The 14th Beaufort International Film Festival Heats Up February
By Mark Shaffer, Editor At Large
Much has changed since we first started covering the Beaufort International Film Festival back in 2009. The Marvel Cinematic Universe (the MCU) had just laid the foundation for the next decade’s campaign of worldwide cinematic domination with Iron Man, starring Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark. James Cameron’s Avatar was about to shatter box office records on its way to becoming the top grossing film of all time with box office numbers so huge they were thought to be untouchable. Heath Ledger posthumously becomes the first actor to win an Oscar for the role of a comic book villain as Joker in The Dark Knight. And Ridley Scott’s acid rain-soaked dystopian world of Blade Runnerstill lurked somewhere in the future.
Wherein the Author Gets a Window Into the Movie Business. Literally.
By Mark Shaffer, Editor at Large
This is it. I finally made it into the movie business. It’s almost like I imagined it would be as a kid. I’m dressed to kill in a white dinner jacket and black bowtie, hair combed back like a mid 20th century matinee idol, cigarette in my right hand (unlit), my left hand caresses a tumbler of bourbon. I am positioned – no, posed – at a café table shrouded in linen and littered with vintage World War II identification papers in both French and German. At my back is an old fashioned upright piano. All of this and me are on display in the massive center window of Beaufort’s NeverMore Books. And if you haven’t figured it out, I am a very poor stand-in for Humphrey Bogart’s iconic Rick Blaine character in Casablanca, the cynical, world-weary American ex-pat owner of Rick’s Café American and some of the best lines ever uttered on film.
On November 9thsomething will happen in Beaufort that hasn’t happened in 20 years. When Director VW Scheich calls, “Action!” it will mark the first time a feature film has rolled in Beaufort since William Freidkin shot the mega-budget war drama Rules of Engagement here in 1999.