Recent news of the Newport Beach Film Festival’s hurried search for a new venue brought to mind a lesser known county festival, which briefly attempted to carve out a cinematic niche, just south of Newport.
Back in the late 90’s, the Laguna Beach Exchange Club (a local chapter of the now 100 year old service organization) was in search of a new fundraising vehicle for the group’s child abuse prevention charity. At the time, film festivals were somewhat of a hot social commodity, with nearly every artistic community of note attempting to create the next Sundance. As Laguna Beach already possessed a rich cultural history and was home to a number of renown art based programs, the club deemed an independent film festival the logical choice for both a fund raiser and community social event. So, in March of 1997, the Laguna Beach Film Festival was launched.
.
Utilizing the city’s Festival of Arts grounds, as local theatres were already tied in to an earlier incarnation of the Newport Festival (unrelated to the current event), the Laguna Beach Film Festival featured three days of independent films, workshops, and social mixers. While garnering modest attention and relying on video projection (as opposed to actual film), the event was successful enough to warrant two more years of activity.
.
Had organizers remained content in the event being a small, local, affair, the Laguna Beach festival likely would have continued on indefinitely. However, in what has almost become an aspiring film festival cliche, dreams of going “big time” soon derailed the event. Outside parties were brought in, a professional director was hired, and aspirations quickly moved beyond the event’s modest means. Far worse, the Exchange Club basically lost control and rights to their festival in the process.
While the film festival had struggled with the limitations of amateur, volunteer based, operations, the “professionalization” of the planned fourth year proved to be a complete disaster. Bogged down under infighting, greed, and visions of self grandeur, the “bigger and better” festival never managed to move beyond the early planning stages. Having failed to even put on another event, most of the parties involved moved on and the Laguna Beach Film Festival faded in to the realm of what “might have been”.
Tags: No Comments
