Tampa Film Fan

gasparilla film festival–saturday (part one)

Saturday at the Gasparilla Film Festival was a day of surprises.

My first Saturday surprise didn’t occur at the festival, but happened because of the festival. (So it’s appropriate to include it here.) Some of the CrazedFanBoy.com writers and readers were having lunch (a.k.a. Fanboy Summit) together at 1 p.m. that day. Of course, I left the house at about 12:40 p.m., planning to arrive fashionably late as usual. On my way there, I checked my voice mail and learned that lunch plans had shifted: new restaurant, new people, new time (earlier, wouldn’t you know it). Surprise. After almost an hour of changing directions, sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic, getting slightly lost, hunting for a parking space and coming thisclose to being wiped out by a trolley in Ybor City, I arrived, grumpy and hungry, at the Fanboy Summit.

Herschell Gordon Lewis (Blood Feast, The Wizard of Gore, The Gruesome Twosome) and David F. Friedman (Blood Feast, Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS) were there. The CrazedFanBoy writers were too, yeah, yeah…Herschell Gordon Lewis and David F. Friedman were there. Surprise!

I had lunch with Herschell Gordon “Godfather of Gore” Lewis and David F. “The Mighty Monarch of Exploitation” Friedman!! Technically, I only had a glass of water because everyone else had already eaten and I sat at the opposite end — from them — of a very long table, but I talked with them, shook their hands, got them to sign my festival program and had my picture taken with them. That counts, people.

I was amazed by their generosity and kindness. You know they’ve heard the same questions a thousand times, smiled gamely during a thousand photo ops and endured a thousand lunches with thousands of fans fighting for their attention; yet somehow Lewis and Friedman managed to make each of us feel special and important. Friedman even walked down to my end of the table to chat one-on-one with several people who wouldn’t have had a chance to talk directly with him otherwise.

During our photo op session, Lewis joked that posing with me was more fun than posing with anyone else (because I was the only woman…take that, fanboys!).

After leaving Ybor City, I headed over to Channelside. Since I had some time to kill before the first Gasparilla Film Festival screening – and because I was about to collapse from hunger – my destination was Bennigan’s, where I enjoyed a leisurely long lunch with filmmaker Chris Woods. In addition to my quizzing him about the Joe Redner documentary he’s just made with directory Shelby McIntyre, we talked about movies, strip clubs (you can’t talk about Redner without talking about strip clubs), and pro wrestling. When Woods asked me if I was familiar with pro wrestling, I startled both of us by answering “Yeah, but from many years ago, way back when, when Sting still had short, spiked, blond hair.” Surprise!

Then it was off to the Women’s Power Hour. The festival gave Women’s History Month some R-E-S-P-E-C-T by screening a group of short films “that highlight strength and leadership in women.” First up was local filmmaker Renee Warmack’s terrific documentary about local trailblazing women Ten at the Top in Tampa Bay, which I didn’t think I’d thoroughly enjoy, since I had already seen it. Surprise! I liked it just as much as I did the first time, plus I picked up new things I had missed the first time around.

Other shorts screened during the Women’s Power Hour were Loose Ends, a comedy/drama about a newly single woman that started off strong and funny but went downhill after that; A Driving Lesson, an incredibly memorable film about a quiet afternoon drive gone wrong; and In Between, a series of vignettes about a couple’s mid-life crisis that seemed disconnected and flat despite the clever segways.

Local publishing company JimSam, Inc. sponsored the Women’s Power Hour, so I had a chance to chat with JimSam president Marcia Freespirit for a little while. I checked out the books on their display tables, got a gift bag full o’ goodies, popped by their reception ever so briefly – and somewhere in all of this I talked to filmmaker and fellow blogger Clark Brooks for a minute – and then it was time to rush off to the next movie.

I caught 14 of the 16 Campus MovieFest short films, several of which I had seen before at the CMF Florida Finale last year. (Surprise!) The five-minute student films ranged from comedy/action (Maximum Overkill, University of Georgia; The Lost Toy, Sonoma State University) to drama (Departure, Northeastern University; Sealed, Emerson College) to special effects showcase (Slow Motion Sickness, Jacksonville University; Einstein, UC Berkeley) to horror (Dead End, University of Tampa) to hilarious animated stick figures (Drinking Guy, Tufts University) to subtitled biopic (Fanya Kaplan, Georgia State University) to inventive comedy (Discovering English, Emory University; Me and My Bot, Georgia State University; The Importance of Playing Yardball, University of Central Florida; The Kite Club, Boston University) to what-the-heck-was-that-supposed-to-be? (Cake Master, Georgia State University) and everything in between.

The day’s surprises weren’t quite over just yet…