Author: bookmarcus

The Rush Line and Murch

During our personal film selecting process, I didn”t know what I”d be doing for Publicity work, and I didn”t know my schedule. Carol, along with Sarah and sometimes Paula and John, went ahead and selected films they wanted to see and bought their tickets. They chose Opening and Closing Nights as well as Fog City Mavericks and the Centerpiece, Delirious, and a few others. (That’s, from left, Sarah, Paula and Carol)

About a week before Opening Night my schedule was solidified. Turns out I will be working the big events: Opening and Closing, Fog City, and the Film Society Awards Night. Otherwise, I”m working Tuesday evenings, Thursday mornings and Saturday evenings. Considering my schedule and the films Carol had chosen, I made my picks. The result; we are ticketed for only one event together, An Evening with Spike Lee. So there you go. Many of the films Carol selected were “at rush” by the time I bought my tickets. Continue reading “SFIFF50 DAY TWO — Friday” →

SFIFF50
An Introduction and Day One.

SFIFF50 Staff

Last July I volunteered to become an intern in the Publicity Department of the San Francisco Film Society (SFFS), knowing that my service would reach fulfillment in the 50th San Francisco International Film Festival (SFIFF50). Having worked the 49th as a Festival Volunteer, I wanted to experience the 50th from the inside.

Starting out, there was Hilary, the Director of Publicity, and me. My main tasks were to research the circulation of those media covering the Festival, paste up press clippings, and post Film Society events at various sites on the Internet. Now, there is a Publicity Coordinator, a staff of three professional publicists, and five other interns, mainly college students or recent graduates in film studies.

Hilary, the boss, is right of me in the photo

Our major activity culminated with a Press Conference on April 3rd, when all of the Festival films were announced to the public. Concurrently, my job of pasting up clippings from the print media and gleaning stories from the internet grew from an inch high pile per month, to an inch pile per week, and now an inch pile per day, with the weekend and days leading to the opening last night, even fatter. Continue reading “My Film Festival” →

The Week of the Vonage
On the day of the deadline to get 3,000 miles from United Airlines for ordering a Vonage phone system, I signed up. We had been looking into such a system for a few months. It’s a broadband-based system that’s considerably cheaper than AT&T, even though we stopped the AT&T long distance feature and all other “extra features” years ago. We used the cell phone for long distance and phone cards to call France. With Vonage, we get caller ID and a bunch of other features including free long distance—even to France!

The orange box arrived on Tuesday. I didn”t open it.

I opened the box on Wednesday and read the instructions, seems simple enough. But I found other stuff to do; I wrote and posted The Best Meatloaf of All Time on eatsforone. Meanwhile, we have no phone. Vonage had notified AT&T that we switched and were keeping our same number, and AT&T turned us off.
Continue reading “Installing Vonage” →