After 1,500 hours of work, Myrtle Beach International Film Fest founder ready for ‘paycheck’

As the Myrtle Beach International Film Festival kicks off its 10th season this week, founder and executive director Jerry Dalton finally gets to reap a bit of reward for the nearly 1,500 hours he puts in year-round to host the event.

“It’s a lot of hours,” Dalton said. “What makes me the most happiest is being able to provide someone with something that makes them smile.”

For years, movie lovers, directors, actors and producers have shared a smile or two, laughed and sometimes left scratching their heads after viewing some of the world’s most creative independent films from filmmakers seeking to make a name for themselves.

“The films that we run, and the people who have submitted to us over the years have found out that we are a film festival for people who want to get into the industry,” Dalton said. “We search out people who are making films that entertain people.”

The reactions from the crowds this weekend through April 25 are really the icing on the cake that takes Dalton, along with fellow film affecianado Heather Mays, upwards of 1,500 hours each to review and narrow down.

Dalton and Mays recruit the help of a diverse judging group — from a waitress and construction worker to a lawyer and a person from the film industry — to make sure the films elected have a wide appeal.

“We have people from all walks of life and to me, they’re better judges of film than having a panel where all people work in the film industry because they can critique something that the average person might just love,” Dalton said. “Having that diverse judging panel really helps us a lot in selecting films that most people would like. It kind of also stays away from some of the strange and bizarre.”

Dalton said films come in from May through January for the following year’s April festival and the group who reviews the movies.

“When the films come in, there are some that are so strange or so bizarre or so bad, that one or two judges will see it and they’ll call me or they’ll call other judges and say it is so bad, it’s really not worth spending a lot of time on it,” Dalton said. “Then there are some that are so good, they go into a box or a couple boxes and we know we’re going to have to review these extremely carefully because it’s either going to be in or it’s competing against another film.”

He said about 50 more films should be in the more than 80-film lineup this year because of the quality of the submissions.

“This year is a mixture of shorts and features,” Dalton said. “We got some great documentaries, but we didn’t get the amount of documentaries we usually get.”

A documentary at the front end of the festival on Wednesday is called “Moonshine Heritage,” which takes a look at the heritage of moonshine in rural north Georgia. At a brief 13 minutes, the documentary aims at summing up the lifestyle in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

The films come from across the world — Belgium, Germany and Italy — and some associated with those films will make their way to Carmike Cinemas at Broadway at the Beach just for a chance to see their film on a big screen in America.

“Film is America’s art,” Dalton said. “When you go to Germany, you see these great carvings and you see these castles. You go to Italy or France, you see the paintings. America is film.”

And they’re not coming to just some small film festival. Myrtle Beach International has held its own in previous years, being named “Top 25 Film Festivals To Submit To In The World,” by Movie Maker Magazine, and was recognized as one of the best film festivals in the world by Film International.

Dalton said he aims to keep ticket prices ($50 for all weekend, which includes booze and food or $10 per time block) low so it is an affordable option for local residents to be exposed to independent films.

“The major thing that separates us from these other 24 is their budgets start at about $2 million a year and go up,” Dalton said of the Movie Maker’s top 25 list. “Ours is $10,000 to $12,000 depending on the year, and it may even cost a couple thousand beyond that. When I say we’re working off nothing, we’re really working off nothing.”

By the end of this weekend, Dalton and Mays should be on fumes. They’ll have a two-week break where they do not watch any movies. But then, their quest to use independent films to bring a smile to someone’s face or to get them to think about life in a different way begins for next year.

“The world continues to get more and more confusing and it seems to get more and more darker each year, and to be able to provide some light in side of that and some happiness and some fun time, that provides me with joy,” Dalton said. “That’s my paycheck.”

This story was originally published April 22, 2015 at 7:00 AM with the headline "After 1,500 hours of work, Myrtle Beach International Film Fest founder ready for ‘paycheck’."