Palm Springs ShortFest to Feature Hollywood Insiders Playing Themselves

When it comes to A-list name dropping, Jay Kamen’s short film Not Your Time-A Musical -- one of 331 films scheduled to play the 2011 Palm Springs International ShortFest, Short Film Festival and Film Market -- will be hard to beat.

Shortfest, which runs from June 21-27 at the Camelot Theatres in Palm Springs, announced its line-up Wednesday, and Time stands out by virtue of a cast that includes Sony’s Amy Pascal, producers Sid Ganis, Lawrence Mark, Joe Roth and Stuart Cornfield and directors Amy Heckerling and Neal Israel.

The movie stars Jason Alexander, playing a fictional Hollywood-screenwriter-turned-studio-censor who decides to end his own life unless someone he knows can talk him out of it. While the cast also includes Kathy Najimy and Sally Kirkland playing fictional characters, all the Hollywood producers, directors and execs play themselves.

The festival,  now in its 17th year, has plenty of other bold-faced names among that movies that are organized into 52 themed programs.

Sarah Paulson and Wes Bentley star in After-School Special; Selma Blair and Jeremy Davies in Animal Love; Michael Cera in Bad Dads; Billy Burke in David and Goliath; Anthony LaPaglia in In Loco Parentis; Campbell Scott in Love, Lots of It; Seymour Cassel and Fionnula Flanagan in Pass the Salt, Please; Melissa Leo in The Sea Is All I Know; Kirsten Dunst and Brian Geraghty in The Second Bakery Attack; Tom Hardy in Sergeant Slaughter, My Big Brother; Julia Stiles in Sexting; Keira Knightley and Colin Firth in Steve; and Jessica Chastain in The Westerner, on which she also served as a producer.

Allison Anders, Effie T. Brown and Kirsten Smith will serve on the ShortFest jury, which will award a total of $118,800 in prizes, including $14,000 in cash awards.

The fest is also launching a ShortFest Online Film Festival, which will play ten films on the fest’s web site, www.psfilmfest.org/shortfest, starting a week prior to the festival.

"It’s a watershed year for ShortFest,” festival director Darryl Macdonald said, “encompassing our first foray into the world of online short film streaming, an expanded lineup of international participants and new sponsors like Persol and The Pipeline in the mix.  I’m particularly excited about the inclusion in our lineup of a wealth of striking new filmmaking talent emerging from the Middle East, South America and a number of Asian countries.”