Ready for the final curtain

Alex Coolman

The end is near.

For bleary-eyed film fans, crazed directors and connoisseurs of buzz,

tonight will be the culmination of eight extraordinary days. The Newport

Beach Film Festival is rumbling to a close.

An awards ceremony, recognizing those films that have rocked the world of

Newport Beach more effectively than the rest, is scheduled to kick off at

7:30 p.m. at the Orange County Museum of Art.

Before that happens, though, a gang of important types -- directors,

festival staff and title sponsors Leigh and Lucy Steinberg -- are

expected to putter around the bay on John Wayne’s yacht, the “Wild

Goose.”

The micro-cruise is reportedly a much sought-after bauble.

“We only have 150 life jackets and I guess they’re really strict about

that, so I actually just gave up my spot,” lamented festival spokesman

Todd Quartararo.

A life jacket is not required to attend the awards ceremony, however.

At that event, prizes will be distributed for a whole range of

categories, from Best Feature and Best Director to Most Twisted Short and

a few Audience Choice awards.

For the hopeful directors squirming in their seats, the awards may mean

more than a pat on the back; in today’s movie industry, festival

recognition can be the key to obtaining distribution.

Chi Muoi Lo, the producer, director and writer of “Catfish in Blackbean

Sauce,” a film that screened here last Sunday, carried away Best Feature

Film and Audience Choice awards at the 1999 Florida and Houston

International film festivals.

Since receiving those awards, Lo said, the fortunes for “Catfish” are

looking up.

“When we won Florida, it was in ‘Variety’ and the ‘Hollywood Reporter,’ ”

he said. “We suddenly got a lot of phone calls from people who wanted to

see the movie.”

That was a particularly exciting development for the film, simply because

it’s a quirky movie -- one in which a humorous take on the lives of its

characters was difficult for programmers in the art-house film market to

understand.

“Sometimes it’s harder to sell” highbrow comedy, Lo said. “They looked at

it and said, ‘No one dies in here,’ ”

The director of the film “Ave Maria,” Eduardo Rossoff, took home a Best

Director award at a festival in Havana.

“It’s another little grain of salt,” Rossoff said. “Any recognition from

the public helps. It means that the public likes the movie, and that’s

what the distributors are looking for.”

Rossoff was confident that “Ave Maria” was a powerful picture, but didn’t

want to hazard a guess as to whether a Best Foreign Film award from

Newport Beach was in its future.

“There’s other good movies and you don’t know what the public is feeling

when they see it,” he said. “Maybe they had a bad Haagen-Dazs experience

before they went to the theater.”