Deeper into movies

The Rhode Island International Film Festival is an independent affair

by Bill Rodriguez

It's small wonder that George Marshall, executive director of the Providence/Rhode Island International Film Festival, ended up so deeply into film. At age five he was already collecting movie soundtracks, and as a teenager growing up in Maryland he was writing screenplays. At 17 he graduated from typing paper to celluloid when he got an old silent 16mm camera. As an undergraduate at the University of Rhode Island, he wrote and produced a short that got him into the University of Southern California graduate film school in 1976. While there a friend was doing sound for a sci-fi film, the cantina sequence of an odd little feature called Star Wars.

"So I got to go over there and watch them put the while thing together," Marshall said in gleeful recollection, walking up Atwells Avenue near the festival office. "I watched them synch the soundtrack, and I met Lucas. That's my big star story."

Over an Arizona Iced Tea at a coffeehouse, the animated founder of Flickers Arts Collaborative discussed the origins of that organization, which led to the current film festival.

When Marshall came back to Rhode Island in 1978 to finish his degree at Brown University, his love of film burst his boundaries. That was the year he gave Flickers its casual start, as a series of living room screenings for film buffs like himself. Eventually, the Newport organization got into producing arts events, but its primary reason for being always remained film.

Over the years Marshall has seen a groundswell of attitude change toward the kind of foreign and independent film that he and others at Flickers have poured so much energy into promoting.

"When we started showing films in the '70s, we were seen as competitors by local arts groups. Film was not seen as a real art, this was a commercial product. I think that's the most significant change," said Marshall, 45. "In the last umpteen years in our existence as an organization, we've seen film become appreciated as an art form."

Even an IRS official they sat down with to get a non-profit designation at first thought that a film society was just a less successful version of Showcase Cinemas.

Inspired by such energetic role models as the film festivals in Seattle and Montreal, he and the Flickers folks were encouraged to start the Rhode Island International Film Festival last year. Based in largely French-Canadian Woonsocket, it was heavy on unsubtitled films in French. The high point of its celebration was the opening of the newly restored Stadium Theatre in that city, which had not had a film theater for years.

Obviously, such enterprise takes a lot of time and effort by volunteer workers and staff. In addition to Marshall, managing director Betty Newberry and festival director Carolyn Testa are at the head of the line of those pouring countless hours into the event.

"Everyone in the organization works. My board works. Our board used to run the movies, they used to man the concessions," he said. "So that sets us apart, in that we're not a slickly run operation where we just throw money into something. We'll throw ourselves into it."

In percentage terms, the festival's budget has increased greatly from last year's, but only because the dollar amounts were and are so minimal. The cash funding and donations have about doubled, from the $25,000 of last year. But the equivalent of $50,000 in additional pro bono contributions has nearly tripled, he estimated. The City of Providence, for example, provided free postage and copying. Brooks Pharmacy is the major sponsor because it is also a client of Marshalls radio and TV commercial production company, Marshall.Com. (When I first stepped into the festival's Bradford Street office, Brooks' chief financial officer was helping with the books.)

In comparison, this year's posh and polished second annual Newport International Film Festival cost about $300,000, with half the sum from contributed goods and services.

When Marshall mentions that 95 percent of the filmmakers showing at the Providence festival do not yet have distributors, he makes it sound like an advantage. As, from his perspective, it is.

"The Newport festival in many ways represents what Flickers used to do, when we were bringing in somebody else's product and exhibiting it," he said. "It's primarily filling the niche of bringing in known stars, known product from distributors. There's nothing wrong with that. People want to see it before it comes to the multiplex."

His vision for the future of the PRIIFF is to both keep it filmmaker-oriented and to grow it into an enterprise that is more like -- well, like Flickers.

"We'd like to have one large festival that's not just one time of the year but is over the course of the year," Marshall suggested. "We're already doing it this year by having satellite venues."

---

The best of the fest

---