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Hollywood In the Hamptons

Lining up for the Hamptons International Film Festival. (Newsday Photo, 1995 / John Keating)

Jack Mathews | Staff Writer

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Maybe it's the beaches. Maybe it's the sunlight. Maybe it's the fact that when the Big One registers on the Richter scale, it's going to do it 3,000 miles away.

Whatever the reason, Hollywood has made a minor migration to the Hamptons in the past few years. Spielberg. Nicholson. Streisand. Baldwin. Just a few of the luminaries who live there either full- or part-time. And who do so because the general tenor of the place is to treat the extraordinary - movie stars on the streets - like it's ordinary. At the same time, there's the ongoing, soon-to-be-6-years-old, Hamptons International Film Festival, which means there's a great surge of star power invigorating the East End.

But don't the two entities - the festival devoted to independent American film and the glamorous Hamptons' social whirl - each occupy a parallel universe? ``Well, yes and no,'' said Bruce Feinberg, who was executive director of the festival and is on its board. ``Steven Spielberg is a special adviser to the festival. But he's a private person and we're not really part of that mainstream.''

Like the Hamptons, which straddle the worlds of independent and Hollywood film, the festival has what might be called a split personality - half resort, half industry, where deals get made but only, as Feinberg says, ``in that genteel Hamptons business style. At the same time, we did participate in a benefit at the Brigehampton Polo Club last summer; [director] Barry Sonnenfeld appeared on our behalf. Of course, the social schedule is an unbroken chain of benefits; as I told people who were coming to ours last summer, `We're the second benefit on the left.' ``The other was for AmFAR,'' he added, referring to the AIDS research organization. ``They were more important, but we had valet parking.''