Clambake

Another fine Newport film fest

The First Newport International Film Festival, in June of last year, was such a smash in every way -- an assured staff, fine films, affable guests, great parties -- that it was hard to imagine a follow-up fest again going without a hitch. I'm pleased to report that for the second fest, the films were once more superbly chosen, and the soirees definitely first-rate. Is there a closing-night party on earth so thoroughly enjoyable as Newport's now annual under-a-tent clambake, with quahogs, chowder, and lobster for all?

Still, UPS contributed to a sophomore wobble with its belated shipping of key films, so that this year's schedule was sometimes in disarray. "It's horrible!" festival director Nancy Donahoe testified. "When I went to other festivals and witnessed cancellations, I said this would never be us. It sucks!"

Last year, many screenings were lightly attended -- excusable for a first-time festival. Unfortunately, the Second Newport International Film Festival started the same sparse way. Lots of spiffy Newport citizenry did show for the fest's opening night, a sneak of Miramax's Oscar Wilde adaptation An Ideal Husband; and as the weekend approached, the crowds did pick up, even for esoteric documentaries. But packed houses are still in the future.

"This year's festival was more heavily promoted, so we need to spend time on attendance," Donahoe said. "Maybe next year we can get high schools involved, or groups of elderly. If we didn't need 250 volunteers to work, they'd be all in the theaters. They're the ones who obviously love movies."

A Newport special attraction were the daily seminars with film professionals on insider subjects: screenwriting, marketing, pitching, etc. (I was part of an opinionated panel on film criticism that included the Globe's Betsy Sherman and two feuding New York journalists.) A fest highlight for me was a gathering of accomplished film-music composers, including folky Mason Daring, who writes for John Sayles, and "noir" composer Michael Small, who was responsible for Klute and The Parallax View. Each demonstrated his talents by improvising a score on the spot to a one-minute title sequence for a nature film.

They also told composer anecdotes. Small: "For Brian De Palma's Sisters, producer Ed Pressman called me and asked, `Could you do a Bernard Herrmann score?'" I said, `Yes, but do you happen to know that Bernard Herrmann is still alive?' That's how I got Herrmann a job." And Daring explained the reason for those dreadful wall-to-wall-of-irrelevant-rock-songs movies. A film actually needs three songs, but the rights are prohibitive -- say, $50,000 per song. The filmmaker asks a record company to pick up the $150,000 cost. In exchange, the record company gets to cram the soundtrack (and the soundtrack album) with arbitrary songs by artists who are under contract to that company.

And the movies!

Newport unveiled two fine feature documentaries: American Hollow, months in the idiosyncratic lives of an extended Appalachian hillbilly family, made by Rory Kennedy, the politically committed youngest daughter of Bobby and Ethel; and Speaking in Strings, Paola di Florio's arresting biography of the stormy, charismatic classical violinist Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg. Among fiction features, I was much impressed by The Big Brass Ring, George Hickenlooper's daring venture to rewrite for the screen a not-quite-completed, unproduced 1983 Orson Welles screenplay.

Hickenlooper would be damned if his film were too derivative of Welles's baroque style, and damned also if he didn't pay enough visual allegiance to the Citizen Kane auteur. To me, he found the right mixture of Wellesian ambiance and his own neo-noir vision. If anything, The Big Brass Ring film seems less Orson than an homage to the Dashiell Hammett of The Glass Key. Both The Brass Ring on film and Hammett's book are symbolic father/son noirs set in the political arena of American cities: the movie adeptly switches Welles's Madrid setting to St. Louis, Hickenlooper's birthplace.

Rare at a film festival: I, the cynic, was in total synch with the Audience Award for the most popular feature. We the people fell hard for Nisha Ganatra's sweet, inventive comedy Chutney Popcorn, about an Indian-American lesbian in her 20s (Ganatra) who decides to get pregnant as a surrogate mother for her infertile married sister.

NYU grad Ganatra admitted apprehension about showing her film to a white, older, preppy, yacht-obsessed Newport audience. "I feel like I'm in a movie set in this town, like Disney World. I walked by a fire station and there was a guy in there with an actual handlebar moustache. But when I showed my film, the audience was laughing! They were honestly moved!" Ganatra noted differences in audience reaction from previous Chutney Popcorn screenings. "The lesbian scenes were `okay,' glossed over, but there was interest when, `Oh, the husband and wife are in bed.' The Newport audience seemed pretty positive that the husband and wife would get back together but confused who gets the newborn infant. At the Seattle Film Festival, it was clear: lesbians will raise the baby!"