Newport news

A Rhode Island film festival first

"Amazing" was the word uttered again and again by filmmakers, the press, and audiences at the First International Newport Film Festival earlier this month. How could a first-time film festival possibly be this good? Have such arresting new movies, such thoughtful panels? Such interesting guests, from animator Bill Plympton to jazz drummer Chico Hamilton? Such elaborate Gatsby-style mansion parties, including a gala clambake at the girlhood home of Jackie Onassis?

(I was there as member of a three-member jury for documentaries, and we were definitely impressed with the nonfiction films we had to choose among for prizes. Eight out of 10 were really fine.)

How could three nice young women living in New York -- executive director Christine Schomer, festival director Nancy Donahoe, and director of programming Maude Chilton, with help from astute friends -- have pulled it all off? Especially when you consider that the trio had no festival experience among them, and that the pie-in-the-sky idea for a Newport Film Festival had been introduced over coffee just 14 months ago.

Schomer, who had worked as a researcher and booking guests for Letterman in New York and then The Tom Snyder Show in LA, returned to Manhattan with a vow to get out of TV. She met one day with Donahoe, the producer of an independent short, about making a film together. Instead, Schomer suggested they put on a film festival!

A native of Barrington, Rhode Island, Schomer told me, "Growing up here, I thought you had to leave this state to be in the entertainment industry. But I came home one weekend when Amistad was shooting in Newport, and Michael Corrente, who made American Buffalo, was filming in Providence. I realized, the film industry is stimulating the Rhode Island tourist industry.

"There should be a Newport Film Festival! Nancy and I decided to push it really fast."

In one year, they lined up a formidable A-list of festival sponsors, including US magazine, Nortek, US Airways, Fruit of the Loom, Skyy Vodka, and Kodak. Using Colorado's Telluride Film Festival as a model (though they've never been there!), Schomer and Donahoe planned out an on-foot festival at which audiences and guests could saunter from hotels to seminars to the fest's moviehouses, the single-screen Jane Pickens and the twinned Opera House.

"Nancy and I sent ourselves to Sundance in January," Schomer explains, "to see how a festival works, how volunteers are used, how theaters and events are run. Then the Newport Daily News sent us to the Berlin Film Festival. As a consumer, I found Berlin impenetrable, and I was pickpocketed. But we did get several films to show at Newport.

"For the initial year, we tried to do everything, to aim incredibly high, though we were cautioned not to. We'd have 75 screenings, panels, events every day, parties every night. I've never known such a frenzied pace. And I'd thought Letterman was frenzied."

June 2 was Opening Night at the Jane Pickens. In the lobby, Schomer marveled that people were buying popcorn, that the festival was actually happening. Inside the theater, another coup: Miramax Films had been persuaded to make the Newport Fest the site for the American premiere of a major release, The Mighty. Miramax boss Harvey Weinstein delivered a gracious speech, comparing this night to something out of Cinema Paradiso.

The Mighty, about the friendship of two boys, a low-esteem giant of a 13-year-old and his high-IQ tutor in leg braces, proved too sentimental and manipulative for me, but much of the audience laughed, cried, applauded. Weinstein left for New York, undoubtedly pleased.

But what if he'd stayed around to see some films?

I believe he would have been writing a fat check for Miramax to distribute That Was You, a hot-from-the-lab Chicago-produced indie that, in its world premiere at Newport, promptly captured the Audience Award for Best Film.

As the only movie critic to have seen it, I'm with the crowd. That Was You is the real thing! Here's that warm, humanist, brilliantly written comedy that everyone waits for, with a screwball ensemble of Chicago actors, none famous, providing a totally pleasurable evening at the cinema. (And there's a recent Bostonian as producer, Lisa Spencer.)

The behind-the-scenes making of this movie is a nifty story itself. A long-retired Second City performer, Tom Bastounes, sold his family grocery business, Capital Produce, and with the revenue hired two pals, directors of commercials, to write a semi-autobiographical screenplay about him. They'd direct, he'd star. Incredibly, it worked. Rino Liberatore and Ron Lazzaretti co-directed beautifully. Bastounes is a wonderfully charming, relaxed screen presence, a total natural, providing the most unlikely movie debut since Sly Stallone in Rocky.

Bastounes plays a Greek-American in the family grocery-produce business who, divorced and floundering, dreams of rekindling his life by taking up with his gorgeous ex-flame (Monica Zaffarano), who's now a world-famous opera diva.

I predict a bidding war for That Was You among American distributors. Remember, it debuted at the First Newport Film Festival.