Keeping it short, but sweet

Alex Coolman

Riding the elevator up to the 16th floor of the Newport Beach Marriott,

Scott Forrest looked as if he had a case of altitude sickness.

“I’ve got a throat thing going on right now,” croaked Forrest, director

of the short films program for the Newport Beach Film Festival. “It’s

been nonstop ‘on’ all week.”

But if Forrest allowed himself a moment of frailty on the ride up to the

hotel’s restaurant, it wasn’t much more than a moment. And when he sat

down to talk about his favorite subject -- short films -- the

baseball-capped Forrest suddenly blossomed into his standard mode of

conversation: total exuberance.

“If we’re going to be an important festival, we’ve got to peel away that

‘Orange Curtain,’ ” Forrest declared. “We’ve got to squeeze that juice

out and suck it down.”

This year’s festival has had an unusually large and rich program of

shorts -- more than 140 films from around the world, ranging from

provocative documentaries to Academy Award-winning comedies. It has

incorporated material from several other programs of shorts, including

the “Hollywood Shorts” festival and “Dances With Films.”

The size and diversity of the program is due in large part to the energy

of Forrest, said Gregg Schwenk, director of the Newport Beach festival.

“Scott is an awesome addition to the festival staff and to the board,”

Schwenk said. “He is someone who infuses whatever he does with enthusiasm

and expertise.”

Forrest, moviegoers may recall, was the man who defied the somewhat

underpowered sound system at the Big Edwards theater on the opening night

of the festival. In the middle of speeches that were only marginally

audible, he was the one who could be distinctly heard belting out the

proclamation “Shorts rule!”

And even sitting at a table in a deserted hotel restaurant, Forrest

operates at high volume, radiating film fervor like a loudspeaker.

The short film, he maintains, is an art form that is breaking down the

Hollywood system and opening doors for creative spirits to focus on the

subjects they find compelling.

“Why can’t we expose you?” he asks. “Why aren’t you interesting? Why not?

Why does it always have to be what Ford [Motors] deems interesting?”

The answer, for a long time anyway, has been that Ford, and other

corporate donors, have had the resources to make films, while artists who

want to produce documentaries about hemp or cartoons about evil spiders

have not.

But the low cost of making short films and the proliferating

opportunities for distributing shorts on the Internet -- on Web sites

like o7 ifilm.comf7 , o7 pop.comf7 and Forrest’s own site, o7

smashcuts.comf7 -- are changing that, he said.

“This is a gold rush right now,” he said. “The people who are digging for

gold are the filmmakers.”

FYI

Today’s screening of the previously sold-out “Long Night’s Journey into

Day,” which includes a segment about Newport Beach’s Amy Biehl, will now

be shown on two screens at the Edward Island 7 Cinemas.