Filmmaker Loren Mendell really appreciates the Fifth Annual Pacific Palisades Film Festival, which begins tonight at Pierson Playhouse. ‘Living in Los Angeles, it’s always nice to have a hometown crowd for a documentary,’ says the Santa Monica-based filmmaker, whose ‘Adjust Your Color: The Truth of Petey Greene,’ will close out the three-day event on Saturday at 8 p.m. Mendell, whose 2005 short, ‘Our Time Is Up,’ received an Academy Award nomination, has fond memories of when he showed ‘Bad Boys of Summer’ at last year’s Festival. ‘The crowd was really receptive,’ he says. ‘It was really a good experience. It felt like a small-town festival as opposed to a huge corporate festival.’ Kicking off the Festival will be ‘Fields of Fuel,’ a documentary exploring America’s addiction to oil and its consequences, that drew attention at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. Directed by another PPFF alumnus, Josh Tickell (‘Veggie Van Voyage’), ‘Fields’ will screen at 7 p.m. tonight. If the subject of Mendell’s profile, Ralph ‘Petey’ Greene, rings a bell, that’s because Don Cheadle portrayed the controversial African-American radio talk show host”who overcame drug addiction and an armed robbery prison sentence, to become one of Washington, D.C.’s most revered broadcasting personalities”in Kasi Lemmons’ recent feature ‘Talk to Me.’ Pelagius Films wanted Mendell’s film to coat-tail ‘Talk to Me”s July 2007 theatrical release. Then ‘Adjust’ was set to be a bonus film for the ‘Talk’ DVD. ‘My goal was to always have it be a stand-alone,’ Mendell says. ‘Adjust’ became its own project when the producers found 30 hours of television footage of Greene that had been assumed destroyed. Once the pressure was off on piggybacking ‘Talk”s release, ‘we made it pretty quickly,’ Mendell says. ‘We started production in June and it took about six months. ‘Petey was such a dynamic personality. There’s no one in the media like him right now. If you were a fake or a phony, he exposed it on the show.’ It didn’t take much arm-twisting to bring the biopic’s star aboard as narrator. ‘Don loves Petey,’ says Mendell of Cheadle, a Palisades resident. ‘He does a fantastic job.’ After playing Slamdance in January, ‘Adjust’ will make its West Coast premiere at the PPFF. ‘The producers are still talking to distributors,’ Mendell says. ‘We don’t have a deal in place yet.’ Translation: the PPFF is your only chance to see ‘Adjust’ in the near future. Mendell, producer Bob DeMars, and executive producers Joe Fries and Joey Rappa will answer questions following tonight’s screening. Tickets (454-1970) are $15 tonight; Friday and Saturday $10. For the Film Festival schedule, visit www.FriendsOfFilm.com. Actors Seymour Cassel (‘The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou’) and Robert Guillaume (‘Benson’) will receive the Festival’s Lifetime Achievement Awards at a private ceremony on March 6.
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