Look who's grown up

WHEN the Palm Springs International Film Festival began in 1990, filmgoers didn't have to contend with traffic from celebrity entourages, Oscar contenders and global film distributors. They had to watch out for the tumbleweeds.

"In those days, literally, you would see sagebrush rolling down the main drag, and there were no cars for them to interfere with," festival director Darryl Macdonald said. "Roadrunners were regular sightings. I'm talking many times a day, running across any given street in town."

Times have changed.

The 18th annual festival, opening tonight and running through Jan. 15, is a huge, glittering affair. Ticket sales are expected to exceed 120,000, and an awards gala is bringing in Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett among a flurry of other luminaries. The influx of filmgoers will stay in new and renovated hotels, and they'll take in shows at the city's recently expanded convention center, among five other venues -- including the Palm Canyon Theatre, a live theater now equipped to screen films. That brings the number of movie screens to 15 within a 1 1/2 -mile radius. All in all, it's a pretty sweet setup for a festival that started out with three screens 17 years ago.

In those early years, the story was about survival -- not just for the festival but for the city as well.

It had not always been thus. The 1950s and '60s saw Palm Springs' heyday. Swinging with Rat Pack glamour and blooming with hip Midcentury Modern architecture, Palm Springs was a cool desert destination for the Hollywood crowd. But the city suffered a slow fade as the hotspot evolved into a slightly run-down haven for retirees. By the late 1980s, the biggest draw for the tourist town was an annual spring break bacchanal. Even that disappeared when then-Mayor Sonny Bono banned public displays of thongs in 1988. He envisioned something grander, to help the city's image as well as its economy. And that something was a film festival.

Macdonald was director for the first four years, and has been back for the last four. "The reason why Sonny even suggested a film festival for January way back then was that the town used to drop dead as soon as New Year's was over," he recalled. Hotels, restaurants and stores stood empty, awaiting the spring tourist season.

A film festival didn't seem an ideal solution at first. "There were no theaters showing foreign films, or what you'd call art-house films, anywhere in the Coachella Valley," Macdonald noted. But as he and other consultants soon learned, the city did still hold a strong allure -- for people who didn't live in this country.