a nervous john tranchina before the first screening.

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for the first showing on friday morning at 11:30am, Just Outside the Door screened in a group with 2 other short films, both graduate thesis films from university of southern california students. they were pretty good. unfortunately, it was basically just filmmakers in the audience -- maybe 7 to 10 people. Just Outside the Door seemed to receive a pretty good reaction. one thing that was cool, was that the other filmmakers who were there were quite friendly overall. we became friendly with a number of other filmmakers who we met there, particularly phil seneker, whose short film Rats! we really enjoyed and matt harrington, an actor in Not Not Now, an australian short that spoofs james bond films.

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john tranchina and melany helinski relax in the festival's "hospitality suite."

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we basically spent that entire first day (friday june 18) watching films ... for free!! as filmmakers, we got to attend all festival functions for free. there seemed to be a number of festival glitches, though... first of all, at about 11:30am, when that first screening of Just Outside the Door and the two other films it was grouped with were supposed to start, there was a mixup as to which theater it would be in. finally, they straightened that out, and then when they started the first film of the group, they actually started the wrong film. after about 2 minutes of this other film that should not have been showing, they stopped it and put on the correct film. THEN, with the schedule about 30 minutes delayed, when Just Outside the Door was finally shown, they did not have the sound on for the first 40 seconds or so of the film! that was rather frustrating, all right.

for the rest of the festival, just about all of the screenings ended up considerably behind schedule. even though my film was grouped with 2 others, you would think that all 3 would be linked together, and they'd play back to back. instead they ran the films separately, then paused to take one reel off and put the next film on...

another festival glitch was that the schedule listed the new independent feature film Run Lola Run as playing at 6pm -- at about 6:05pm, a festival worker announced that to a waiting audience of about 30 people that they couldn't find the film's print and that they were looking for it. about 10 minutes later, they came back and said that they never got the print and there would be no screening...

some other notable films we saw that day included the feature Temps, the short partially animated film Plug, and the short film Peep Show.

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- temecula valley int'l film festival page 3 -

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