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July 22, 2005Traverse City Film FestivalVolunteers come from all parts of the stateByRecord-Eagle staff writer TRAVERSE CITY - Carol Danly was supposed to have spent the last weekend in July sailing and cycling around a small East Coast island. Instead, she'll be selling popcorn and escorting filmgoers to their seats as part of the Traverse City Film Festival. "I had a chance to go with my husband to Maine and then it looked like I couldn't go - and I'm not all that sorry because now I'll be in town for the film festival," said Danly, an independent and international film enthusiast who is volunteering for the inaugural event. Danly is one of thousands of people, from sponsors to ticket buyers, who have jumped on the festival bandwagon since the event was announced June 4. They include more than 400 from all over the state who signed up to volunteer on the festival's Web site, said Volunteer Director Heather Shaw. "The response has been overwhelming. My house is just filled with piles of forms," Shaw said. "And they're people who can do everything - Web site designers, graphic artists, lawyers, accountants." Shaw expects to put almost all of them to work one way or another, although the bulk of volunteers will be needed to handle ticketing, ushering and concessions duties during the film events, she said. Some out-of-town residents plan to come just for the weekend and to work a five-hour concessions shift every day of their visit, she added. At the State Theatre, where renovation has been in high gear for several weeks, volunteers are "all over the board," said Lori Hall Steele, a member of the festival organizing committee. "We have teenagers and 70-year-olds. There are a couple of homeless kids working side-by-side with billionaires. We have a guy working on the marquee lightbulbs and he couldn't be farther left; then there's the mason who is total Republican. So it's an incredibly diverse group of people," she said. The festival is bringing together movie buffs, arts organizations, businesses, local government and educational institutions as diverse as Northwestern Michigan College, which is hosting panel discussions, to Interlochen Center for the Arts, which is handling ticketing for the 19,000-seat event from its box office and downtown Traverse City store, Bravo! "When you look at the number of local programs we have, from Pathfinder (School) to the two radio stations to the (Interlochen) Arts Festival, those are all intensely local programs, so we have a great stake in cultural events both artistically and economically," said Paul Heaton, Interlochen's assistant vice president for communications and engagement. "This is another opportunity to showcase the incredible cultural assets of this region and we believe that the strong cultural community benefits all other aspects of the region," he said. The Old Town Playhouse, which ended its regular season in June, rescheduled some of its summer children's theater program events in order to make its 350-seat auditorium available for the festival and is waiving rental fees, said Executive Director George Beeby. The playhouse will host 16 showings of 13 movies, including filmmaker Michael Moore's "surprise screening" at 10 p.m. July 31. "It's a great thing for the community and so we want to support that," Beeby said. "And from our perspective, we want to bring people into our building. We'll have season brochures available so people will be able to see what's coming up at the theater." Beeby said the event could even lead to a new off-season use for the playhouse, which recently experimented with showing films in digital format. "You never know. We've talked about the possibility of doing movies at some point," he said. Community support for the festival has extended to the financial. As of noon on Wednesday, festival organizers had enlisted more than 100 sponsors, from the 10-woman "Wednesday Lunch Bunch," which donated $1,000 for a showing of the documentary "Enron," to the Herrington-Fitch Family Foundation, which shelled out $30,000 as a founding sponsor. "I can't get away from the computer," said Sondra Shaw-Hardy, head of the festival fund-raising committee. "The phone calls are coming in faster than I can return them. The acceptance and enthusiasm and support for this has just been enormous." Danly isn't surprised. A Traverse City film buff who once considered opening a DVD store that would specialize in independent and international award-winning films, she said there is a lot of community support for the kinds of movies Hollywood rarely makes. "I know there's a lot of interest because I got a lot of positive feelers for my business plan," she said. But Hall Steele thinks there is something more at work behind "festival-itis." "I think it feels like an event, it feels like something big happening, and people really want to be a part of it," she said.
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