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Profile: Barbara Morgan, Austin Film Festival’s leading lady
Take Barbara Morgan, executive director of the Austin Film Festival & Conference. All these cool people come to town for panels and screening and schmoozing and getting their picture made with Leslie, and she’s sweating the details. That’s what she’ll be doing Thursday through Oct. 28.
“I have this dream that one day, before I’m too old, I can go and not say, ‘That table is out of place,’” she says. “Sometimes I wonder what it’s like outside the registration room.”
Well, if it weren’t for her and co-founder Marsha Milam, who established AFF to showcase screenwriters in 1994, there wouldn’t even be a festival for her to not have quite as much fun as everyone else.
It started as a simple idea: “‘Hey, let’s start a film festival!’ It was just like that,” she recalls. “Neither Marsha nor I had been to a film festival when we started it.”
And just a couple of years before, she’d put together a tour of Austin singer-songwriters and she figured a festival couldn’t be as complicated as that. So they started booking speakers and screenings because nobody said they couldn’t. The first year, the fest was held at Willie Nelson’s old Austin Opera House off South Congress Avenue. Morgan remembers it rained all weekend, the roof leaked, there were buckets everywhere and the pay phone — this being a time when cell phones weren’t universally brandished — was in the john.
Austin writer Bill Wittliff (“Lonesome Dove”) doesn’t remember it as a particularly miserable affair. Quite the opposite.
“I thought it was wonderful, largely because it centered on writing,” Wittliff says. “That’s Barbara’s genius. She was the first one, to my knowledge, who created a festival that centered on screenwriting. I don’t think anybody was affected by the rain. It was a dandy deal.”
She was sure nobody would come for a sophomore effort, but the next year they moved to the Driskill Hotel, which had a less problematic roof. Things have been better ever since. The conference now runs four days, the film program eight. The screenplay competition — regarded as one of the most prestigious in the world — got almost 5,000 submissions this year.
Along the way, the festival has maintained its laid-back vibe and proved that there’s room in this town for more than one film festival.
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