THURSDAY

The huge, crazy, interactive Last Notes section of Mud Puddle Filmsstill isn't quite finished, but I couldn't invest time and money in another festival without handing out my publicity chotzkes: blue buttons that say "IChooseBlue.org," red armbands that say "IChooseRed.org," green stickers that -- well, you get the idea, and black yoyos. My great friend Daniel, a fellow Dominican friar and priest, is with me. He's a magician, so we thought we'd get people's attention with his illusions, then hand out my stuff.

At $125 per, Daniel and I couldn't afford the opening night movie and gala, so we just worked the line. They made those poor wealthy people wait outside for over an hour, so we had a chance to meet some great people, including local film composer Rick Sherman and a fun group of students from the local community college, which has its own section of shorts playing at the festival. Then we went to the only non-festival movie that hadn't started yet, a flimsy but fun teen take on "As You Like It," whose name I'm too embarrassed to mention.

FRIDAY

Today, we started at the old-time, art deco Lido Theater. No lines to work -- I guess a weekday at the Newport Beach festival, unlike at Sundance, is really a weekday -- but we chatted up the volunteers (and armed them with my "IChoose" paraphernalia). The theater manager wouldn't allow the enthusiastic popcorn young popcorn vendor to wear my flair, though.

Strike Up the Tent is a nicely-done, moving film based on writer/star Julian Adams' great great grandfather's affair with a Yankee during the Civil War. The battle scenes were quite painful. Is it sacrilegious to question whether the Civil War could have been avoided? I asked Julian what his family thinks about the war, and he said it was fought, at least initially, for the same reasons the American Revolution was fought, unfair taxation. Sounds like I'm going to have to do some studying. I'm already reading a book called Team of Rivals, about how Lincoln put together a cabinet made up of his enemies -- research for my new script about three presidential candidates trapped together.

For our next two films, we left the classic, single-screen Lido for the multiplex. Art and Life is an awesomely inspiring look into the life and projects of Peter Sellars (not Sellers), the world-renowned theater director and activist. He teaches a class at UCLA called "Art is Moral Action," where he encourages his students to maintain fidelity to their artistic vision and trust that in a couple hundred years people will get it. Film director Marina Goldovskaya is a fascinating artist herself, a Russian documentarian who also teaches at UCLA.

I told the film's producer George Herzfeld that Daniel and I are both artists who are now inspired to do a little research so that we can verbalize to our very verbal and sometimes skeptical Dominican brothers just why we're artists. Meanwhile, we continued our chotzke shtick. Still no crowds, but we continued to chat up volunteers when no one else was available. Three young T-shirt sellers had a chance to be amazed at Daniel's slight-of-hand. We met a couple young filmmakers from Awkward Pictures. They gave us business cards with awkward pictures of themselves. Two of their one-minute films are at the festival. I checked them out online and really like them -- very clever -- but some of their other films on the site may not be appropriate for all ages and sensibilities. And met another composer, Kevin Dippold.

Tim Boughn's script for Neo Ned won Slamdance's screenwriting award, and after several years looking for production money, Van Fischer has directed an enchanting -- yes, enchanting -- film about a Neo-Nazi's romance at a mental hospital with a black woman who thinks she's Hitler. Jeremy Renner and Gabrielle Union give terrific performances. Renner took a goofy, naive, offbeat approach to this violent character, and Union underplayed to great affect. The movie has attracted distributors who are squeamish about finding an audience. The filmmakers are building their case, though, by winning audience awards left and right. Interestingly, they've also realized they need to give a better, truer feel for their film in festival programs, which have been frightening people off with the Neo-Nazi photo and language. Go to the film's message board at www.neoned.com to let distributors know of your interest.

SATURDAY

Today was all day back at the Lido, where the crowds were still disappointingly thin. Wah-Wah is a somewhat touching story of a white British boy in colonial Swaziland who fights to keep his family together. The political backdrop is mostly wasted, but the performances by Gabriel Byrne, Emily Watson, Miranda Richardson, and young Nicholas Hoult are extremely convincing.

Sweetland is a simple and quite involving story about a slowly evolving American love between a Norwegian immigrant farmer and his German mail order bride, who is quite suspect to the small, insular community because the first war with Germany has just ended. Elizabeth Reaser gives a very committed performance, which includes lots of competent-sounding, un-translated German.

We saw famous documentarian Haskell Wexler on our way out of the theater. His new film, Who Needs Sleep? is an expose on the dangerously long hours worked on film sets and was prompted by a recent death. I don't know of any deaths from watching too many films at festivals, but we needed afternoon sleep or a walk, and some food besides string cheese and nuts, so we walked down to the pier instead of staying for the film.

We returned for one last movie called One Last Thing..., about a teenaged boy whose dying wish is to spend time with his favorite super model. The only reason we went to this film is so we could work the crowd at the after-party. But, as with Neo Ned, the brief synopsis was misleading. The film is surprisingly deep and touching. Cynthia Nixon does really well outside of that little TV show of hers. We talked with writer Barry Stringfellow and director Alex Steyermark after the screening. Barry did a magical job of translating feelings and insights from the loss of his own father. The film is one of theater owner Mark Cuban's HDNet projects, assured of distribution, this one in just a couple weeks.

We concluded our festival experience with the evening's after-party, which hosted hundreds of filmmakers (and film lovers) of all ages, including the makers of Edward Furlong's comeback film Jimmy and Judy, Jason Ritter's short Placebo, An American Vampire in America, and What Are You Anyways?, an animated, autobiographical short about growing up mixed Japanese and Caucasian in a small Canadian city.

Our goal was to get the whole party buzzing about my film and our chotzkes, and I think we came close to our goal. The party confirmed our feeling that the festival has a super-abundance of kind people. Besides, Daniel says he loves to do magic for people under the influence. To find out about how to see Daniel's magic in more sober settings, check out his website. And don't forget to take a brief tour of my cycle of films Last Notes at www.mudpuddlefilms.com and vote for it to come to a theater near you.