It’s High, Wide and Handsome

If going to the movies offers any escape from the emotional aftermath of last month’s terrorist attacks, one unusual avenue is the seventh annual Widescreen Film Festival, Thursday through Sunday at Cal State Long Beach’s Carpenter Performing Arts Center.

Musicals have been known to lift a spirit or two, and they dominate this year’s lineup, with new prints of “Funny Girl” (Thursday), “How to Marry a Millionaire” (Friday), “Grease” (Saturday, with sing-along lyrics) and Otto Preminger’s rarely seen “Carmen Jones” (Sunday). Throw in “American Graffiti” (Friday) and you’ve got a landmark early ‘60s rock ‘n’ roll soundtrack.

The rest of the schedule includes Saturday night screenings of “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” “Poltergeist” and “Roxanne” as well as Sunday screenings of “Lawrence of Arabia” (shown at the first Widescreen festival and its most-requested encore) and, returning by popular demand, “The Adventures of Robin Hood.”

The Errol Flynn Technicolor swashbuckler from 1938 is part of a program titled “What if it had been shot wide?” exploring how earlier epics might have employed the wide screen canvas.

“Funny Girl” (1968), starring Barbra Streisand in her Oscar-winning role as stage comedienne Fanny Brice, is eagerly anticipated, because it’s screening in its original road-show format in a new Technicolor dye-transfer print that enhances color saturation.

The reds in the dining room seduction sequence, for example, really stand out, as do most of the colorful production numbers. On a subtler note, the romantic interlude on a pier at sunset with co-star Omar Sharif is quite striking.

“We’ve been after ‘Funny Girl’ for the longest time,” festival founder and artistic director Gary Prebula said. “A lot of kids haven’t seen it, and it has a wonderful historic cachet that appeals to all ages. I remember how beautiful the ‘Don’t Rain on My Parade!’ scene at New York Harbor was when I first saw the film: the water, the sky, the Statue of Liberty. I can’t wait to see it again, especially now.”

Sony Pictures has done considerable restoration work (supervised by Grover Crisp, Sony’s vice president for asset management and film restoration), not only repairing damage to the original negative but also tweaking and reincorporating the original six-track stereo masters. The “People” sequence and a vigorous argument between the two lovers are two segments that have been replaced. This year finds Prebula in a more reflective mood about the movies and the nature of the festival. “American Graffiti” (1973), for example, holds a special interest because it made him want to write movies.

“I saw it for the first time when I was at USC, and sound designer Walter Murch was my teaching assistant,” he said. “Everyone was dancing in the aisles and it was my first taste of new Hollywood, with [producer] Francis Ford Coppola sitting two seats away from me and [writer-director] George Lucas sitting in the back.”

“Roxanne” (1987), Steve Martin’s charming romantic comedy about small-town firefighters that turns “Cyrano de Bergerac” on its nose, offers some unexpected emotional resonance in light of recent events. For Prebula, “It’s the first film that I actually worked on that has made it into the festival,” he says. “I was audio-visual director at Columbia working on electronic press kits, and it’s going to feel weird watching it again.”

In its seventh year, the festival is at a crossroads, Prebula said. On what does it concentrate next? How can it improve? How can it become more relevant and profitable?

“They say that after seven years you renew the cells in your body, and this is a great time to do this,” Prebula said. “One way of renewing the festival is with new programs like the one we’re inaugurating this year with ‘Robin Hood,’ which was the brainchild of Dick May [vice president of preservation at Warner Bros.].

“Another is to expand our reach, which we hope to do in 2003 with a joint festival across Los Angeles honoring the 50th anniversary of CinemaScope [which 20th Century Fox introduced with ‘The Robe’]. Historian and festival committee member Rick Mitchell is trying to organize this. This would certainly make us more vital and hopefully get the studios to strike new prints of their films. We’ve got a running start this year with ‘How to Marry a Millionaire’ and ‘Carmen Jones.”’

Prebula also suggested the possibility of introducing as early as next year “a competitive festival for long-form and short-form films. We could honor cinematography and production design and editing and overall merit, perhaps starting with short films before moving on to features. The idea would be to use the festival as a forum to really promote the wide-screen format.”

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The Widescreen Film Festival will be held at the Carpenter Performing Arts Center at Cal State Long Beach, 6200 Atherton St. For ticket information, call the Arts Ticket Office at (562) 985-7000.