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EVENT: AUSTIN FILM FESTIVAL
Texas Toast to Scribe Tribe
Screenwriter-centric event grows
city’s rep as key spot for industryites
and cinema buffs By Andrew Barker
DRESSED TO KILL Austin audiences get peeks at award season titles such as Brian Helgeland’s mob yarn “Legend,” with Tom Hardy, right, and Taron Egerton, left.
The cool
kids to me
are the
screenwriters.”
Barbara Morgan
WHEN BARBARA MORGAN launched the Austin Film
Festival & Conference back in 1993, she had an
inkling she’d created a strange beast. After all,
hers was a festival centered entirely around
screenwriting, that pointedly eschewed any
sort of VIP treatment or market elements, taking place in a city
whose film culture was still very much in gestation.
But perhaps she didn’t know how strange. Not only had she
never organized a film festival before, but she’d never even been
to one. “I wasn’t even sure we were going to do a second festival,
to be blunt,” remembers Morgan, now the AFF’s executive director.
But at the behest of early festival supporter and then-Texas
Gov. Ann Richards, Columbia Pictures prexy Barry Josephson
attended that inaugural year, and in the process, helped define
its mission.
“That first year, Barry said, ‘Next time you’re in L.A., come
see me.’ So I did, and when I was walking out of his office, he
asked me, ‘Have you ever been to film festival before?’ I thought
it would be a bad time to lie, so I said, ‘No.’ And he said, ‘Well
don’t go. Because you just did everything you’re not supposed to
do, and you should keep doing that.’ ”
Now in its 22nd year, this year’s AFF certainly has the appearance
of a festival that’s doing what it’s supposed to do. Taking
place Oct. 29 to Nov. 4, the fest will be the first place Texas audi-
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