Written by Marli Guzzetta

From Sundance to Saratoga Springs, everyone has a film festival. Personal assistants, junior producers and B-list actors scurry through the big ones in hopes of building their professional legacies and accumulating as much swag as their rolling suitcases can carry. Meanwhile, in the smallest of small town festivals, college kids in faded T-shirts queue up outside their local theatres while texting and nursing Starbucks coffee.

The Nantucket Film Festival is neither of these things. Like most anything else on Nantucket, the festival’s culture is preoccupied with authenticity, yet it stays relaxed and keeps a low profile. This allows moviemakers to drop their guards long enough to make real friendships that often become working relationships. Although filmmakers might sell their movies at Berlin by way of Sundance, they can begin brainstorming about their next projects here while sitting next to one another over breakfast, for example.

That’s what happened in the case of actor Ross Partridge and brothers Mark and Jay Duplass. They bring their film “Baghead” to the festival this year after meeting over breakfast at Black-Eyed Susan’s in 2005, whenMark Duplass andwife Katie brought their film“The Puffy Chair” to the festival. “We hit it off immediately,” remembered Mark Duplass. “We only spent a few days together, but kept in touch and, within a few months, Ross quickly became one of our closest friends.”

The Duplasses were living in Los Angeles at the time, but Patridge was in New York City, where Mark Duplass’ brother Jay resided.

“So, I set Ross up with my brother Jay and they started becoming close friends,” Mark Duplass said. “It was like a tug of war over Ross. Needless to say, ‘Baghead’ would not be what ‘Baghead’ is without the Nantucket Film Festival.”
“Baghead” is the comedic horror story of four struggling actors who go off into the woods to brainstorm film ideas that materialize into odd and menacing realities. Sony Pictures Classics bought the film at Sundance and is planning a July release, according to Mark Duplass.

“I’ve been to so many festivals, and Nantucket is a screenwriters’ festival. It’s geared toward a different caliber of talent,” said Partridge.

Conroy connects

Will Conroy, who co-authored opening night film “Transsiberian,” called the festival’s focus on writing “unique and special.” “Transsiberian” sold at the Berlin Film Festival and is scheduled for a limited platform release in early August. The Nantucket Film Festival played “a definitive role” in getting the film made, said Conroy, who had his first short film screened on Nantucket several years ago.

“Almost every single iron I had in the fire had a Nantucket connection,” remembered Conroy of his early filmmaking career. “And all of those connections would coalesce at the Nantucket festival every year.” It was because of the festival that Conroy met “Transsiberian” director and co-author Brad Anderson several years ago. The two went on to complete a few small projects together before heading into “Transsiberian,” which Anderson summarized as “a Hitchcockian suspense thriller on a train trip across Russia.” The film stars Woody Harrelson, Emily Mortimer and Ben Kingsley and was shot on 40 kilometers of railroad track in Lithuania.

“It’s a throwback to those train thrillers from the thirties and forties, like ‘Strangers on a Train,’ ‘Murder on the Orient Express’ and ‘North by Northwest,’ films that featured big, interesting, suspenseful scenes on trains,” said Anderson.

After a trip on the Transsiberian in college, Anderson said plans of telling a story on the train had been “percolating in his brain.”An admirer of Conroy’s father—the late novelist Frank Conroy—Anderson chose Conroy to co-write “Transsiberian” because he realized Conroy was a talented writer of his own accord. “I immediately liked Will,” Anderson said. “He’s modest but very smart and knows how to write lean,mean scripts.”

As a life-long, seasonal Nantucketer, Conroy said that bringing his film back to the island has special resonance.

Having summered here as a young man at his family’s home on Polpis Road, Conroy’s memories of watching summer blockbusters such as “Star Wars,” “Jaws” and “The Shining” happened at the Dreamland Theatre. He also met his wife Julia here in the late ’90s, when she was working on Straight Wharf and he was location scouting for the film “To Gillian on her 37th Birthday.”

Julia gave birth to their first child, son Liam, at Cottage Hospital “on a snowy March night five years ago under the care of Doctor Hinson,” remembered Conroy. “So Nantucket sometimes feels like the center of the universe to me.”

