WideScreen Festival takes a frightful turn

Director Wes Craven has been responsible for scaring the living daylights out of people with horrifying thrillers such as “The Hills Have Eyes,” “A Nightmare on Elm Street” and the “Scream” trilogy. But the 65-year-old director is somewhat frightened about teaching a directing workshop Wednesday as part of Cal State Long Beach’s 10th annual WideScreen Film Festival.

Craven is the festival’s artist in residence, and he opens the five-day event with the directing workshop as well as a Q&A; session after the screening of “A Nightmare on Elm Street.”

Though Craven was a college professor teaching humanities before turning to filmmaking more than 30 years ago, he admits, “I never taught film. When people say, ‘Would you like to teach film?’ I say, ‘I wouldn’t know the first thing to say.’ I have no idea [what I will say]. I will walk in there in a cold sweat.”

Film historian Gary J. Prebula, who teaches at Cal State, is the festival’s artistic director and founder. For the first seven years, the festival’s mandate was to honor widescreen movies. Then two years ago, thanks to a suggestion from producer Rory Kelly, the event moved in a more personal direction. “The idea is that we say to the filmmaker, ‘If you have 10 pictures to pick that really shaped your career, what would they be? And would you talk to our students about why that is?’ That becomes extraordinarily attractive to people,” Prebula says.

The first artist in residence was Steven Spielberg. “Then John Bailey, the cinematographer and director, was our second last year, and Wes is our third.”

The festival’s evolution has yielded handsome results. Last year, Prebula reports, was the first profitable one for the festival. “It attracts a really large audience for certain screenings and others a medium audience.” This year, the general public can sign up to take Craven’s four-hour directing seminar, which is being offered with the university’s extension program.

Prebula has known Craven for more than 20 years. “He came to my class the summer of 1983 with ‘Swamp Thing,’ Prebula recalls. “Over the years he’s returned many times and has been extremely generous.”

Craven enjoyed choosing the films for inclusion in the festival. “It’s a great opportunity,” he says. Among the movies he’s picked are “The Bad Seed,” Ingmar Bergman’s “The Virgin Spring,” Jean Cocteau’s “Beauty and the Beast,” F.W. Murnau’s “Nosferatu” and James Whale’s “Frankenstein.”

Craven admires the “magic and surrealism” of “Beauty and the Beast”; “The Virgin Spring,” he says, illustrates that “there are no good guys or bad guys ... we can all do horrible things and then regret them and not even know why we did it.”

He finds “Bad Seed” filled with “misanthropic humor. It’s almost like a melodrama.” And he praises the wordless performance of Boris Karloff in “Frankenstein” as “amazing.”

Films were not part of Craven’s life until he became an adult. “My parents were members of a very strict Baptist church,” he says. “The college I went to also forbade them. And then I did a year’s master’s program at Johns Hopkins. They obviously didn’t have any prescription against movies, but it was so intense.”

It wasn’t until he began teaching at Clarkson College in Potsdam, N.Y., that he experienced movies at the local art house theater. “Suddenly I was seeing all of these incredible films. When I went up there, I was hoping to be a novelist. I wasn’t even thinking in terms of cinema. But the impact on me was so strong. I had no resistance to it. I had never seen that many films. They were just wonderful. They just amazed me and transported me. I decided I had to make movies.”

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The WideScreen Film Festival

Where: Carpenter Performing Arts Center and University Theatre, Cal State Long Beach

When: Wednesday to Sunday

Ends: Halloween

Price: $8 for adults, $6 for seniors and students for individual film tickets; $15 for “Nosferatu,” $10 for students; $60 for the festival package, $40 for students; $150 for the master class, which includes tickets to all screenings and admission to all lectures and workshops.

Contact: (562) 985-7000 or go to www.widescreenfilm festival.org; 800-963-2250 or e-mail info@csulb.edu for workshop enrollment.

Schedule

Wednesday: Wes Craven direct- ing workshop, 1 p.m.; “A Night- mare on Elm Street,” 8.

Thursday: “Blow Up,” “The Virgin Spring,” 7:30 p.m.

Friday: “Diabolique,” 1 p.m.; “Repulsion,” 4; “New Nightmare,” 8; “Scream” trilogy, midnight.

Saturday: “The Bad Seed,” 1 p.m.; “Beauty and the Beast,” 4:30; “Nosferatu” with live score, 8.

Halloween: “Frankenstein,” 11 a.m.; “War of the Worlds,” 1:05 p.m.; “Don’t Look Now,” 2:50.