As the host and honorary jury president of the Coronado Island Film Festival, Leonard Maltin hands out awards to Hollywood luminaries every year at the festival’s Leonard Maltin Industry Tribute Awards Gala. But Wednesday, as the festival marked its 10th anniversary, the beloved critic and film historian received an honor of his own.
Before he recognized this year’s honorees — who included Beau Bridges, Delroy Lindo, and more — Maltin was presented with a Hubbell, the festival award named for sculptor James Hubbell. The awards extend the long connection between Hollywood and Coronado, a sunny, idyllic island across the bay from San Diego.
Coronado has been a location for such classic films as Some Like It Hot and Top Gun, as the festival’s sidewalk placards reminded guests Wednesday night as they arrived for the festivities at the 137-year-old Hotel del Coronado. “Marilyn Monroe was here,” noted one. “Tony Curtis was here,” said another.
Each year, the Coronado Island Film Festival adds to the list, thanks in no small part to Maltin.
Coronado Island Film Festival CEO and artistic director Merridee Book celebrated Maltin’s contributions to the festival by noting that he “epitomizes the passion and love of cinema” and has “devoted his life to capturing, holding and sharing the history of cinema.”
As he took the stage, Maltin intoned, “I’ll come for another 10 years if you’ll have me.”
This year’s honorees — who were recognized in the Crown Room of the historic hotel, which recently underwent a $500 million renovation — reflected Maltin and the festival’s interest in every aspect of moviemaking.
Beau Bridges and Delroy Lindo may have been the biggest names, but the other honorees stood for some of the behind-the-scenes professions that make movies possible: music editor Adam Smalley, stunt performer Heidi Moneymaker, screenwriter Austin Kolodney, and costume designer Deborah L. Scott.
“I just need to appreciate that you are honoring screenwriters, stunts, music editors, and costume designers, and actors,” Lindo said, noting that he had been “the direct recipient of their work in my career.”
One highlight of the evening was getting to watch Maltin sit down for a few minutes with each of the honorees to ask them about their careers. Below are some excerpts from what they told him.
Adam Smalley, Music Editor and Recipient of the Coronado Island Film Festival’s Transcendent Award
Adam Smalley has worked on an impressive range of projects, including The Lion King, Gladiator, The Morning Show, The Twilight Saga, Kung-Fu Panda, and Mission: Impossible II. His responsibilities range from assuaging worried composers to working as a liaison between the musical team and studio to overseeing mixes to creating temp scores.
Sometimes, the composer and music editor don’t really go to work until the film has been shot, often in the last months of the process. But that wasn’t the case, Smalley said, when the great director Terrence Malick asked him to work on The Thin Red Line, which was released in 1998 — two decades after Malick’s previous film, Days of Heaven.
“He had sort of disappeared for about 20 years,” Smalley told Maltin. “And my phone rang, and it was Terrence Malick.”
The director had a proposal for Smalley and his longtime collaborator, composer Hans Zimmer.
“Terrence Malick wanted the score to be written before he began shooting the film. So Hans and I produced and wrote and created and mixed about four hours of music that he played on the set. And then I took those pieces of music and created the soundtrack that you hear now,” Smalley recalled.
Heidi Moneymaker, Stunt Performer and Recipient of the Coronado Island Film Festival’s Trailblazer Award
Heidi Moneymaker’s remarkable feats have included doubling for Scarlett Johansson’s character, the Black Widow, in several Avengers films. She has also doubled for Drew Barrymore and Brie Larson, among others, and worked in franchises including Mission: Impossible, Fast & Furious, and Spider-Man.
It all started with jumping off her bed.
“To be honest, I became a gymnast because I was a young child doing stunts in my own home,” she told Maltin. “I jumped off my top bunk so many times and hit my head that I think my parents were a little concerned.”
She was so successful at gymnastics that she became a UCLA gymnast and NCAA champion, which led eventually to stunt work. From there, she has gone on to become a stunt coordinator and second-unit director.
One of her career highlights was working with Steven Spielberg: “You want to give everything you have, because he’s doing the same,” she said.