Because the Nantucket Festival has “done him a lot of favors over the years,” Conroy said it “feels so cool to be able to come with the more legitimate, finished, full length film; It’s like I can stand up straighter this year.”

Anderson also has a long history with the Nantucket Film Festival. In 1998, his film “Next Stop Wonderland” opened the festival. “I’d just come from Sundance, and Nantucket was one of the better film festival viewing experiences I’d ever had,” said Anderson.

“Nantucket is not known as a place where business transactions happen but it is known as a place where filmmakers and writers get to meet and sort of commiserate and celebrate their talents,” he continued. “The experiences I’ve had there just meeting other filmmakers and establishing certain relationships have been rewarding. Nantucket is small but it has cool people, cool films, and it’s so much more relaxing. Also, because it’s not an industry festival like Sundance or Toronto, you get a real audience for your movies, which means you can get a real response.”

Partridge agreed. “There’s such pressure within the industry that the true essence of what you’re doing—the art of it, and why you love it—can get lost when you’re in LA,” Partridge explained. “But when you step outside for a festival like Nantucket,you can get a little perspective and realize why you do what you do.”

Mark Duplass also said that the Nantucket Film Festival is one of the Duplasses’ “favorite festivals.” “They choose great films and concentrate less on the business side and make it more about having a great festival experience, watching movies and hanging out with your peers and the locals who enjoy indie film,” he said. “We’ll keep coming back as long as they’ll have us.”

By William Ferrall

Doctor, foreign correspondent,humanitarian, adventurer, nutrition expert and athlete, seasoned pilot, prolific author and motivational guru. Whew. Any one of those roles would challenge most individuals, but Dr. Bob Arnot usually squeezes some of each into every day. And between a few hours weekly to a few weeks out of the year, Arnot even manages “down time”—sometimes surfing on Nantucket or skiing in Vermont with his younger prep school son or the older one in college.

“I’m a type ‘T’ personality, ready to go mow down the world,” Arnot is fond of telling interviewers. With 14 books to his credit—others are in the works, according to Arnot—his name is among the most recognizable in writings about diet and health issues. During the 1990s, his books “Dr. Bob Arnot’s Guide to Turning Back the Clock” and “Dr. Bob Arnot’s Revolutionary Weight Control Program”were best sellers, as are his later books on cancer and heart disease prevention and joint ailments.

For two-and-a-half decades, Arnot has also traveled extensively around the world to report on famine, devastating diseases and civil unrest. His humanitarian efforts have become the yin to the yang of his recent incarnation as an international man of action in the guise of “Dr. Danger,” a character who proclaims, “There’s a fine line between adventure and danger…a line I find and cross more than I should.” If Arnot is wise enough to know that he can’t save the world, his jam-packed itinerary of international charitable efforts suggests that he’s giving it a darned good try.

TV’s Dr. Bob

Many recognize and remember Arnot best from his gig as an Emmy-winning health and medical doctor on network television, beginning with 15 years at CBS This Morning and then CBS Evening News. In 1996, he moved over to NBC as that network’s chief medical reporter, but after September 11th, at Arnot’s urging, he doubled up as a foreign correspondent. He eventually ended up at the network’s MSNBC division as one of the few “embed” reporters traveling with troops during the invasion of Iraq by U.S.-led forces in 2003. He was the only NBC reporter on the scene in Baghdad’s Firdus Square in April of 2003 during those remarkable moments that U.S. troops toppled a giant statue of Saddam Hussein.

U.S. Army Major General David Petraeus, Commanding General of forces in Iraq, told NewYork Observor that Arnot was “quite a renaissance man.” Other military leaders echoed that high regard by putting Arnot atop an unofficial list of most likable reporters. Some executives at NBC apparently felt less enthusiastic with aspects of Arnot’s reporting. His contract with MSBNC was not renewed when it expired in December of 2003.

In the public airing of his departure, Arnot suggested that NBC officials were unhappy with his “very positive” reporting about developments in Iraq because the network had unofficially taken a more critical stance. “On a tactical level it [the invasion] really worked,” said Arnot. “It’s kind of inspirational,what our people are doing there. So much over there is nuanced.”

