The San Luis Obispo International Film Festival took a heavy hit the last two years, forcing the festival to go virtual. This year, it returns with live screenings and events through Sunday, May 1—and most of the films will also be available virtually on May 1.
But festival organizers are hoping that this year the public is ready to venture back into theaters and fully engage.
“Ticket sales are picking up and things are going well,” SLOIFF Executive Director Skye McLennon noted. “I think there’s a little hesitancy to come back out, but at the same time, people are really excited to come out and do things, so that’s been really positive.”
The always popular Surf Nite happens on Thursday, April 28, at the Sunset Drive-In in SLO, with a concert by the Boomer Surf Band before a screening of The Yin and Yang of Gerry Lopez, a new film about the Pipeline legend by award-winning documentary filmmaker Stacy Peralta.
On Friday, April 29, is the second-ever Music Video Showcase. There were a bunch of great videos last year, and this year promises to be even better.
The Awards Night Gala is in the Fremont on Saturday, April 30, emceed by Turner Classic Movie channel host Ben Mankiewicz. On May 1, closing day, there’s a panel called Adapting Your Script from Short to Feature, where screenwriter Meg LeFauve (Inside Out, Captain Marvel) and filmmaker Jeff Graham will workshop attendees’ ideas. That evening, the festival concludes with a screening of the stand-out documentary Mija at the Fremont Theater.
In between these big events, dozens of films will be shown: shorts and features, documentaries and narrative films.
This year’s King Vidor Award winner is one of the most recognizable female character actors working today. She’s had small but pivotal roles in films such as The Pledge with Jack Nicholson, Domino with Keira Knightly, Changeling with Angelina Jolie, Winter’s Bone with Jennifer Lawrence, Super 8 with Elle Fanning, and Being Flynn with Robert De Niro.
This year Dickey has the lead role in A Love Song, which is screening as part of the film festival.
“It’s so nice to see her because she’s always been kind of a supporting role, so to see her as the star—it’s so well-deserved,” McLennon said. “She’s one of those people that, maybe they don’t know her name, but when they see her, they’re like, ‘Oh, I know her.’”
You certainly will. She’s got an amazingly recognizable and expressive face, and she has a knack for bringing just the right tone to her roles. She started theater acting as a child with the Clarence Brown Theatre at the University of Tennessee.
“Once I did that I didn’t want to stop ever,” Dickey said via phone. “I was 9, and I did three plays a year at the university growing up. I just loved it.”
After high school, she attended the university as a student from 1980 to ’84 before moving to New York, where she admitted she struggled to get work and secure an agent.
“But I loved it,” she said. “I pounded the pavement, I worked with casting directors, I started doing regional theater, and I did one Broadway show, and then I started to do some film and television.”
She got her first film role in 1995 in The Incredible True Adventure of Two Girls in Love, did a TV series in New York with Tyne Daly called Christy, and finally decided to relocate “to La-La Land, where I’ve been ever since,” she explained.
She goes back to the University of Tennessee, which awarded her an honorary MFA, every five years or so and does a play with their MFA students.
Winter’s Bone in 2010 was definitely a breakout role for Dickey, earning her a Film Independent Spirit Award for Best Supporting Actress. She played Merab, a tough but practical country woman trying to protect the “old ways.”
“Winter’s Bone was such a unique film, and so well embraced by so many people,” she noted. “The weirdest thing about going through that awards ceremony was, I look very different if I’m in a dress with makeup and my hair done, and a lot of people—I think because the movie did such a great job blending unknowns and known character actors with real local people—people didn’t recognize me. I’d be introduced, ‘This is Dale,’ and they sort of look, and they do a double take.”
Dickey’s face is one for the ages. She describes it as “hard edged,” and she drew on her experience growing up near the Smoky Mountains, “populated by people who sometimes frightened me,” to play Merab and make her violence understandable.
“I’ve worked really hard and I still love what I do. I’ve been really blessed to work as much as I have,” Dickey said.
She explained that making A Love Song was particularly scary because she was “carrying a film, and I’ve never done that—not a lead in a film—I’ve done them on stage,” but she was incredible in the film, communicating volumes without dialogue, simply by letting emotions wash over her face.
When she told Tyne Daly she was going to Hollywood, Daly told her she wasn’t what Hollywood was looking for physically, but to be happy that she was a character actress because she was going to work more when she got older.
Dickey was also told by a New York casting agent to be happy to be typecast because “‘that means they see something in you that they don’t see in anyone else. Even though you don’t have a Southern accent, you reek Southern.’
“I’ve embraced being typecast as sort of Southern white trash, and I started getting work,” Dickey said. “If I’m going to be typecast, it’s been a dang fun journey. I’ve had a lot of gritty, crusty, unsavory roles, but they’re meaty and I love digging deep and trying to find the humanity in all of them.”
Contact New Times Senior Staff Writer Glen Starkey at gstarkey@newtimesslo.com.
This article appears in Apr 28 – May 5, 2022.