| Issue #30, October 20, 2006 |
PUTTING TOGETHER THE OTHER FILM FESTIVAL
By Dan Rattiner
Elsewhere in this newspaper, you will read about the big party held on the great lawn of the Southampton College campus last Saturday afternoon to celebrate the birth of a new era there under the flag of SUNY Stony Brook. About a thousand people came. Everyone was welcome. The buildings sparkled, the banners flew, the band played, the speeches were made and a big celebratory cake was cut by the new college administration and local officials.
Two weeks earlier, a smaller ceremony was held at the entrance to the school on the very day that the title transferred from the previous owner of the place, Long Island University in Brooklyn, to the new owners from Stony Brook. And that was a very different thing.
At that earlier ceremony, the old signs reading SOUTHAMPTON COLLEGE OF LIU were taken down and the new STONY BROOK SOUTHAMPTON signs put up. The transfer of ownership had cost $35 million, and that included about a dozen college dormitories and a similar number of classroom buildings, libraries, lecture halls and theatres on a beautiful, rambling 77-acre ocean-view property.
What a difference there was in the state of the campus at these two events. At the first event, it was clear the new owners would have some job to do. There was trash everywhere. LIU had stopped holding classes, except for one or two, two years earlier, and all the buildings were now abandoned, with things that were broken, obsolete or just plain trash now outside all the buildings waiting for the garbage trucks to arrive. The windows were filthy, the paint was peeling, and, according to everybody who was there, everything that was not nailed down had been taken away by the old owners, except what they didn’t want.
The word “ broom clean” was bandied about, referring to the fact that when a property is sold, the old owners are supposed to leave it broom clean for the new to come in. This clearly was not done. It was pretty disgusting.
The President of Stony Brook, Shirley Strum Kenny, had spoken at that earlier ceremony and at the time said it had been their hope to close on the property in time to have a fall semester with the new curriculum this year. But now, due to delays about a lien on a particular building that LIU had not satisfied, that was not going to happen. Obviously, although the sale was done in the spring, so there should have been time to get it done before autumn, it was now beyond the start of the school year. And look at this mess.
I was at this earlier ceremony, on a mission. For several years prior to the shutting of the campus, a small film festival that this newspaper runs had been held every Saturday in the spring and fall for six weeks in the Duke Auditorium in Chancellors Hall. Called THE DAN’S PAPERS THEY MADE THE MOVIES HERE FILM FESTIVAL, it celebrated the heritage of filmmaking on eastern Long Island by presenting, in a theatre setting, one or another of the nearly 100 known films made in this County every Saturday for six weeks.
But a year before the announcement of the closing of the college, I had gotten a call from a dean telling me that the college was no longer going to be hosting our little Film Festival. No reason was given. I thought that maybe it had something to do with what I had written. The festival had actually cost the school nothing. What could it be? (We’d all soon find out.)
So I had to take the festival elsewhere, and in recent years, both in the spring and the fall, it has been at the Ross School in East Hampton.
I found Shirley Strum Kenny at this earlier event where the food and drink were set up under some trees by the new sign. And I told her about it.
“We ought to have it back here,” I said. “The school is coming alive again thanks to what you’ve done. And our next film festival showing begins on November 4, just six weeks from now. It would be another reason to come to the campus. And it’s a set piece. It requires practically no work to set up. We’d just need the Duke Auditorium in Chancellor Hall one Saturday afternoon every week.”
Actually, I thought we might have it in TWO places. At Ross, and at the College. There is no reason why not. These two schools are half an hour apart by car. But I had not yet asked the Ross.
As I spoke to Kenny, construction trucks filled with workmen were already rumbling around on the roads of the campus. There were garbage trucks out. The dirt was flying. The new purchase was just hours old.
Ms. Kenny said she liked this idea very much. And she introduced me to the new interim Dean of the College, Martin Schoomen. He liked the idea too.
“Let’s do it,” he said.
We exchanged phone numbers — his was a cell phone since there were no offices set up yet — and we exchanged emails. We began to talk about whom in the film industry we could get to introduce the films, the first of which would be DEATHTRAP, starring Christopher Reeve and Michael Caine.
After these short ceremonies two weeks ago, at which Ms. Kenny wielded a pink hammer to symbolically raise the first STONY BROOK SOUTHAMPTON sign, I walked around the campus for a while, stopping occasionally to check out the garbage outside the various buildings. It consisted of broken chairs, chalkboards, desks and lamps, filing cabinets and various folders filled with old documents. Outside of Duke Hall, there was a big stack of yellow pages phone directories, still in their plastic straps, unused, from 2004. There was nothing of any use. Just crap.
On page 68 in this paper you are reading, you will see that this autumn’s DAN’S PAPERS THEY MADE THE MOVIE HERE FILM FESTIVAL will be held this year at the Westhampton Beach Performing Arts Center. It may also be at the Ross School. The details of that have not been worked out at press time. But it will not be at the college.
The very next day, I got a call from Dean Schoomen.
“What kind of projection equipment is used for your film series?” he asked. “Was it from a big pod on the ceiling?”
“Honestly, I don’t remember,” I said.
“Well, what we’ve got sticking out of the ceiling are just wires,” he told me. “Maybe there was a pod up there. We don’t know until we find out where the wires go. But for now, I have to tell you that LIU took everything they could. We’ve got theatre seats and we’ve got a screen that comes down from the ceiling because they’re bolted down. But nothing to project anything with. We’d love to do it, but we’ll have to wait until your spring film festival. It’s going to take a little while for us to find out what we need and order it. They left us with no audio visual equipment whatsoever.”
Film Historian Lee Davis will introduce DEATHTRAP in Westhampton Beach at 3 p.m. on Saturday, November 4. The full schedule of films, selected by film festival judge Guy de Fraumeni, can be found on page 68. The Suffolk County Film Commission is one of the new sponsors of the event, the Sydney’s Taylor Made Cuisine in Westhampton Beach. See you there. Or perhaps at Ross, too.
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