{"id":704,"date":"2011-01-25T12:17:43","date_gmt":"2011-01-25T12:17:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cinelog.org\/cinelog\/?p=704"},"modified":"2011-01-25T12:24:45","modified_gmt":"2011-01-25T12:24:45","slug":"orange-countys-forgotten-film-festival","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cinelog.org\/cinelog\/2011\/01\/25\/orange-countys-forgotten-film-festival\/","title":{"rendered":"Orange County’s Forgotten Film Festival"},"content":{"rendered":"
Recent news of the Newport Beach Film Festival’s hurried search for a new venue <\/a>brought to mind a lesser known county festival, which briefly attempted to carve out a cinematic niche, \u00a0just south of Newport.<\/div>\n
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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,\u00a0with nearly every artistic community of note attempting to\u00a0create the next Sundance. As Laguna Beach already possessed\u00a0a rich cultural history and was home to a\u00a0number of renown art based programs, the club deemed an independent\u00a0film festival\u00a0the logical choice for both a fund raiser and community social event. So, in March of 1997, the Laguna Beach Film Festival was launched.<\/div>\n
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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\u00a0Festival 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.<\/div>\n
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\"\"<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \"\"<\/a><\/div>\n
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Had organizers remained content in the\u00a0event being a small, local, affair, the Laguna Beach festival likely would have continued on indefinitely. However,\u00a0in what has almost become an aspiring film festival cliche,\u00a0dreams of going “big time” soon derailed the event. Outside parties were brought in,\u00a0a professional\u00a0director was hired, and\u00a0aspirations quickly\u00a0moved beyond the event’s modest means.\u00a0Far worse, the Exchange Club basically lost control and rights to their festival in the process.<\/div>\n
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While the film festival had struggled\u00a0with the limitations of amateur, volunteer based, operations, the\u00a0“professionalization” of the\u00a0planned fourth year\u00a0proved to be a complete disaster. Bogged down\u00a0under infighting, greed,\u00a0and visions of self grandeur, the\u00a0“bigger and better”\u00a0festival never managed to move beyond the early planning stages. Having failed to even put on another event, most of the parties involved\u00a0moved on and the Laguna Beach Film Festival faded in to the realm of what “might have been”.\u00a0<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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, \u00a0just south of Newport. \u00a0 Back in the late 90’s, the Laguna Beach Exchange Club (a local chapter of the now 100 year old […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-704","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cinelog.org\/cinelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/704","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cinelog.org\/cinelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cinelog.org\/cinelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cinelog.org\/cinelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cinelog.org\/cinelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=704"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/cinelog.org\/cinelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/704\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":709,"href":"https:\/\/cinelog.org\/cinelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/704\/revisions\/709"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cinelog.org\/cinelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=704"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cinelog.org\/cinelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=704"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cinelog.org\/cinelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=704"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}