Whatever the causes of NBC’s break with him, Arnot came away from there with cutting edge, highly-honed technical skills that put him in the vanguard of international field reporting.“The day of the super correspondent went away,” noted Arnot. “Now it’s more ‘backpack journalism,’ meaning that he’s often on his own in his travels to remote locations or part of a two-man only crew. A single high-def video camera, a laptop computer and cell phone are his main reporting tools.

For much of the last four years, Arnot’s bags and equipment have been packed for sometimes exotic, often strife-torn hotspots around the world.The entertainment component of those working trips is now entering its third year in Arnot’s video series “Dr. Danger,”broadcast via the web-based mojohd.com, a part of TimeWarner Entertainment and cable television’s IN DEMAND Network.

Like much of the programming on mojoHD, Dr. Danger aims squarely at the mostly male demographic sought by cable television’s adrenaline pumping Spike TV network and by magazines ranging from Esquire to Maxim. In most episodes of Dr. Danger, Arnot lands in some palpably dangerous environment deep in remote regions of underdeveloped countries. Chapters so far have put him inside the African nation of Mogadishu searching for gun merchants and in Afghanistan on combat missions with U.S. and Afghani troops. Other episodes appear decidedly less heroic, including one in which he test drives a cross-country rally car and another in which he cheers on Yemeni camel jumpers after chowing down in a primitive local eatery. In fairness to Arnot’s risk-taking and stamina, the Yemen trip resulted in him falling while hill climbing,which dislocated his shoulder and required a bumpy, hours-long trip to the nearest hospital for repair.

Dr. Care

Arnot’s personal travails pale alongside the discord he haswitnessed. FromZaire to Iraq to an extended stay last year in the famine-ridden Sudanese region of Darfur, Arnot has reported on and has often treated people in life-threatening struggles. Unlike the cocky bravura of his Dr. Danger character, Dr. Bob Arnot the physician-healer sounds genuinely humbled to improve the lot of groups in distress. “I’m trying to bring the full power of the media to bear on these problems,” he explained.

His documentary “Emergency in Darfur,” produced by his own Video Action Aid, the production company he founded to document crises worldwide, screened late last year on Plum TV and has been seen thousands of times on youtube.com.

Arnot’s video about Darfur has been praised for telling “the compelling and powerful story of one of the largest humanitarian crises in recent memory,” inwhich thousands of people have been displaced by civil war and genocide. In the film, Arnot honors the work of International Medical Corps and other nongovernmental groups who, he feels, are often very effective in relieving such distress.

Both in the U.S. and abroad, Arnot tries to avoid partisan aspects of such issues as Iraq and the famine in Darfur, instead working as an independent advocate who eschews the “dogma of party politics.” If he took sides, Arnot surmised, he’d “be persona non grata” in places like Darfur. Even so, he recently signed onto the board of Dream for Darfur, an advocacy group pressuring the Chinese government via the Olympics to urge the Sudanese government to stop the genocide.

His advisory role there could be especially influential since he’s a past lead physician for the Olypmic games and once oversaw medical care at Olympic Village in Lake Placid, New York, after overseeing emergency room care out of medical school in 1974.

Arnot’s Olympian-like multi-tasking has come with a toll. His chronic osteoarthritis and several mishaps led to a recent double hip replacement and to planned future shoulder operations. His marriage ended in 2003 at the same time he was separating from MSNBC. That was a pretty blue time,” he recalled. “For awhile there, I didn’t care what happened tome.”

For the last two years, Arnot has applied the keen focus of his journalistic reporting to his own career. Fellow Nantucket resident and agent Allen Morell has harnessed Arnot’s “‘Big Q,’ high name recognition as amedical expert” into gigs for Arnot as medical anchorman for a new Google Health series of videos and as spokesperson for several corporate campaigns on health and nutrition. The two initiated the deal with Google CEO Eric Schmidt in meetings on Nantucket. Morell envisions Arnot’s potential name recognition and earnings capabilities approaching that of even higher profile celebrities like Dr. Phil McGraw.

