Ojai Valley News Blog

Pentagon Papers figure to headline expanded Film Festival event

By Linda Harmon
Now in two cities and four locations the Ojai-Ventura Film Festival is growing by leaps and bounds, and that’s just what Chairman and President David Shor had planned when he was given the reins three years ago.

“A film festival has to keep growing to be successful,” said Shor about the 10-year-old Film Festival’s expansion this year to Ventura and the additional venues. “The proviso when I came on board was that the festival would enter into an expansion model, otherwise I wasn’t interested.”

Last year’s Ojai Film Festival had more than 5,500 attendees with its theme of “Enriching the Human Spirit through Film” and this year, as the Ojai-Ventura Film Festival, hopes to attract many more.

“The association with Brooks Institute has been big for us,” said Shor. “It was like getting the Ojai Valley Inn as a sponsor.”

Shor says the year-long process of mounting the festival will be easier this year because of the expansion.

According to Shor, besides having more room for screenings and panel discussions, the entire student film program will be at the Brooks campus, and, most importantly, they will have more room to grow in the future.

“This year we will be screening 62 films and last year it was 55,” said Shor, “plus we have our special honoree screenings, and are offering every film twice.”

Each year, a panel views, reviews and selects the films that will be presented at the festival from films submitted from around the world.

An even more complicated job is choosing the annual special honorees and invited films. According to Shor, a film producer and former board member of the Tahoe and Reno International Film Festival and the producers’ panel of the Cannes Film Festival, he is comfortable with what is an “opportunistically” driven process.

“Although the particular honorees are definitely a part of the process,” said Shor, “it also involves what’s out there, what’s opening, what we can get to screen. Is there a premiere available?”

In other words, not only does a film have to be available, but it needs to have someone associated with that film that is suitable to honor and available to speak. Even though the film is frozen in time, its stars, directors or subjects are not.

“This year it was a pretty easy decision,” said Shor of the selection of Daniel Ellsberg as one of the honorees, and showing the documentary, “The Most Dangerous Man in America,” about Ellsberg’s leaking of the Pentagon papers in 1971. Shor added, “It’s a pretty timely film. One of our board members was at a screening and got some phone numbers for us. We made some calls and they were both available to come.”

Shor went on to explain that when they selected Peter Graves, a second honoree, they were looking at screening either his 1953 appearance in “Stalag 17,” where he appears as a Nazi plant in a German World War II prisoner of war camp, or his 1980 appearance in “Airplane,” as the airplane captain in the zany comedic release.

“Obviously we chose ‘Airplane’ because we figured there would be more cast members available for the Q and A afterwards,” explained Shor.

The Film Festival schedule also includes honoring Haskell Wexler, and will be screening his documentary film about working conditions in the film industry, “Who Needs Sleep?” with a question-and-answer session afterward where Wexler will discuss his film.

Although the Film Festival prides itself on its event planning, in an odd twist of fate they will be screening a selected film that stars Wexler’s wife.

“I hope it’s not happening during the same time as his screening or his panel discussion,” said Shor, laughing at the odd twist of fate. “It had nothing to do with honoring Wexler. Her film was selected by our review panel.”

Hopefully this is the only possible glitch in the expanded schedule a year and half in the planning.

“Our web site is pretty complete,” said Shor, going on to list some of the events. “This is the second year of our celebrity golf tournament, which was a huge hit last year, the parties on Friday and Saturday night, and we’ll have lots of interesting people and celebrities on Thursday, Friday and Saturday. It’s been a really good year, even with the economic downturn and less films being made, I’m happy with our lineup.”

Shor wants to remind film buffs “early bird tickets” are on sale until Oct. 15, and offer special pricing for all the events.

For more information go to ojaifilmfestival.com.