Packing in plenty of just-plain-fans

While civic boosters and Hollywood types mingled Saturday night at the Palm Springs International Film Festival’s gala of limousines, red carpets and black ties, Bonnie Gunderson, 60, a schoolteacher from Redondo Beach, was just where she wanted to be: a few blocks away watching a French film with her husband, Howard, his 82-year-old mother, Alice, and about 400 other ordinary people.

“Jet Lag,” a romantic comedy with Juliette Binoche, was the fifth film she’d seen that day. “I started at 9 this morning,” she said.

“The first film was ‘I Was a Rat,’ a cute fantasy fable kind of story [from England]. I worked my way through ‘The Hours’ this afternoon. Then I saw a Cuban movie, an English film and the French comedy tonight.”

At 9 the next morning, the Gundersons were up and in the theaters again, this time to see the Mexican film “A Beautiful Secret.”

There are no Parker Poseys at this festival. Not many People in Black looking for deals. Instead, the 14-year-old festival draws passionate movie lovers, the intellectually curious sort, many of whom grew up with Shirley Temple, cut their teeth on Ingmar Bergman films or courted to Elvis Presley movies.

The festival drew an estimated 5,000 out-of- towners its first weekend, including a few stars, directors and cinematographers, 20 consul generals and journalists from around the world. Officials estimate they will have sold 75,000 tickets by the final day, Monday.

Among the fans were a scout for the Cinema Society of San Diego -- 200 members will be arriving on Thursday -- and a group of 14 friends from Scottsdale, Ariz., who had taken a few days off work. Many weekend festival-goers were retired, stylishly dressed and flush enough to afford the $350 Platinum Pass to see as many of the 200 films showing this year, 45 of them foreign-language Oscar submissions that might never reach their neighborhood cinema. Some rent homes for the festival’s two weeks and will see as many as 50 films before they go home.

Leon Rigberg, 60, a physician from Scottsdale, said there is only one theater in the Phoenix area that shows art house films. Everything else, he said, is “standard American fare.” Sunday morning, he stood outside the Courtyard Theaters, discussing the Canadian Oscar submission “Soft Shell Man” with the other members of his group, all of whom seemed to be talking at once. Some thought the film, a story about a nice man who courts disaster because he can’t tell the truth, was the best film they’d seen so far. To Rigberg, though, the editing was choppy and distracting.

Similarly, the Gundersons like to see any film they couldn’t see otherwise, especially those with subtitles. “If you can’t read it, I won’t go,” Howard said. “If you can hear it, you can rent it sooner or later.”

Foreign films “take me to places I’ve never been and may never go,” said Sally Goodman, 63, a film festival volunteer from Palm Springs who attended the gala. “They teach me about the moral and ethical values of a particular country.” She had just seen “Evagora’s Vow,” a humorous Bulgarian film, set before World War II, about a man who vows to cross Cyprus on foot if his wife gives birth to a son. “It was a beautiful film,” said Goodman, who spoke to the director afterward. “I asked him what it took to make the film. He said it took well over a year because they didn’t have the money.”

A common thread running through the filmgoers was unhappiness with the big action-adventure, special-effects, spy-thriller movies churned out by Hollywood these days. Del and Donna Reisner, 74 and 69, respectively, said they loved romantic musicals and Carmen Miranda films. “Nowadays, it’s just blast things, blow them up. Cuss and swear. Show as much sex as they can,” said Del, a handsome man in a natty gray suit, who wheeled his wife, who has fibromyalgia, from theater to theater. “It’s not our style,” added the elegantly turned-out Donna.

Chai Mann, an enthusiastic businessman who brought his wife, two children and a friend from Vachon Island in Washington, said he met the directors of “Nine Good Teeth,” a documentary about a feisty, 102-year-old, Brooklyn-born Italian-American matriarch who had nine good teeth left. “That was fabulous,” he said.

In special panels, or talks introducing the films, others said they were thrilled to hear Adrian Brody, star of “The Pianist,” say his role in the Holocaust film was the most rewarding of his career; Stephen Daldry, director of “The Hours,” describing how makeup artists aged Julianne Moore’s face by using her mother as a model; a letter by Sam Mendez describing how the late cinematographer Conrad Hall wept while filming Paul Newman in “The Road to Perdition,” remembering how he had filmed the actor years ago in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.”

Cinematographer Wally Pfister (“Insomnia”) said he loved the festival’s passionate lay audiences, which he called more energetic than those at festivals like Sundance, where industry professionals are there to judge his work. “It’s wonderful to have your peers see and recognize your work, but to have someone in the audience come up and say, ‘I don’t know what you did, but I felt the impact of the menacing light,’ is fabulous. It’s the greatest feeling in the world.”

Enthusiastic fans at the festival might offer other, more tangible benefits for filmmakers. Jack Talmadge, a retired executive from Palm Desert, said what he admires most is the gutsy entrepreneurial spirit in young, independent filmmakers. At his first festival four years ago, he said he met a producer-director who didn’t have enough money to meet the demand for distribution of his film “St. Patrick’s Day.” He wound up writing him a check for $2,500.

This year, he said he was impressed by Marion Comer, director of a film called “Boxed” about an Irish priest who volunteers to be held hostage by the IRA. “It’s the first feature film this woman has ever done,” Talmadge said. “It was extraordinarily well-done, artistically. Fantastic, philosophically. The whole issue she’s pursuing is, ‘When is violence justified when it’s in a just cause?’ That kind of film needs distribution.”