in audience. “It’s ironic that in the world capital of entertainment, so few people actually realize there’s a film festival here,” said Rick Carpenter, president of DDB Worldwide Communications Group, a Los Angeles-based advertising agency and one of the organizations IFP/West has courted aggressively to donate time, expertise or advertising space to the festival.

So far, DDB has produced billboards and ads running in theaters on the theme “Everyone Likes to Watch.” IFP/West’s Hudson said “street teams” pass out candy with the festival logo in movie theaters in the evening. Public radio stations, local newspapers including the Los Angeles Times, and major sponsor In Style have donated advertising. Target donated cash for the narrative feature prize. “We’ve had a lot of filmmakers come to us because of the $50,000 grant,” Hudson said.

Raddon isn’t sure the campaign has reached all the communities the festival wants to attract. For instance, one new documentary, “OT: Our Town,” follows eager students at Dominguez High School in the Crenshaw District as they stage the school’s first theatrical production in 22 years. “I’m hoping those kids and families in Crenshaw come up for the film festival. I don’t know if they will,” Raddon said.

Utley said Hudson and Raddon impressed her with their plans for a “people’s festival. We wanted to be supportive of that idea.”

This year, Fox Searchlight will screen “The Good Girl,” an edgy comedy starring Jennifer Aniston as an unhappily married shopgirl. Lions Gate will also present a Nick Broomfield documentary, “Biggie and Tupac,” and a feature, “Lovely & Amazing,” an ensemble family comedy. The festival is a cheap way to launch the summer features, both of which are scheduled be released in August, Utley said.

One key to a successful local festival, she added, is to persuade more studios to premiere more films that haven’t already been screened in other festivals. “If the lineup is amazing, then everyone in the industry will want to go.”

Big studio chiefs, who sometimes premiere their smarter, award-contending films at the Toronto Film Festival in September, said privately there was no reason to participate in a local film festival that doesn’t get daily media coverage. They would be seeking publicity for new releases, and in Los Angeles, the major studios prefer to control publicity at the time they choose. (But they didn’t want to be identified because they want to appear supportive of the L.A. fest.)

Last year, the L.A. Film Fest increased attendance 150%, to 30,000, and boasted its biggest success, “Kissing Jessica Stein.”

“The festival delivered me,” said director Charles Herman-Wurmfeld, whose movie was acquired for distribution and represented his first professional break in 15 years. His film, made for less than $1 million, was distributed to 400 theaters and has made $6.5 million so far, he said.

Many in the filmmaking community argue that Los Angeles needs and deserves its own major festival--especially now, when young filmmakers are taking advantage of digital video to create more independent films, and when most major studios have scant interest in the small and the quirky.

Tanya Wexler, who will screen her feature “A Ball in the House,” said a festival in the center of the film world is a boon for a small works like hers, a black comedy about a small-town teenager trying to stay sober that will probably initially appeal to art-house crowds.

“The whole industry’s out there. It’ll be fairly easy to get someone to drive over. You can say, ‘It’s only on Sunset, can you go to see it?’ ”

The L.A. Film Fest is on the right path, she added. “They’re more selective, devoting more resources to fewer films.”

Cuaron said, “It would be great to have a really important festival evolving in the context of the [film] industry capital of the world. It is about time, by the way.

“A key in L.A. is to reach out for the normal, mainstream audience. It would be a beautiful thing to expose them to the diversity that cinema is all about,” he said.

“You have to understand, we believe we’re involved in a cause,” Raddon said, “the cause of promoting voices that wouldn’t otherwise be heard. This summer, everywhere I look, it’s ‘Spider-Man.’ ”

If there’s any one thing all 153 films have in common this year, Rosen said, “it’s whatever it takes to get a movie made when no one’s asking you to make it. And that applies straight down the line from the international films to some of the archival films to the American documentaries and features. I doubt there was anyone throwing money at any of these filmmakers or begging them to get out there with a camera.”

She and her team screened more than 2,500 entries, including shorts and features. Her schedule for the event shows a checkerboard full of gray, black and blue color blocks to help people sort the galas from the special events, the music video screenings from the seminars, and figure out where to go for the international showcase movies, the shorts, high school films, narrative competition films, and the documentary competition. Events will be held mostly around Hollywood, from the festival center at the Laemmle Sunset 5 in West Hollywood, to the DGA, the ArcLight Cinerama Dome, the John Anson Ford Amphitheatre and the Chateau Marmont.

Hudson said she hopes the festival will inspire industry and non-industry people alike to remember why they loved going to movies in the first place. “When you go to the festival and see wonderful films, and you’re not hearing the box office report the next morning, and they haven’t been prepackaged to you, there is that exciting sense of discovery and more of a pure film experience. It takes us all back to whenever you first discovered film as a powerful medium.”

It was “Kissing Jessica Stein” that made Berkeley filmmaker Myra Paci sit up and take notice. Her first feature film, “Searching for Paradise,” the story of a young woman disillusioned by what she learns about her father after his death, had been accepted by three other film festivals this year. She said she pulled it out of the other festivals because the L.A. Film Fest wanted the world premiere.

She is hopeful she will be able to sell her film here. “The Los Angeles Film Festival is getting to be such a big festival. Plus, it’s placed in the center of the filmmaking industry. A lot of sales happen there and there’s a lot of attention by the press and buyers. This is a festival that has a lot of weight for a filmmaker who wants to go on to make more movies.”

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The IFP/West-Los Angeles Film Festival runs Thursday-June 29 at the Directors Guild of America, 7920 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood; Laemmle’s Sunset 5, 8000 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood; and other venues. (866) 345-6337 or www.la filmfest.com.

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Other Southland Film Festivals at a Glance

AFI Fest

Established: 1987

Next: Nov. 7-17

Number of films: 120-plus

Attendace: 40,000-plus

The point: To capture the diversity of L.A., provide filmmakers with industry exposure and celebrate world cinema.

Representative films: “No Man’s Land” and “Dogtown and Z-Boys.”

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Hollywood Film Festival

Established: 1997

Next: Oct. 1-8

Number of films: 50

Attendance: 25,000

The point: To bridge the gap between Hollywood and the global creative community.

Representative films: “Curse of the Jade Scorpion” and “An American Rhapsody.”

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Outfest: The Los Angeles Gay & Lesbian Film Festival

Established: 1982

Next: July 11-22

Number of films: 241

Attendance: 40,000

The point: To connect audiences, filmmakers and the industry through gay-, lesbian-, bisexual- and transgender-themed films and videos.

Representative films: BTD “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” and “Kissing Jessica Stein.”

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Palm Springs International Film Festival

Established: 1990

Next: Jan. 9-20

Number of films: 150

Attendance: 70,000 (includes summer shorts festival)

The point: Former Mayor Sonny Bono saw the festival as a chance to add vitality to the city. It features most of the films submitted for the best foreign-language Oscar.

Representative films: BTD “Monsoon Wedding” and “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.”

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Santa Barbara International Film Festival

Established: 1985

Next: Feb. 28-March 9

Number of films: 124 (in 2001-2002 festival was shortened to five days)

Attendance: 30,000

The point: To showcase American independent and international films; nurture aspiring filmmakers; preserve and sustain cinema as an art form.

Representative films: “Festival in Cannes” and “The Man From Elysian Fields.”

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Times staff writer Kevin Crust contributed to this story.