Sonny skies

Independents' day at Palm Springs

It's pretty zany: the typical audience at California's Palm Springs Film Festival, which I recently attended, were 70-year-old Republican retirees in bermudas and white sneakers just off one of the town's 99 golf courses. The films got too much for a few bluenoses, who complained about the vulgarity and obscenity. Mostly, these septuagenarians were pretty tolerant, braving subtitles, strange foreign languages, and sexual couplings and politely applauding some of the worst American independent films imaginable.

Everyone wonders: what happens to the thousand movies that get bypassed by Sundance? More than a dozen, the Very Undistributed, landed on their heads this year at Palm Springs, where they were, inexplicably, screened. Me, I just kept avoiding twentysomething filmmakers who hoped I'd publicize them in the Phoenix. What would I write about? Their so-called movies are extended TV sit-com pilots about vapid post-college types looking for Mr. and Ms. Right.

Californians made almost all these silly pictures. Am I prejudiced? The two indies I liked best came from New Englanders. Martin Guigi's farcical Wedding Band takes place at a Jewish-Italian marriage in New York, but it was shot in Guigi's home town of Burlington, Vermont. Independent congressman Bernie Sanders does a funny, guest-turn monologue as a reform rabbi who, mid benediction, gets fatally distracted by his anger over the Dodgers' desertion of Brooklyn.

The Week That Girl Died, directed by Concord (Massachusetts) native Sean Travis, is a sometimes affecting, nicely acted story about a bunch of working-class friends who live in a New England port town. The end credits place the filming in Narragansett, Maine. There's no such spot! Echo Park and the fishing town of San Pedro stood in. "It's all photographed about LA, and every shot is an inch away from a palm tree," Travis explained, amused by the deception. "Narragansett was the beer we drank, growing up summers in Maine."

The late Sonny Bono started this festival 10 years ago, when he was Palm Springs' mayor, and his celeb buddies appeared willingly. Even this year, with Sonny gone, the stars came out, though only for the $400-a-person tribute to John Travolta and Debbie Reynolds. They skipped the movies.

Somehow, Wayne Eric Boyd, a local Palm Springs man with cinema ambitions, squeezed into the expensive tribute and shook Travolta's hand. I met Boyd when he arrived at my motel from Aztec Rent-a-Car, where he works between film projects. As he drove me to pick up an auto, he talked excitedly about his written, directed, and starred-in first feature, One More Shot, which, yes, was playing in the fest. Based on his life as a college wrestling champion trying to make the American Olympic team, One More Shot is, he said, "in the Rocky and Karate Kid kind of mold. In my movie, there's no drinking, not one cuss word, not one killing. We don't blow up one building. Also, I quit drinking. I learn to pray. Not many films have such a positive message."

True. Boyd is a heck of a nice guy, so I went to see his movie and watched him wrestle on the screen, not only other grapplers but a 600-pound bear. At the end of One More Shot, he's on his knees in the locker room talking to the Lord, and there's a soundtrack song imploring, "Don't Give Up Your Dreams."

Wayne Eric Boyd, I hope you find an enterprising distributor. One More Shot is a tiny movie that would be enjoyed in every small town in America. In the meantime, Boyd has finished a draft of a second script, which he described to me as "another feel-good story, which begins with an alcoholic father who has lost his son, the light of his life."

A young filmmaker at Palm Springs told me he had been approached there by Boyd, who told him, "I've got a script that's 120 pages. If you can get it down to 90, I can put it in Travolta's hands."

The best of the Palm Springs fest? A gentle millennium comedy, Extraordinary Visitor, which has John the Baptist landing today in the colorful fisherman's town of St. John's, Newfoundland. It's the first feature by 51-year-old John W. Doyle, who had studied to be a priest. He jokingly calls his film "my revenge against the Church for taking the best years of my life."

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The title of the bawdy British comedy Preaching to the Perverted, which opens this week at the Coolidge Corner, is a play on "preaching to the converted." But the latter idea is very apropos. Those who will care about the S&M issues raised by the film are those obsessed about the freedom to explore their painful fetishist desires. Not my leather-and-rubber scene: I didn't feel celebratory when the film's hero has his precious nipple pierced. Neither was I turned on when the film's heroine announces, saucily, "Bring in the butt plug."

It's a rather dumb movie, I think. A young man, Peter (Christian Anholt), is sent by rightist crusaders in Parliament to infiltrate a fetish club and get evidence to shut it down. As you'd expect, he falls hard for the dominatrix (Guinevere Turner) on whom he's spying and soon finds himself yearning to be her slave. The sex in the movie isn't much, and I preferred Turner as the lipstick lesbian of Go Fish to her hardened tart here.