Glitter in the desert

People in evening dress lingering on the red carpet even when urged by men in dark suits and headphones to keep moving. Spectators standing for hours behind barricades in a chilly rain to shout the names of their favorite stars as they passed. Young actors flaunting the formal dress code with blue suits and open collars or tuxes deconstructed past all recognition. The braying of the paparazzi -- “Nicole, look left,” “Laura, Laura and Liam, over here” -- as non-celebrity guests flinched in the camera-flash fallout.

The Oscars? The Golden Globes? No, this would be the Palm Springs International Film Festival shaking off its wallflower reputation like a debutante determined to ditch the horn-rims and bobby socks.

After 15 years of galas honoring only one or two celebrities, often of a generation that reflected the town’s Bob Hope Classic demographics more than the year’s hit movies, this year’s red carpet was lined with stars, young stars, hot stars, many of them Oscar hopefuls. Nicole Kidman, Kevin Spacey, Samuel L. Jackson, Liam Neeson, Laura Linney, Bryce Dallas Howard, Kirk Douglas, director Alexander Payne and “Lord of the Rings” composer Howard Shore all showed up to receive awards presented by equally high-wattage luminaries including Virginia Madsen, Adrien Brody, Lynn Redgrave, Anjelica Huston, directors Bill Condon and Alejandro Amenabar and, well, Kevin Spacey.

Hollywood wattage notwithstanding, the biggest celebrities in the room were perhaps newly named festival chairman emeritus Harold Matzner and current festival chairman Earl Greenburg, local philanthropists and the forces behind the newly revitalized festival. Coachella Valley socialites, festival sponsors and ambient millionaires jockeyed for positions on the red carpet and sighed over Kidman’s beauty and Neeson’s towering charm -- “I’m so star-struck I can’t stand it,” one woman said to her husband -- but once inside, the stars were pretty much left alone, while Matzner and Greenburg were swarmed by admiring patrons.

Greenburg, a lawyer and former programmer for daytime television at NBC, will tell you that the festival is finally coming into its own, now ranking as the second largest film festival in the country. He will credit the location -- “a two-hour drive from Hollywood!” -- the weather -- “who wouldn’t want to come to a place where the sun is shining and it’s 66 degrees in the middle of winter!” -- and the recent scheduling changes of the Academy Awards -- “we’re a natural marketing place for Oscar hopefuls; the timing just couldn’t be better!”

And then he will tell you how it really happened.

How, in 2000, Matzner stepped in with his checkbook and business expertise to save the financially floundering festival he had helped former Mayor Sonny Bono found. How Matzner then convinced a bunch of his philanthropist friends to join the board and make commitments, both financial and influential, to the event. How a few years later, Matzner persuaded Greenburg -- “I say this in a very loving manner; he sucked me into this thing” -- to join the board.

How utilizing the connections he had as a former NBC programmer, Greenburg began making the rounds in L.A., beating the bush for the big stars.

“The festival’s core is, and always will be, its films,” Greenburg said. “But the gala is what will get written about, the gala is what people will want to hear about and see, what will bring them to the festival, what will bring them to Palm Springs.” Because while the festival’s core may be film, its purpose is selling the Coachella Valley. As Rep. Mary Bono points out, when her husband Sonny, then mayor of Palm Springs, came up with the idea of the festival, it was in answer to the town’s deficit, not its desperate need for foreign film. The economy of Palm Springs runs on its transient occupancy tax, so Bono wanted to fill the hotels and restaurants and to show the world that Palm Springs was once a place of old Hollywood glamour for a reason, that it could, and should, be a vibrant city once again.

“Sonny had no real connection to foreign film,” says director of programming Darryl Mcdonald, who was there at the beginning and rejoined the staff last year after several years running the film festivals in the Hamptons and Seattle. “But we told him that if he wanted it to be successful, we had to find a niche and foreign films was it.” The festival soon became the biggest of its kind in the country, gaining a reputation for being the only place American filmgoers could catch all the contenders for the foreign film Oscar in one place. But in the late ‘90s, it began losing money, and after a personnel crisis, Matzner stepped in.

“The festival is a business,” he says. “You have to run it like a business. It has to break even or no one will support it.” A gravelly-voiced man with the stance of a bulldog, Matzner is something of a local legend, showing up at cocktail parties in a royal blue down vest over his suit and tennis shoes beneath it. The chief executive of CBA Industries, a New Jersey-based direct-marketing firm, he is the sort of man who needs very little sleep and always knows everyone in the room.

“I brought Earl in because Earl understands how to do business, he has a lot of Hollywood connections which I do not, and he is very very charming, which I am not.” While former festival leaders were content to let the project “evolve,” Greenburg and Matzner knew that product branding is an act of will, not chance. They brought in high-profile sponsors, including Tiffany, Mercedes, “Entertainment Tonight” and the city of Indian Wells. The newly renovated Parker Palm Meridian hosted the honorees and many of the high-profile guests and Tiffany, which signed on for a three-year commitment to the festival, also provided thank-you watches to honorees and presenters.

In return, Tiffany was a very clear presence at the gala -- from the live models flanking the final turn of the red carpet to a montage of clips paying homage to the jewelers.