Asked if he misses the limelight of network television in the mean time, Arnot averred that his current work has actually increased his visibility. “I ‘disappeared’ when I went from CBSThisMorning to CBS Evening News,”Arnot recalled. “Now a days, people recognize me all the time on the street.”

It stands to reason that Nantucketers can love something for being small and tucked away and for doing things a little bit differently.

Nestled into a little, out-of-the-way spot on India Street, beloved eatery Black-Eyed Susan’s doesn’t purvey wine, which is why dinner companions Pepper Frazier, Angel Conrad, Heidi Weddendorf, Brian Conroy and Matt MacEachern and Evelyn MacEachern came to the restaurant prepared last May.

“I love the aroma sneaking up the street,” said Conrad, owner of Ocean Breeze Cleaning and Frazier’s wife, as the group approached the restaurant. They’d brought along wines furnished by the nearby currentVintage, one bottle of red and one white per couple. For the reds, that meant Barrel Monkeys 2005 Shiraz, J.Wilkes Pinot Noir 2006 and Fife Max 1999. And for the whites, they had Marimar Estate Torres Family California Chard 2006, Clestin Blondeau White Loire 2006 and Abraxas 2006.

It was a clear night, so the companions had the option of dining on the outdoor patio—one of Evelyn MacEachern’s favorite places to share a meal with girlfriends in the summer.

Inside the restaurant, diners sidled up to the bar counter and cozied up at tables set with rustic flatware, which was in carefree contrast to the elegant, glass chandeliers. Servers David Cokonis and Meredith DeBusk re-acquainted themselves with the faces and preferences of new and old customers, who often break their winter fast with favorites of Caesar salad, tuna tartare and linguine and clams made with succulent quahogs.

Owner Susan Handy opened Black-Eyed Susan’s with executive chef Jeff Worster 16 years ago. The pair had met while working together at the Boarding House.

“We opened Black-Eyed Susan’s to be an antidote to fine dining,” said Handy. “We wanted to make something very affordable, but still do the quality of food we’d done in other restaurants. The BYOB was a way to cut people’s costs in half.”

Because the restaurant wasn’t pulling income from alcohol, the staff created a “high-energy dining room to keep the seats full,” said Handy. In the open kitchen, Worster and chefs Lance Richard and James Vincent pull out pyrotechnic tricks to match the creative flourish in the menu, which changes on a regular basis, per Worster’s mood. “Jeff’s talent lies in his ability to take seasonings from all different ethnic backgrounds and make a menu that’s cohesive and makes sense,” said Handy.

Devotees of the restaurant will tell you one of its best assets is not on the menu. Black-Eyed Susan’s is known to be a place where diners from different parties have a tendency to mix.

“The counter starts it,” said Handy. “People watch the chefs and engage with one another without realizing that they are. And that spreads. I remember these two parties sitting next to each other one night: One table was pouring this beautiful vintage champagne and the other was drinking home-brewed beer. They swapped and became friends. That happens a lot.”

“This place has a real funky feel to it, and we always have a lot of fun,” said Conroy, who practices law on island. Emeritus Development owner Matt MacEachern agreed on the “eclectic atmosphere,” while Frazier said that an equal draw is that the food is always “fresh and healthy.” The couples dined on a rainbow of intercontinental flavors. They began with appetizers including Bartlett’s Farm seasonal greens with goat cheese ravioli and raspberry truffle vinaigrette and Thai beef salad with watercress, lemongrass, lime and sweet basil. Their entrees included Wiener schnitzel with Yukon potato salad in a lemon burre blanc; salmon with Indian flavors, leeks in coconut curry and a banana chutney; and chicken on a quinoa cake with Mexican cocoa and fig mole. Complimenting the creative menu, Weddendorf added that she thought Black- Eyed Susan’s had the best breakfast on the island. More than a few hung-over revelers have dragged themselves out of bed on Saturday or Sunday mornings so as to not miss the sourdough French toast with orange Jack Daniels butter and cinnamon
pecans.

