A film fest where it's needed: The Shore

MARGATE, N.J. - Sundance, meet Downbeach.

For one weekend at least, in Atlantic City, Ventnor and Margate, you can bask in films more current than Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (Gene Wilder, not Johnny Depp, shown on the beach last week at Newport Avenue) or Remember the Titans, shown last Monday on a blow-up screen at the ballfields near the bay.

This weekend, the red carpet will, literally, be rolled out as organizers William H. Sokolic, 61 (four-time unproduced screenwriter, much-published South Jersey journalist), and film producer Brandon E. Brooks, 31, welcome a summer audience of flip-flop-and-Uggs-wearing film connoisseurs to the Downbeach Film Festival in this underserved Jersey Shore movie market.

Jersey filmmaker icon Kevin Smith (Clerks, Chasing Amy) will be on hand to bestow his Jersey-guy blessing on the event (and receive a festival "Lifesaver" award), as will indie filmmaker hero Jim Jarmusch (independent filmmaker icon award) and actor/producer William Forsythe (receiving the character-acting icon award).

The films, including popular indie films Stuck and Phoebe in Wonderland, student films, and the shot-in-Philadelphia Mark Webber-directed and Jarmusch-produced Explicit Ills, will be screened at the Margate Performing Arts Center all weekend. Explicit Ills has been shown only in Austin, Texas, at this year's South by Southwest gathering, so Downbeach will be its East Coast premiere. Gala events will be held at Resorts Atlantic City (home to a now barely used screening room), where Smith and Forsythe will appear on Saturday, and Jarmusch and actor Paul Dano on Sunday. Panels on screenwriting and producing will be held afternoons at the Ventnor Cultural Arts Center. (For a complete schedule, go to www.downbeachfilmfestival.org.)

Brooks said it was not as hard a sell as he thought it might be to lure directors and producers of these independent films from as far away as Hollywood.

Hey, why not? Jersey Shore in August (Downbeach) sounds about like Park City, Utah (Sundance) in January, when you think about it. Uggs get you to the front of the line in both locales.

"It's an area that deserves to have something big every year," Brooks said. "It's such a beautiful area. It's not as difficult to lure Hollywood as you would think. Next year, with more time, there's a lot bigger heights the festival can go."

Let's hope so. Still without an actual movie theater, this old movie mecca - once home to dozens of theaters - seems to have pulled one out of its hat with the inaugural Downbeach Film Festival.

A dozen years ago, there was the short-lived Atlantic City Film Festival, which did a neat trick by showing Louis Malle's Atlantic City in Atlantic City with some of the actual extras from the movie sitting in the audience kibbitzing.

Other than the Imax at the Tropicana, the last surviving movie theater on the island is the Ventnor Twin on Ventnor Avenue, which hasn't shown a movie in years. (Its marquee did figure in the recent overthrow of the Ventnor mayor and commissioners, though, when opponents rented it and put "Enough is enough!" on it. The old girl can still throw her weight around.)

The theater had a few glory years before that, with nice-guy movie-theater-janitor-turned-operator Thomas John Berezowski dishing up mints and coffee with his first-run and classic film operation. Alas, the theater was shut down, the victim of the usual multiplex and economic variables as well as a failed attempt at redevelopment that called for the theater's demolition and cut off any hope of Berezowski's buying the building, as he had hoped, or anyone else for that matter. (Johnny B., are you still out there?)

The theater is still for sale, and the owners of the now-shuttered deco theater, the multiplex-owning Franks, have recently reconsidered their position of not wanting to sell to anyone who would try to show first-run movies (asking price: $1.79 million). Paging Johnny B.!

In any case, this weekend the area is once again awash in movies.

For Sokolic, the festival was one of those ideas that lodged in his head and wouldn't leave. At the very least, he figures it's a good way to gather some people in whose hands he can push one of his unproduced scripts he's still keeping in his drawers.

"I get lots of ideas of different things," said Sokolic, a Ventnor resident and former Inquirer reporter who now writes for the Courier-Post of South Jersey. "Usually they come into my brain and would mill around a little bit and something tells me this isn't going to work, get this out of your mind."

The Downbeach Film Festival idea is one that seems to have legs though, or at least not the usual brakes.

There's a three-day schedule that includes student films from Charter-Tech, the performing arts high school in Somers Point, and Rowan University, plus the opening film on Friday, Jerome Bixby's The Man From Earth, which Sokolic calls "more an intellectual exercise than anything else ... about a resident of a small town who invites his friends over and tells them he was born 10,000 years before, and has lived for 10,000 years." An after-party will follow at Sophia's in Margate.

Sunday will feature a screenwriting panel, plus showings of Public Interest, Benny Bliss and the Disciples of Greatness, and a 4 p.m. showing of Explicit Ills. An awards gala will be held that night at Resorts. Many of the films' directors and actors will be on hand at the screenings, according to organizers.