Growing the gala

“Listen,” says Matzner. “The films are great, we love the films. But mostly we want people to see what a wonderful place this valley is, what a wonderful town Palm Springs is. When we [recently] named a street for Kirk Douglas, we reached 100 major television markets and 700 newspapers. That’s what this is about.” So Greenburg’s goal was to grow the gala. He has done this, he says, by treating the talent well and gaining a reputation for stability. But he also understands “that in Hollywood, availability is a big issue.” When Kevin Costner’s representatives called last year to reply in the affirmative, Greenburg admits he “probably overstepped his bounds” and promised him an award before consulting the awards committee. “But if you were sitting in my chair and Kevin Costner said yes, you would do the same thing,” he says with a laugh.

The awards are intentionally connected to a person’s work rather than a particular film, allowing a certain flexibility in choosing honorees. When Kidman’s representatives finally replied, two months after the original letter requesting her presence and three weeks from this year’s gala, Greenburg had to think fast.

“Originally,” he says, “we wanted to give her an acting award, but we had already offered it to Laura Linney. And the younger actors,” he adds, “they’re not so happy getting a lifetime achievement award because they feel like it means their career is over.” Fortunately, he said, the festival has “a very prestigious” Chairman’s Award, an honor so rarefied “I think we’ve only given it out once before, many many years ago.” So long ago that he couldn’t remember who received it -- a little digging revealed it was Jimmy Stewart in 1992.

It is an award, he said, designed to “acknowledge actors who take risks in their selection of roles,” which fits Kidman’s career to a T, and the timing worked for the actress who got a Golden Globe nomination for “Birth,” a film that met with mixed reviews and opened nationally the day before the gala.

Other choices showed the same mixture of admiration and savvy -- when the festival committee saw “Kinsey” earlier this year, Greenburg said, members were blown away and immediately asked him if he could get Linney and Neeson.

“Like that’s going to be easy,” he says with a laugh. “But we were lucky -- we had some big names last year [Scarlett Johansson, Costner, Jim Sheridan and Anthony Minghella received awards], and I got a much warmer reception at the studios this time around.” It also gave the actors, and their director Bill Condon, who was a presenter, the chance to do publicity for a movie that, while a critical success, is still doing only so-so at the box office.

“We know there is a wider audience for this film,” Condon told a 200-plus audience who came to hear him speak about his career at a festival event earlier in the day. “We’re not quite sure why they haven’t gone yet; maybe talks like this will help.” For actors who have Golden Globe nominations and/or Oscar hopes -- such as Kidman, Linney, Neeson and Payne -- the timing and location of the festival make it easy to say yes.

If the trappings were high Hollywood, the attitude was pure Palm Springs. Here in the desert, there is little of the industry spin, little of the hand-wringing over-management that makes the huge awards show seem hollow and rote. The stars seemed genuinely gratified by the awards, and if many arrived shortly before the gala and left soon after, they all said very nice things about the town that honored them.

“No, I’ve never been here,” said Kidman as she moved through the red carpet line, gripping her father’s hand. “But it seems lovely and we’ll have to come back.” The stars also spoke with a candor not often displayed by actors who are not Bill Murray. The nature of the festival and the presence of just enough of their peers allowed them a freedom in their acceptance speeches that mercifully did not include laundry lists of studio heads.

“I thank you for this award, though I think there may be a problem with a world in which making small, human and humorous films is ‘an achievement,’ ” said Alexander Payne, receiving the award for director of the year. “It should be the norm.” Neeson expressed gratitude for film festivals’ unique ability to foster ideas that would not normally come out of the Hollywood machine and said that of all the films he has made he is proudest of the ones that are used in classrooms as educational tools -- “Schindler’s List,” “Michael Collins” and now “Kinsey.” “It fills me with a new respect for this medium and the responsibility of storytelling,” he said. “We need to keep celebrating festivals, especially this one.” And Kevin Spacey, still perhaps channeling Bobby Darin, just had a ball.

“Usually when you’re up here receiving an award, there’s an orchestra behind you ready to cut you off before you’ve said anything,” said Spacey, staring down the orchestra while he received the Sonny Bono Visionary Award for Acting, Directing and Producing before launching into an emotional 10-minute thank-you to “the team that makes what I do possible.” Later, when presenting the Career Achievement Award for Acting, he admonished Hollywood “to spend more time giving this man awards with his name on them,” before surrendering the stage to Samuel L. Jackson.

It was also very Palm Springs in presentation -- wine and champagne flowed throughout the evening, but dinner was served during the ceremony, which, as MC, the preternaturally enthusiastic Mary Hart kept at an even canter, and the whole thing was over by 9:15 p.m.

Because, as Matzner says, this is still Palm Springs, “and in Palm Springs you got to wind up by 9:15 or they will walk. No matter who’s up there talking.” Not even Kirk Douglas, the town’s favorite son, who received homage from every honoree as well as the final award, for lifetime achievement.

Many residents believe the new sheen of the festival reflects how Palm Springs is growing and changing -- the population of the valley is projected to double in the next 10 years and Palm Springs has grown considerably in the last five, recapturing, they say, some of the movieland magic of the Brat Pack days.

“When I came to Hollywood,” said Kirk Douglas, accepting his award, “I wanted to see movie stars. But I didn’t see any movie stars until I came to Palm Springs. And we haven’t changed. If you want to see movie stars, come to Palm Springs.”