Bayside resident Mark Metcalf is an actor who has worked in movies, TV and on the stage. He is best known for his work in "Animal House," "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Seinfeld."

In addition to his work on screen, Metcalf is involved with the Milwaukee International Film Festival, First Stage Children's Theater and a number of other projects, including the comedy Web site, comicwonder.com. He also finds time to write about movies for OnMilwaukee.com.

SECOND OF THREE PARTS

After the great success of Chris Allen's first year as the Milwaukee International Film Festival's operations director in 2006, we all felt that the growth was just beginning. It was suggested at that early date, and even before, that an independent board be formed that would more faithfully represent the entire city of Milwaukee.

Louis Fortis had formed a not-for-profit organization called Milwaukee's Future Foundation, whose function was to produce the Milwaukee International Film Festival. The legal Board of Directors of that not-for-profit consisted of Louis Fortis as president / chair, Dave Luhrssen as vice president-who also had the title executive director bestowed upon him-and Caroline Goyette as secretary / treasurer.

Goyette was working at the time for Luhrssen at the Shepherd Express, but soon after moved out of state. When contacted about it in early 2008, she vaguely remembered being asked to be on the board, but had little idea of what the responsibilities were. Once she understood, she promptly resigned. Goyette's replacement was Matthew Astbury, yet another Shepherd staffer reporting to Shepherd Express publisher and editor-in-chief Fortis.

Most successful, fully-functioning non-profits, especially those concerned with the arts, have a board of anywhere between eight and 35 people. The advantages to having a large and varied board are obvious. You are represented throughout the community at many levels and areas of influence and therefore have access to a much larger base when raising funds and marketing your events. And raising funds is the bottom line in all non-profit work. You must raise funds in order to operate and bring the service that you have promised to the community.

Everyone involved in building the festival was so busy putting together the 11 days of film celebration each year and bringing the varied educational programs to high school students throughout the area, that even though they were aware that the board of directors of the non-profit Milwaukee's Future Foundation, which was supporting production of the festival, was the same two people that operated the for-profit organization known as the Shepherd Express (In other words: Fortis and his employee, arts and entertainment editor Luhrssen). There was nothing practical they could do about it even though it bordered on being an unethical conflict of interest, or at the very least it seriously muddied the waters surrounding the already murky workings of the not-for-profit.

We all have a tendency to trust that those who pose as our superiors are at least equal to us in their moral and ethical dealings. Sometimes, it's just not the case.

Most people closely involved with the festival had talked about and even asked that it be given a greater degree of independence from the Shepherd as early as 2005. It would have enabled the staff to work more fluidly and we would be able to expand our advertising base beyond the weekly freebie entertainment magazine that represents itself as an alternative publication.

Fortis would not allow any local paid advertising except in the Shepherd. It would also make cash flow easier to track. As it was, all expenses had to go through the Shepherd for approval and reimbursement and that took time and a lot of paperwork. The answer to the request for independence was always a parental analogy about the child not being ready to leave the nest. And this came from two men who had never raised children.

After more than a year of asking, Fortis finally began to make some decisions to give the organization more independence. A bank account was established and expenses below a certain dollar amount could be handled internally. Interestingly, one of the first things he did was to stop the insurance plan for the festival's employees, which had been administered through the Shepherd Express.

They were placed on COBRA, which allowed them 18 months to find a health plan of their own. When they found a plan through Associated Bank, Fortis rejected it even though he had originally recommended them and the Shepherd Express used Associated.

But there were important restraints applied along with the partial independence. The staff, and specifically Allen, was instructed not to directly solicit corporate sponsorships for the festival. They could negotiate in-kind trade agreements with companies like Alterra Coffee and North American Camera or Independent Edit and Independent Sound, but they could not approach, say, U.S. Bank or Manpower and ask for a large financial sponsorship of what was now an established part of the Milwaukee arts scene.

Allen was permitted to write grant proposals to solicit foundation money to support the festival, and he did this very well. With his background at Hunger Task Force and the AIDS Resource Center of Wisconsin, he already knew who the players were and how to approach them. Even though the face of the festival is 11 days in autumn when people can see and discuss, and celebrate movies from around the world, it also produced several year-round programs to educate young people in Milwaukee.

Reel Flix brings high school students together to watch socially conscious documentaries and narrative films. The Jane Bradley Petit Foundation has always sponsored this program.

The Herzfeld Foundation has, for the past three years, sponsored the Student Screenwriting Competition. A group of film professionals from Milwaukee takes selected high school students through a series of workshops wherein they are taught the art and the craft of writing for the movies. The best of their screenplays is picked and a short film is produced. This film plays on the big screen at the Oriental Theatre during the festival and at other festivals throughout the country.

The festival also supported a program created and run by Maxine Wishner, called "My Milwaukee," which put cameras into the hands of students from the inner city and mentored them in making short documentaries about their lives.

All were good programs, designed to give back to the community. They were very attractive to foundations. And the Richard and Ethel Herzfeld Foundation, the Argosy Foundation, Northwestern Mutual Foundation, Jane Bradley Pettit Foundation and many others all stepped up to the plate and supported them.

The 2007 festival was another great one, with attendance improving by another 26 percent, even though it was forced to move the dates earlier in the fall and it overlapped some religious holidays.

Willem Dafoe had come home to Milwaukee to be the focus of a tribute. More films had shown from more countries and there were more sellouts than ever. You could feel an anticipation growing for several months before the festival and the electricity in the air in the lobby of the Oriental Theatre, at the Downer Theatre, the Times Cinema -- and even online -- during the last two weeks in September was palpable.

The Midwest Filmmaker Competition received more submissions than ever before and New York distribution company Film Movement offered distribution to one of the films that had premiered on festival screens. This was the first occurrence of something that Jonathan Jackson and I personally had hoped would happen, which was that the Milwaukee festival would become a marketplace for local and regionally made films.

I made a direct plea to Fortis more than a month before the 2007 festival began that an independent board be sought because it was increasingly obvious that the film festival was now in a very real way Milwaukee's festival and had moved beyond what the Shepherd Express could manage.

My plea was ignored.

I spoke to Chris Abele of the Argosy Foundation, which had been the first foundation to support the festival (followed by the Herzfeld Foundation) and had continued to provide the largest funding gift each year, and he agreed that in order for the festival to continue to grow, in fact for it to grow anymore at all, and to truly represent the city, an independent board was imperative.

Everyone on staff and anyone familiar with the inner workings of the festival realized that the time had come when, if the festival was ever to reach it's potential, if it was ever to truly transcend it's original identity as a small East Side film festival, as it was straining to do, if it was ever to grow into something that could be recognized nationwide as major festival representing the Midwest region, it needed to break free of the smallness of it's one man and his assistant board of directors.

Everyone except Louis Fortis.