Alan Inkles, man behind Stony Brook Film Festival

A sampling of Stony Brook Film Festival movies

BY GENE SEYMOUR | gene.seymour@newsday.com

July 18, 2007

These days, when he's not booking eclectic acts ranging from the Emerson String Quartet to jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis to guerrilla comic Sandra Bernhard to appear at Stony Brook University's Staller Center, Alan Inkles, the center's director, gets phone calls from people, on and off Long Island, on the best way to set up their own film festival.

Since it would be understating matters greatly to say that the 47-year-old Inkles enjoys talking about his work (and just about anything else), one guesses he would have to be unimaginably busy when such phone entreaties arrive at his cluttered office on Staller's second floor to reject them.

"Call me Mister Film Festival," he says with a shrug. "I can only tell them what's been working well for us."

"Us" is the Stony Brook Film Festival, held for the last 12 years at Staller. The 10-day festival, which begins its latest edition tomorrow, has evolved gradually into a modest, yet sturdy model for success amid a rapidly expanding universe of film festivals in America and abroad.

"We keep things simple," Inkles says as he leads a visitor into the center's 1,000-seat main auditorium. "Most festivals have you wandering around from theater to theater. We show everything in one place only." With a flourish, he shows off the 40-foot-wide, 26-foot-high silver screen that will project the festival's 20 features and 14 shorts.

"We fill those seats for each screening," Inkles says. "We know who we are and we don't try to overreach and become something we're not. We don't have the machinery to make this a major destination on the festival circuit. But that's not my mission. My mission is to bring to Long Islanders in the middle of the summer films they will not see anywhere else in a great venue."

There are a handful of film festivals on the Island throughout the year, notably the Long Island International Film Expo, which ends tomorrow in Bellmore and the Long Island Film Festival, held this year from May 31 to June 3 in Glen Cove. In the fall, there's the Hamptons International Film Festival, which has built a reputation for its selection of European features, provocative documentaries and high-profile American independent features.

A cinematic balance

Stony Brook is poised somewhere between the broad selection of experimental and independent movies of the LI Film Festival and the glitzier array of events and movies served up at the Hamptons. It couldn't possibly have a better, more amiable pitchman than Inkles, a master of the relentless, non-abrasive hype. Yet he's not the only one who's bullish on the festival.

"Alan doesn't worry about getting big-time premieres or scoring scheduling coups," says Dylan Skolnick, programmer for the Cinema Arts Centre in Huntington. "And that's what I like about the festival. He simply tries to give people what he thinks are the best films and presents them in an easygoing atmosphere."

Inkles says he has programmed this year's festival from more than 700 entries - some 550 submitted directly to his office; the rest he viewed at festivals throughout the country, including January's Sundance Film Festival where he found "Rocket Science," this year's closing-night pick at the festival. It is slated to open theatrically Aug. 10 in New York and other selected cities.

The rest of the schedule blends American indie films, such as Derek Sieg's gritty "Swedish Auto" (Friday, 7 p.m.) and Scott Caan's comedy "The Dog Problem" (July 27, 9:15 p.m.) with foreign-language features such as French-Canadian director Ghyslaine Cote's opening-night selection, "A Family Secret" (tomorrow, 8 p.m.) and Israeli filmmaker Dina Zvi-Riklis' "Three Mothers" (Saturday, 9:30 p.m.). Documentaries include "About Face: The Story of the Jewish Refugee Soldiers of World War II" (Sunday, 3 p.m.) and "War/Dance" (July 27, 7 p.m.), a story of Ugandan children that won this year's Director's Award at Sundance.

Actors amid the audience

It isn't all sitting in the dark. The festival also includes such events as a Saturday night barbecue and buffet at the Jasmine restaurant at the Wang Center next door to Staller. And actor Christopher Plummer, who delivers a much-lauded performance in Michael Schroeder's "Man in the Chair," will appear after that film's 7 p.m. screening Monday to take questions and meet with the audience.

All told, Inkles figures it now costs about $350,000 to put on the Stony Brook festival. Of that figure, $150,000 ("Maybe a little more," Inkles says) comes from the university in terms of facilities and staffing. Roughly half of the remaining $200,000 are expenses paid by ticket sales and the other half comes from donations, mostly from such sponsors as HBO and JetBlue.

"You look at a festival like Tribeca where it's all about velvet ropes and exclusive access and we're not about that," Inkles says. "From the very beginning, we've had stars like Rod Steiger and Cliff Robertson interacting with our audience. Last year, Alan Alda was here to discuss his memoir."

Filmmakers get direct access to Stony Brook's audience after screenings and during receptions. "I find the audience to be very sensitive, very knowledgeable about movies and I like the questions they ask," says opening-night director Cote, whose "The Five of Us" was the closing-night selection in 2005. "And Alan is the most important element of all. His energy is ... what is the word ... so communicative!"

A reel difference

Pat Kelly, director of operations for the Staller Center, believes filmmaker loyalty to the festival is grounded in the tender loving care their movies get at Staller. "You hear horror stories at other festivals about prints being run out of sequence or totally messed up. Not a single film goes up on our screen without being tested. And in general, we set the bar higher than what most of these directors are used to at other festivals, even for things like transportation to and from their hotel."

These sound like simple things, Inkles says, but they have allowed the festival to cultivate an audience since the first event in 1995. In those early years, Inkles figures, there were between 500 and 600 people coming, compared with what he and his staff believe to be roughly 7,000 to 8,000 attendees purchasing about 15,000 tickets.