An American Express Card billboard stands near the L.A. airport displaying the green card, an Arri film camera and the words "You use it to go to the movies. Heck, why not use it to make one?" From the record number of submissions to the third LAIFF, just under 1,000 this year, people seem to be doing just that.

In 1996, founder/director Robert Faust described some of the festival's problems as "growing pains"--the festival suffered from an overwhelmed small staff coping with over 700 entries. With a larger staff and the experience of the previous two years behind them, the '97 LAIFF reached the next level of problems young, successful film festivals find themselves in--they've now outgrown themselves, as many festival goers remarked as a constructive yet well earned compliment. Faust, along with a team comprised of programmer Thomas Ethan Harris and managing director Linda Rattner Kelly, designed an event that easily juggled the handbook ingredients that make a film festival--the delicate rhythm of balance between good films, "event" films and corporate sponsorship. The one thing they possibly didn't anticipate is the record attendance (some 12,000 people), as ticket and VIP badge holders jostled in line to some of the more heavily buzzed films and events.

The Sundance Channel and Kodak returned as sponsors to this year's event. Additionally, Raleigh Studios and the Directors Guild of America lent their support as a screening of Roberto Benabib's Little City opened the fest at the DGA's headquarter building. The romantic comedy starring Jon Bon Jovi and Annabella Sciorra unspooled as a rough edit, but the festival had been basking in the press garnered after Miramax picked up the unfinished film for a reported $2.8 million.

The body of the festival screenings alternated between Raleigh Studios and Paramount Studios. Particular standouts including Heather Johnston and Gordon Eriksen's Lena's Dreams, Chris Chan Lee's Yellow, and Will Geiger's Ocean Tribute. Geiger had previously optioned his script of Ocean Tribute to an independent company with a deal at Paramount. After the company showed him an "awful" film by the director signed to do the project, Geiger bit his nails for over a year waiting for the option to expire. When it did, he made the film as his directorial debut, returning ironically to the same Paramount screening room several years later at the '97 LAIFF to watch his work.

Kirby Dick's Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Super Masochist accomplished a minor triumph by walking away with the Audience Award for Best Feature. As one of three feature docs, it was the only one not used to frame a particular festival event. For example, Robert Pulcini and Shari Springer Berman's Off the Menu, an entertaining and at times dark document of the last days of the famous Hollywood eatery Chasen's, made for a well sponsored closing night screening and catered party. Additionally, Colors Straight Up, a doc about an inner city performing arts group in L.A., centered the LAIFF Community Spotlight. The only event to distinguish Sick, however, was that it was screening against.

George Hinkenlooper's Dogtown. Although Dogtown's ticket-holder line stretched down the sidewalk, its audience was comprised almost entirely of VIP badge holders anxious to see the film from the director of the original Billy Bob Thornton short, Some People Call it a Slingblade. "I used to get beat up a lot in high school", Hickenlooper said as he addressed the audience. "I guess this is payback". Dogtown was a strange and muddled film about a failed actor returning from L.A. to his small hometown to face the bullies and the lost love of his past.

Various panels included highlights such as "The Next Wave of Digital Filmmaking", "Creating Content for the Internet" and a lively meeting-of-the-minds in "Festivals, Markets, and the Indie Filmmaker", whose panelists included new IFFM director Sharan Sklar, VP of Acquisitions and Production at 20th Century Fox, Bob Aaronson, and Sundance programmer Geoffrey Gilmore who remarked that festivals fall under two categories: "discovery" fests that carefully handpick their titles to satisfy a specific mission or curatorial sensibility, and "launch" festivals, which program a seemingly indiscriminate number of "world premieres". The difference between the two seems to be a matter of quality rather than style--according to Gilmore, not all festivals are "discovery" festivals.

In defending his "discovery" festival status, Faust notes that in the previous two years of the fest a total of ten programmed films were picked up. He gets excited when he reiterates the story of Little City and the potential bidding war that ensued before Miramax came up with the seven figure sum--all for a work-in-progress based on its LAIFF programming. It's apparent that Faust covets the community independent films foster; he is quick to say that the LAIFF, like an indie film, came together not through independence but "interdependence". "Festival making is a collaborative effort", he writes in the program. "We need to work together to keep independent film alive". With that in mind he's also quite aware that an independent film festival based in L.A. must keep a connection to Hollywood now that the line between independent and studio filmmaking is as blurred as ever. It is fitting, therefore, that the closing night film was an homage to the passing of a posh Hollywood restaurant and the golden era it coveted. "Through a wonderful stroke of timing and luck", stated Menu's New York-based indie filmmakers, "we stumbled into the vanishing world of old Hollywood, a world alien to us".

The Cannes Film Festival by Noah Cowan
The Los Angeles Independent Film Festival by Michael Jones
The New York Underground Film Festival by Pamela Grossman
SXSW Film Festival by Holly Willis
San Francisco International Film Festival by Isabel Sadurni
Aspen Shortsfest by Holly Willis
Gen Art Film Festival by Adam Pincus