Story Frame 55 – The Asheville Film Festival & Dating A Guy Named Bogdanovich

I admit there were times I took the whole film-themed-direction-to-my-life thing too far, sometimes with less than positive results. One such instance was my short-lived infatuation with a guy named Jack Bogdanovich, whom I dated briefly during my first months in Asheville.

Jack was a guitar playing, master craftsman luthier with a kind of rugged Mick Jagger-esque look at the time that I found appealing. I’ve always been drawn to men who work with their hands and don’t wear suits: designers, artisans, musicians, and writers.

Not only did Jack craft beautiful guitars – which sold for thousands of dollars and were beloved by musicians – he also played the guitar himself, segueing effortlessly from Bach to the Rolling Stones.

Be still my heart….

Like my sister (and Robert Redford, Rob Zombie and Martin Landau), Jack was a graduate of Pratt Institute. His strong New York accent often made me laugh, and as a Northerner myself, I found it comforting in the sea of Southern accents now surrounding me.

If I’m being embarrassingly honest, though – in addition to the music, it was his last name I found appealing. Even though he was not related to actor and filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich, I daydreamed about how cool it would be, working as I was in my wee little corner of the film biz, to have the name Kristin Bogdanovich. Not that I wanted to actually marry him – I didn’t. I just liked his name.

It was hardly a match made in heaven. A close friend of mine at the time, having listened to my tales about him over several wine-laced, long distance phone calls, told me quite accurately that I was in love with his story – not him. I realized she was right.

It wasn’t the first time I’d done that. I’m very susceptible to a good story and Jack had a great one. I wrote a feature article about him titled Jumpin’ Jack Flash in a nod to the Rolling Stones. I’d pitched it to Rolling Stone Magazine and a number of other guitar and music publications but had no luck getting it picked up.

Eventually, I decided enough was enough in terms of dating. Working in the garden one fall afternoon, I was pondering how best to end the relationship when the phone rang. It was Jack, calling to tell me things were over between us. After the call ended, unsure what to do with myself, I kept weeding.

Moments later, the phone rang again. This time it was Steve. Wanting to be near Zoë and Leif, he’d also moved to North Carolina and had settled in a little cabin in the nearby town of Black Mountain, less than twenty minutes away.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, hearing a few tears in my voice.

“Jack just broke up with me!” I told him.

He laughed.

“So why are you sad?” he asked. “Didn’t you tell me you were going to break up with him?”

“Yes,” I wailed into the phone. “But he beat me to it!”

A few days later, Steve called again.

“I have an idea,” he said. “I know you’re shy about going out to meet people on your own. Since we’re both single, why don’t we go out and do things together – not on a date – but just so you’re not alone?”

Oddly, this made a kind of weird sense to me.

“The Asheville Film Festival is coming up,” he said. “Want to go together?”

I love film festivals and there was nothing more I wanted to do than to check out Asheville’s very own, now in its third year. Normally I would have gone with Zoë, but she was now a freshman film studies major at the University of North Carolina and 500 miles away on the coastal side of the state.

I said yes to Steve’s offer.

North Carolina had become a mecca for film production. Parts of The Last of the Mohicans (1992), The Fugitive (1993), My Fellow Americans (1996), and Patch Adams (1998) had been shot here.

Leni Sitnick, Asheville’s first female mayor, decided to use the film industry to enhance the region’s draw. What was needed, she decided, was something to help bring various industry components together and celebrate their accomplishments. She sent Asheville’s Parks & Recreation director, Melissa Porter, to the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah for inspiration.

“I went out there and absolutely fell in love with the town and the look of it and what they were bringing to Utah, and the thought process behind it,” Porter told the Mountain XPress. “This so could be Asheville, I thought. I could just feel that energy that we could do something really great.”

She came back to Asheville and created a festival advisory board that included John Cram and Neal Reed of Asheville’s Fine Arts Theater and local film critic, Ken Hanke among others. And voilá, the Asheville Film Festival had come into being, just two years before I arrived in town. Actress Andie MacDowell, who lived in Asheville at the time, helped get the word out.

Asheville was quickly building a reputation for being cool. In addition to film, the music scene was also blooming. Rolling Stone Magazine soon picked The Orange Peel, just down the street from the Fine Arts Theater, as one of America’s top five rock clubs. New breweries, restaurants and art studios cropped up, seemingly overnight.

Because of its location, the Asheville Film Festival immediately attracted the attention of major filmmakers. Director Ron Howard attended the previous year. Ken Russell, the daring and flamboyant British visionary director of scores of films including Altered States, Women in Love and Tommy, was featured the year Steve and I went.

We ended up sitting just behind Russell and his wife, Lisi, at the Fine Arts Theater for the festival’s opening night screening of Tommy – the ‘satirical surrealist operetta fantasy film’ based on The Who’s rock opera album about a deaf, dumb, and blind pinball wizard. Ken Hanke, Asheville’s film critic, resplendent in a maroon shirt, brown velvet sports jacket and luminescent pink tie, sat with them.

With his florid complexion, white eyebrows and white hair, legendary Ken Russell was by then 78 years old and larger than life, quite literally. I was thrilled to be seated behind him where, like a curious bird on his shoulder, I could watch him watching his own film.

Afterwards, Steve and I went to the opening night party at the Diana Wortham Theater. Jack was there but I did my best to ignore him.

What I couldn’t ignore, however, was the bombshell redhead who’d stopped midway down the atrium stairs and stood staring at my ex-husband. That was the night Steve met Nan, who would become his partner for the next two decades – and this while he was ‘helping’ me try to start dating again.

So much for that idea.

Kristin Fellows is a published writer, world traveler, and a well-seasoned documentary film consultant. When not writing, Kristin can often be found listening to someone’s story or behind the lens of one of her cameras.

More about Kristin @ kristinfellowswriter.com