In fact, lines extend down the sidewalk on most weekend mornings the breakfast menu reads like the short story of a perfect brunch which may be why filmmakers and brothers Jay and Mark Duplass and actor Ross Partridge formed their new working relationship over breakfast there, as noted in a story on Nantucket Film Festival homecomings in this issue. On the breakfast menu, there’s a little bit of every country represented on Nantucket, including the Portuguese scramble with linguiça, tomatoes, spinach and garlic. Combined with a side of black-eyed peas, it creates a flavor profile that makes it worth getting out of bed.Who you meet when you’re there is what could make your day

Written by Marli Guzzetta
Photography by Ron Lynch

Year-round Nantucketer Neil Edward Romanski grew up in West Haven, Connecticut, surrounded by a large Polish family. In nearby Saybrook, his Polish cioccias, or great aunts, had a double kitchen in which they cooked over pots of rich coffee and hands of cards.

“They were always competing with each other,” remembered Romanski, who sought to re-create this taste of his childhood on a cold evening in April by preparing a Polish feast for friends at the Naushop home he shares with his partner of eight years,Bruce Korson.Nantucket Times Magazine

“Cold-weather comfort food is how I always thought of it,” said Romanski of his family’s Polish fare. “It’s not something you ate all the time. It was special.”

Alongside Tucker the Retriever and Beauford the Bassett Hound, Romanski and Korson—who founded the American Kennel Club’s Canine Health Foundation—entertain “constantly” in their home. For the Polish dinner, they invited old friend and Polish native Jola Gutnik, owner of Jola Jewelry, along with her beau, Nantucket Fire Chief Mark MacDougall. Also invited were Romanski’s oldest island friend, Catherine Velez of Cottage Hospital, W. Michael Salon owner Michael Hawkins, Legends owner Azra Wilmott-Smith and prolific non-profit board member John Brewer.

For the kielbasa, Romanski traveled back to Meriden, Connecticut, to visit Filipeks, the same Polish butcher his father and grandfather patronized. “It’s a tiny place, but they make incredible polish kielbasa, both fresh and smoked,” said Romanski, who assembled pierogies and bought three kinds of hand-made kielbasa—traditional fresh kielbasa, spicy fresh kielbasa and traditional smoked kielbasa—from the son of the man who sold to Romanski’s father and grandfather.

The guests began arriving at Romanski’s and Korson’s at 7 PM and were greeted with a warm fireplace and cold cocktails. Having just returned from Poland, Gutnik brought to dinner a fabulous Polish vodka called Zubrowka, which is brewed with grass from a Polish forest that is home to many bison. Libations also included a potato vodka, prosecco and a delicious, French flavored vodka called X-Rated.

Romanski prepared the meal using recipes from Sarah Leah Chase’s “Cold-Weather Cooking,” beginning with a Polish mushroom and potato soup served with a hearty Struan multi-grain bread from Daily Breads, instead of traditional rye bread, and a marjoram compound butter.

For the main course, Romanski paired his grandmother’s stuffed cabbage with Filipeks’ kielbasa, as well as sides of Polish creamed beets, the pierogies with ricotta, figs and sage butter and also fresh horseradish.

At the table, the group discussed the special coincidence of having MacDougall over for a Romanski Polish dinner, since Romanski’s father was the Fire Chief in West Hartford, Connecticut.

“I used to do a lot of the cooking, but I don’t anymore, because I’ve been kicked out,” said Korson. A board member for the Artists’ Association of Nantucket and the Nantucket Cottage Hospital Thrift Shop, an advisory board member for the Nantucket Historical Association and a Chairman of the Development Committee for the National Cancer Center, Korson has a theory of entertaining. “I don’t like cocktail parties,” he said.“If I’m going to have a party, I’d much rather have a dinner party with eight to ten friends, as opposed to standing in a room shifting my weight from one foot to the other. I’d much rather be in a setting where everyone can relax and walk away having had a good time.”

For dessert, the pineapple upside-down cake with ginger cream was a perfectly moist punctuation to a hearty meal. The fire had turned to embers, and Romanski was warmed to know that the recipes of his youth had continued, all these years later, to yield not only full stomachs but also fond memories.