San Francisco Film Society announces George Lucas to receive first and only Irving "Bud" Levin Award at its 50th Int'l Film Festival
By Susan Gerhard
Inside North Beach’s storied cafe-bar Tosca, the San Francisco Film Society announced yesterday that it will be honoring George Lucas with the Irving “Bud” Levin Award at the 50th San Francisco International Film Festival. Lucas will receive the one-time-only award created by the Festival in the name of its founder, Irving “Bud” Levin, as a tribute to a filmmaker, innovator, and entrepreneur who the SF Film Society believes reflects Levin’s passionate engagement with film and the Bay Area.
The Film Society also underscored its plans to create a year-round presence in the City as it heads toward its 50th edition with new initiatives, including this web magazine, SF360.org, which is co-published by the Film Society and indieWIRE. “It’s a moment of transformation,” SF Film Society Executive Director Graham Leggat told the crowd, which included members of Levin’s family as well as former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown. The former mayor thanked the Film Society and its supporters for the culture they bring to the City, and offered characteristically colorful anecdotes about Bay Area filmmaking from his personal archive.
Irving “Bud” Levin worked in movie theaters run by his family during high school before running the business himself. In 1957, he created the San Francisco International Film Festival to rival festivals then running in Venice, Cannes, and Berlin, and built community support for the project, which eventually received an “A” ranking by the international ruling body of film festivals, according to the SF Film Society.
George Lucas’s roots in the Bay Area go back more than 35 years. He used the American Zoetrope production studio of his friend Francis Ford Coppola to create his first feature, “THX-1138.” His filmmaking — from “American Graffiti” (1973) through the “Stars Wars” films and beyond — has earned him a variety of high-profile awards, including the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. But his contributions to the Bay Area film industry — his Lucasfilm Ltd. Company, Industrial Light & Magic, and Skywalker Sound — may be what makes him particularly suited to receive the first and only Levin award.
George Lucas’s roots in San Francisco go back more than 35 years. (Photo courtesy Lucasfilm Ltd.)
“George Lucas has created and defined so many things about the current cinema scene that were unthinkable before he came along,” Leggat told SF360.org. “He’s moved the goalposts, from the realms of licensing and merchandising, to the way stories are told, to the way films are made, to the way empires are built — whether it be a narrative empire or an industrial empire.”
Leggat emphasized the unique opportunities offered by the 50th anniversary of the festival — the first in the Americas. One of those opportunities is an engagement with the Bay Area’s filmmaking history.
“As George himself pointed out to us, there’s a long lineage of film innovation in the Bay Area,” said Leggat. “The ‘Bronco Billy’ films were made by the Essaney film company in Fremont. [Lucas] traced a line of innovation from the 1910’s silent era through Bud’s innovation to his own. George is one of the latest in this lineage, and there are still other filmmakers coming up who’ll carry the mantle from him.”
The award will be presented to George Lucas at the Film Society’s Awards Night, a benefit for the Film Society Education Program, on Thursday, May 3, 2007, at the Westin St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco. For ticket information (tickets start at $500), contact Jeanne Sweet: (415) 561-5005 or jsweet@sffs.org.
12.06.2006