Reel-to-Reel Remembrance for Couple

Friends and relatives of the husband-and-wife filmmaking team killed in last week’s crash at the Santa Monica Farmers’ Market gathered Monday to remember the couple with laughter and tears, screening a few of the quirky, funny movies they left behind.

Director Kevin McCarthy, 50, and his 41-year-old wife and producer, Diana Gong McCarthy, had been living in Los Angeles just seven months when they were struck by the speeding Buick, which plowed through the crowded market Wednesday afternoon, killing 10 people and injuring more than 50.

The gathering at the Skirball Cultural Center seemed to reflect the character of a couple whom friends described as exceptionally broad-gauged and cosmopolitan: Held in a Jewish cultural center, the ceremony honored a Chinese American woman who worked at the Skirball part-time, and her husband, a Peruvian-Irish New Yorker obsessed by Italian cinema. One singer offered the hymn “How Great Thou Art” in both English and Chinese, while another sang the Irish ballad “Danny Boy.” Relatives came from as far away as Lima.

The Rev. Darwin Ng said that, much as people yearn for answers after a tragedy, the reason behind a loss is unknowable. “God could have kept Kevin and Diana from dying,” Ng said in a sermon before the films. “But for some reason beyond us, he didn’t.”

The couple had moved from New York in hopes of turning their passion for film into a full-time career, although their movies -- low-budget, black-and-white affairs with no spoken dialogue -- were hardly in step with the big-budget flash preferred in 21st century Hollywood.

Before the screening of the couple’s short film “Ciao Marcello!” Kevin’s sister, Anamaria McCarthy, remembered her diminutive brother as a man whose “heart was so much bigger than his body.”

McCarthy’s films certainly contained multitudes. The silly, elegiac “Ciao Marcello!” -- about an Italian playboy and the women he loved -- seemed to draw inspiration from Fellini, Charlie Chaplin and Benny Hill all at once, and boasted a soundtrack of operatic arias, Italian American pop songs, mid-century cocktail music, as well as a selection from “The Nutcracker.”

Kevin McCarthy’s friend Francesco Mazzini -- who also starred in most of McCarthy’s movies -- said he is looking for the proper time and place to screen the couple’s first feature, “The Rouge Shoes,” which Kevin finished editing less than a month ago.