THURSDAY JUNE 1, 2006     THE NEW YORK TIMES
Sundance East? Maybe Not, but You Can Take the Ferry
Jeannine Marotta, the Staten Island Film Festival director, at the St. George Theater, one of six sites that will be screening 113 films. She called the festival "something that the island has needed for a very long time."	by Andy Newman At the dawn of the motion picture era, filmmakers flocked to the wide-open spaces of Staten Island Big-screen cowboys and Indians galloped across Fred Scott's movie ranch in South Beach, which had a frontier main street, a wide selection of stagecoaches and a 56-foot stockade. The island provided a serviceable stand-in for locations as varied as the Sahara desert and a British cricket pitch. Soldiers were shot on the plains of Grasmere. "The Perils of Pauline" and its even more popular sequel "The Exploits of Elaine" were filmed largely on the island. So was the 1906 blockbuster "Life of a Cowboy," by the same director, Edwin S. Porter, who made "The Great Train Robbery." "Staten Island seems to be the producer's paradise for exterior stuff," The Staten Islander newspaper observed in 1916. "Hardly a week passes that we do not see some company round-about." Producers soon found a more permanent paradise west of the Arthur Kill, but they returned again and again — see, among dozens of films, "Splendor in the Grass" (featuring the Travis neighborhood as 1920's Kansas) and "The Godfather" (Emerson Hill as 1940's Long Island).
Even the island's movie theaters played a role in film history. In 1979, the St. George Theater, a baroque riot of a 1920's picture palace that by then had seen much better days, was the setting of a murder scene in the slasher film "He Knows You're Alone." The movie began the careers of its director, a Staten Islander named Armand Mastroianni, and somewhat more famously, an actor named Tom Hanks. Twenty-seven years later, the St. George, two blocks from the ferry terminal, has been restored in acres of red velvet and gold leaf. Mr. Mastroianni has a new movie out. Mr. Hanks has moved on. And Staten Island is making a new bid for cinematic significance: the first Staten Island Film Festival, 113 films from a half-dozen countries screened over four days at six sites including a baseball stadium. The festival opens tonight at the St. George with the East Coast premiere of Mr. Mastroianni's new movie, "The Celestine Prophecy," a film version of the pop-spiritual novel that sold 14 million copies. "How's that for synchronicity?" Mr. Mastroianni asked yesterday. The festival, put on by the island's Economic Development Corporation and corporate sponsors, is intended to counterbalance Staten Island's perceived cultural deficit. "This is our way of saying Staten Island is a city of 450,000 and it deserves these kinds of things," said Vin Lenza, the deputy director of the development corporation. "People need to recognize that Staten Island is a place where things like this can happen." One movie making its New York City premiere at the festival is "Anytown USA," a documentary about a hard-fought mayoral election among three variously disabled candidates in Bogota, N.J.; it has won prizes around the country. Another is "Unicorn Pride," about a town in Texas that claims to have the only high school in the country whose mascot is the unicorn. A complete listing is at www.sifilmfestival.org. The decidedly family-friendly festival steers a broad course around the cutting edge. "There's not an experimental section," Mr. Lenza said. "Nothing that people will be picketing us for." The two main sponsors, KeySpan and the charity arm of Richmond County Savings Bank, were given veto power. "We just wanted to make sure there was not a six-minute documentary detrimental to the natural gas business," said Robert Moore, vice president for marketing at KeySpan. To improve the festival's appeal, the organizers also enlisted ethnic associations and other community groups to pick films that their members wanted to see. Hence such offerings as "Punjabi Love Story," "Re-Imagining Ireland" and "Waiting for Maggio." As the festival field grows more crowded — there are close to 1,600 around the country, according to withoutabox.com, a site for independent filmmakers — it gets harder for a new one to establish itself. But the Staten Island festival's director, Jeannine Marotta, called the festival "something that the island has needed for a very long time." At the festival's closing ceremony, "Verrazano" awards will be handed out. One is the Audience Choice prize — a distant echo, perhaps, of 1917, when patrons at the Palace in Port Richmond voted on which local resident would star in a two-reeler called "A Romance of Staten Island." (The island's early film history is recounted by a local historian, Hugh Powell, in the 2004 proceedings of the Staten Island Institute of Arts and Sciences.) Arthur Siegel, whose documentary about nostalgia and development, "Once Upon a Time in Staten Island," traces 60 years of change on the island, said he could easily picture the island's future as a film capital. "They didn't think of Cannes as a film place until it became one," he said.