Finding time for his ‘reel’ job

Alex Coolman

During the time it took Todd Quartararo to grab a quick lunch one day

last week, he got 14 phone calls. Thirteen of them were about the Newport

Beach Film Festival.

Quartararo, the spokesman for the festival, was happy to see so much

interest in the event; the only problem was that he wasn’t getting paid

to return those 13 calls. His “real” job, the one for which he actually

is compensated, is at the advertising and public relations agency of

Quartararo and Associates in Laguna Niguel.

Like all the people who are helping coordinate the festival this year,

Quartararo is donating his time to something he thinks is a good cause.

The entire board of directors -- 11 people -- is unpaid. That means a lot

of the work of putting the event together has been done on weekends, in

the evening, or whenever the volunteers can wrench a minute away from

their day jobs.

“Seven days a week you can drive by the film festival office at midnight

and see the lights on,” Quartararo said. “It’s a challenge.”

But even if this year’s festival has had to be put together in people’s

spare time, the mere fact of its existence is remarkable.

When Jeffrey Conner, the man who ran the event in previous years, filed

for bankruptcy last September, it looked as though Newport Beach’s days

of hosting a film festival might be over.

However, six weeks after that surprising announcement, a new group formed

to take over the reins. Gregg Schwenk, who works for The Geneva Cos. in

Newport Beach, and a handful of people with experience in the business

and creative worlds, declared their intention to keep the festival alive.

Since that time, the board of directors has grown. It now includes people

like Rosalind Williams of the Newport Beach Conference and Visitors

Bureau, Ralph Rodheim of Rodheim Marketing, Nancy Warzer-Brady of UCI’s

Arts and Humanities Department, and Robert Cano, who has handled

programming for film festivals around the world.

In contrast to the old management of the festival, Quartararo said, this

year’s direction involved “a lot of delegating and utilizing all the

resources in the community.

“There are different folks with different specialties,” he said.

In the complicated business of organizing a festival, this kind of

delegation is common.

Len Cripe, managing director of the Savannah Film and Video Festival in

Georgia, said more than 20 people sit on the board that organizes that

weeklong event.

“We task out all the various responsibilities because we understand the

complexities of film festivals,” Cripe said.

Savannah has seven paid staffers working year-round to organize the

festival, and he brings on extra workers as the start date draws near.

Getting some salaried workers to staff the Newport Beach festival will be

a priority in years ahead, Quartararo said.

For now, though, it’s enough of an accomplishment just to have a staff,

volunteer or otherwise, and to be respectable enough that other festivals

are taking notice.

Quartararo said there are even some organizations that are now a little

skittish about sharing film information with the Newport Beach group.

“What a compliment,” he said. “We’re a threat.”