Santa Barbara International Film Festival has hired veteran Benjamin Goedert as its new development director. In his new role, Goedert will be responsible for generating funds to support the fest’s dynamic arts and educational programs through sponsorships, grants and donations. He moved to our tony town 11 years ago to attend City College where he […]

Watching David Crosby: Remember My Name at a SBIFF screening at a sold-out Lobero Theatre back on Super Bowl Sunday last February 3 was a thrilling but almost excruciating experience, made even more so knowing that the aging Santa Barbara-raised rock star was seated just a few rows away, watching himself sing, and squirm, on […]

What could be more fun than spending a Friday evening with your friends watching a free classic film outdoors in a gorgeous garden setting? That’s basically the premise behind UCSB Arts & Lectures and the Santa Barbara County Office of Arts and Culture’s annual summer film series at the Courthouse Sunken Gardens downtown – a […]

Echo In The Canyon, Andrew Slater’s documentary about the 1964-68 era in Laurel Canyon when folk-rock bands formed in the neighborhood that offered both seclusion and proximity to Hollywood studios before giving way to the psychedelic and singer-songwriter movements, may well prove to be the most commercially successful movie to have emerged from this year’s […]

Cinephiles were out in force when mayor Cathy Murillo opened the Barbakow Family Center for Film Studies, just a tiara’s toss from the Arlington Theatre. The 3,600 sq. ft. space, formerly the administrative offices of the Granada Theatre, now relocated to the theatre building a block or two down State Street, consists of seven classrooms, […]

The show business adage is never follow children or a dog. Glenn Close was definitely up staged by a dog at her tribute during the Santa Barbara International Film Festival (SBIFF). I’m sure she didn’t mind since it was her own dog, Pip, who sneaked out of the green room and came prancing out on […]

Babysplitters offers a decidedly fresh take on the age-old struggle of couples coming into agreement about having children. The film, which had its world premiere earlier this month at SBIFF, dives headlong into unforeseen and decidedly risky territory as two couple who are close friends choose to have a single baby and split custody and […]

Making Apes: The Artists Who Changed Film has its world premiere on Friday and Saturday at SBIFF under the Santa Barbara Features sidebar only because its director, William Conlin, lives in town. Also the film’s co-star, co-writer, and co-producer Thomas R. Burman began working on the piece while he was taking Shelly Lowenkopf’s memoir writing […]

Guest Artist is the 10th of 18 plays written by famed actor-author-director Jeff Daniels that he has premiered at his Michigan-based Purple Rose Theatre Company, but only the second to be adapted into a movie. The 2006 work has only been produced a few times elsewhere, but the play still resonates for Daniels, who looked […]

Last weekend, Santa Barbara marked the 50th anniversary of the famous oil spill that befouled local beaches and, through inspiring Earth Day and the creation the EPA, basically birthed the environmental movement. Earlier in the month, Montecito marked the one-year anniversary of the devastating debris flows that killed 23 people and caused millions in damages. […]