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[Film culture]

The real deal?
Woods Hole turns 10

by gerald peary

Something to nibble on: maybe the real Boston film festival isn’t the much-hyped affair that takes place here in town every September. Maybe it’s the Woods Hole Film Festival, which, directed by Brookline’s Judy Laster and programmed by local legend David Kleiler, is dedicated to showing independent films from New England, especially from Boston. I was on the Cape for part of the 10th Woods Hole Fest (July 28 to August 4), and I marveled at how many local films were featured, and how many spirited filmmakers drove from Boston to be there to introduce their screenings.

Feature presentations included The Blue Diner, Lakeboat, and Unfinished Symphony (all of which have screened in Boston) but also four significant local premieres: Denton Hunter’s Gavin’s Way, a romantic comedy set in blue-collar South Boston; Mark Wilkinson’s Dischord, a murder mystery shot, and situated, on the Lower Cape; Ziad Hamzeh’s Shadow Glories, about the rejuvenation of a middle-aged ex-kickboxer; and Bob Morrow’s Barstow 2008, a Christopher Guest–like comedic send-up of a dubious California town (this last one was produced by Bostonian Mary Feuer). Then there were the four Kleiler-picked programs of short films. I was fond of Sean Fitzgibbon’s " Metamorphosis, " a valiant attempt to do a modern-day telling of Kakfka’s unfilmable story; Lewis Fotjik’s " Bid Me Run, " an old-fashioned big-hearted documentary about the annual Boston Marathon wheelchair run of quadriplegic Rick Hoyt, who’s pushed by his dad, Dick; and James Holland’s " Night on the Town, " a finely directed black comedy about three energy-to-burn children left home while their parents wine, dine, and dance.

Local performers? Kudos to Jessica Parker, a radiant, Maureen O’Hara–like presence in a just-okay yuppie farce, Edward Keenan’s Natural Selection. And to the bound-for-HBO Southern Comfort, winner of the Sundance Jury Prize for best documentary, which was introduced by its director, Kate Davis, a one-time precocious Harvard filmmaking student and also a founder of the Woods Hole Fest. This wonderful film about a group of transsexual friends living deep in rural Georgia drew, for its one-time showing at Falmouth’s Nickelodeon Theatre, an appreciative audience of local gays and lesbians. (The Falmouth/Woods Hole area — preps, retirees, ocean scientists — isn’t exactly Provincetown!)

Davis and Laster became childhood friends summering at Woods Hole, so that was the obvious place when they decided impulsively on a one-evening fest a decade ago, after Laster’s spaghetti western, Damsel in Dis Dress, had been rejected by the New England Film Festival. Their first screening, a bunch of shorts shown upstairs at the Old Woods Hole Fire Station, actually sold out. That encouraged them to stage a second festival the following year, with films by persons connected to Woods Hole.

" The third year, I met David Kleiler and asked his help, " Laster explains. " Five years ago, we put an organization together and made a call for entries focusing on first-time New England filmmakers, because they are the ones who have trouble getting access to audiences. The last three years, the festival has really exploded. Now it’s an expected event in the Woods Hole Community. We’ve added this year a blues festival, and I’m planning a film institute here, bringing filmmakers and scientists together and focusing on the intersection of film and science. "

A bigger Woods Hole festival could attract bigger talents, such as the New York–based indie animator Bill Plympton (The Tune), whose laid-back workshop this year was a total kick. With a pencil and notebook, Plympton sketched some typical frame-by-frames of his uproarious, scatology-and-violence cartoons, such as a five-drawing toilet joke about a cowboy galloping into a barn on his horse. Frame 3: " Cowboy kicks his horse, " said Plympton, simultaneously drawing. " The horse raises its tail and takes a big dump. " Frame 4: " This stench comes up, " he says, drawing an LA smog. Frame 5: " The cowboy falls down! Suicide! "

Plympton told his class of neophytes that Bugs Bunny animator Chuck Jones said you start only after you’ve done 100,000 drawings. And Plympton? " I did 50 to 80,000 before I made a film. I’ve made four features with 30,000 drawings in each, so that alone is 120,000 drawings. I draw 10 or 12 hours a day. I can do a drawing every five seconds and my hands don’t cramp. I’ve been lucky. "

Gerald Peary can be reached at gpeary@world.std.com.

Issue Date: August 16-23, 2001