A film festival where shorter is better

The Los Angeles International Short Film Festival is a game of numbers. As in five movies in 72 minutes. Or 400-plus movies in six days. Or an overnight success story six years in the making.

The festival, which runs through Sunday, includes more than 70 programs with idiosyncratic lineups like this one, from opening night: the 18-minute plight of a lovesick man (“Sex and the City’s” David Eigenberg) who keeps injuring himself to visit a nurse; the 13-minute confrontation between an imprisoned Nazi war criminal (James Cromwell) and a victim’s granddaughter who comes to forgive him; a surreal 15-minute merger between H.G. Wells’ “War of the Worlds” and a brief visit to Ireland by Che Guevara; a 14-minute journey through the angst of teenage virginity; and a 12-minute showdown between a small-time actress and the New York Times’ arrogant drama critic, in which the actress -- panned by the critic a year earlier -- poisons his coffee and recites her favorite monologue as he dies.

The fact that the LA Shorts Fest, as it calls itself for short, is screening so many movies this week is a testament to the faith of its founder, Robert Arentz.

As a young man, Arentz was a minor league baseball player. That didn’t work out. Then he became an actor. That didn’t work out either. Then he began studying how to make short films, and figured he’d set up a place where he and other like-minded people could get their shorts screened.

That -- it was finally clear this week -- definitely worked out.

This year, the festival, which features films of 40 minutes or less, boasts both a new status and a new home. Having surpassed the 240 films screened in 2001, Arentz can now claim the largest short-film gathering in the world, overtaking the 8-year-old Palm Springs festival, which showed 290 shorts last summer.

The festival is screening about half of its films in stylish digs, the new ArcLight cinema complex on Sunset Boulevard near Vine Street, with the other half showing at the festival’s home base in 2000 and 2001 -- the Los Angeles Film School opposite the ArcLight on Sunset.

It’s another world from Arentz’s first stab at a festival in 1997, when he screened 90 shorts at Barnsdall Art Park on Hollywood Boulevard.

Before Tuesday’s opening-night program, by contrast, you could walk through the ArcLight’s second-floor bar and catch a struggling Wisconsin-born actor, Brent Nowak, swapping experiences with Irish writer-director Ciaran Foy, who had flown in from Dublin a few hours earlier with his project’s composer, Liam Bates.

Nowak, 27, appears Sunday in an 18-minute short, “Union,” about tension between two Civil War Army brothers. It was written and directed by San Diego State filmmakers Kevin Smets and Joey Castanieto.

Foy, 24, spent less than $3,000 in grant money from his Dublin film school to make his eight-minute “The Puppet,” which also screens Sunday.

“Here’s the synopsis,” Foy said, smiling self-consciously at how robotic a filmmaker becomes at repeating his one-sentence pitch: “Five office workers are taken hostage by shy colleague Neil [played by Irish actor Ned Dennehy] and his evil hand-puppet Morgan.... I’m trying to turn it into a feature.”

So is almost everybody else who paid the $30 submission fee. Filmmakers discuss their work after each program, providing technical insights largely absent from Oscar after-parties, such as the fact that Ikea does not charge a fee to shoot on location.

Mark Stolaroff, an independent producer, went to opening night seeking prospects somewhere in this swirl. “A 30-minute story or a three-minute story, you’re looking for some basic storytelling elements,” he said.

Stolaroff has long since forgotten the name of a filmmaker who charmed him at a student film exhibition, but he vividly remembers his reaction to the movie and hopes someone else provokes it: “It was scrappy, giddy, it had an energy to it, not everything worked but most things did, and you just had a sense this guy was really going for it. The humor had a real edge to it. You got the sense he didn’t have a lot of money but he made the most of what he had. He wasn’t trying to make the same old movie.”

Arentz, 40, once planned on being one of those people. Born in Chicago, he went to high school in Anaheim and, he said, played briefly on the lowest rung of the San Francisco Giants’ farm system. Then he stumbled across a friend who was studying acting and caught the bug. When that didn’t take, “I thought I would give filmmaking a shot.”

He started taking classes at L.A. City College, shot a couple of short films, and then, looking for exposure, coordinated a screening. A year later, he held the first LA Shorts Fest. By the festival’s third year, Kodak became -- and remains -- a major sponsor. “This is the first year, thank God, I’m able to pay myself a little bit of money,” Arentz said.

Eleven of the shorts shown at the festival have been nominated for Oscars in the short-film documentary, action or animation categories, and three have won Oscars, including last year’s “The Accountant,” the first directing effort of writer-actor Ray McKinnon. A native of rural Georgia, McKinnon told the story of two farming brothers who, on the brink of bankruptcy, consult an accountant with unconventional moneymaking suggestions.

The offerings for today and Sunday include more than 150 shorts that cover a lot of ground. A sampling of subjects: filmmakers who betray a Chicago mob boss, an elevator confrontation between rivals at a murder trial, penmanship as an Olympic event, female rodeo riders, teen prostitution, deadly hitchhikers and a racial drama that takes place during three time periods. It ends with Sunday’s awards in eight categories and the annual character actor award, to be presented this year to James Woods.

And then Arentz can begin planning the 2003 festival. He’s convinced it beats acting. “I have more control than when you’re just waiting for the phone to ring.”

*

The festival program schedule is available at www.lashortsfest .com/fest.htm. Tickets to most events are $10.