Maltin asked: “Have you ever had a stunt that you refused to do?”
Moneymaker thought about it for a few seconds, then explained that she’d never refused a stunt that was well-planned out in advance. “I kind of have a rule that if there’s anything I’m afraid to do, it’s because it’s either unsafe or we haven’t prepared properly,” she said.
Then she wryly added: “One time I got called to do a car hit from a Range Rover on roller blades, so I’d roller-blade down the street and get hit by this car. And I decided that I didn’t want to do that.”
Austin Kolodney, Screenwriter and Recipient of the Coronado Island Film Festival’s Screencraft Award
Fast-rising screenwriter Austin Kolodney has directed for SyFy and Funny or Die, among others, and made waves with his short film “Two Chairs, Not One,” which premiered at the Austin Film Festival in 2022.
He started writing his latest film, Dead Man’s Wire, during Covid lockdowns, after watching a documentary about a 1977 incident in which a man, Tony Kiritsis, took a mortgager hostage and demanded money and an apology after he felt ripped off.
Watching Kiritsis crack jokes during a long standoff, Kolodney wondered: “How has this not been made into a movie?,” he told Maltin.
Maltin noted that Kolodney had written the film on spec, with no guarantee that anyone would make it. But now it’s a film directed by Gus Van Sant, with a cast that includes Bill Skarsgård, Dacre Montgomery, Colman Domingo, Myha’la, Cary Elwes, and Al Pacino.
Kolodney is still taking it all in, and Wednesday’s award added to his sense of wonder.
“I’m very honored to be here, next to you,” he said. “Sitting with Leonard Maltin is such a dream come true for a young filmmaker.”
Deborah L. Scott, Costume Designer and Recipient of the Coronado Island Film Festival’s Artistry in Film Award
Deborah L. Scott’s astonishing list of credits includes E.T., Back to the Future, Heat, Minority Report, and the upcoming Avatar: Fire and Ash. Her collaborations with the latter film’s director, James Cameron, includes winning the Academy Award for Best Costume Design for her work on his 1997 Titanic.
She told Maltin that her interest in film goes back to her father. He was “a huge, huge movie buff” who would take her to drive-in movies where she watched “I can’t even say how many Westerns,” she recalled.
She has worked on films where she was solely in charge of costumes, and on films where she had as many as 150 people working for her. She took part of her time on stage to shine a light on them.
“I love that my work can be a big part of the visual narrative of any film,” she said. “Mostly I’m grateful for all the costume crews around the world that I’ve had the opportunity to work alongside. I would not be here if it wasn’t for them — the set costumers, costume house people, costume supervisors, shoppers, assistant designers, PAs, illustrators, and maybe the most important — the makers: seamstresses, tailors, readers, cutter/fitters. All the crafts peoples, artists and artisans who still work with their hands.”
Delroy Lindo, Actor and Recipient of the Coronado Island Film Festival’s Leonard Maltin Award
Delroy Lindo’s extensive list of credits includes Get Shorty, The Cider House Rules, Gone in 60 Seconds, The Harder They Fall and The Good Fight, as well as the Spike Lee films Clockers, Crooklyn, Malcolm X, and Da 5 Bloods. This year he’s in awards contention for his role as bluesman Delta Slim in Ryan Coogler’s simmering historical horror hit Sinners.
But on Wednesday evening, he recalled a night in the 1970s, when he and a fellow student at the American Conservatory Theater talked about the future.
“Many years ago, as an acting student, in San Francisco, I stood on a street corner with one of my classmates and we were talking about our aspirations and our hopes for our futures for our careers and we talked about hoping that there would be space for us — that it would not be a competition… that we would each make a space for ourselves, however our careers unfolded,” Lindo recalled.
“That classmate that I stood on a street corner with in San Francisco in the 1970s — his name was Denzel Washington. And as we witness the trajectory of Denzel’s career, and the trajectory of my career, albeit that Denzel’s trajectory is a little bit different from my own, the point is the definition of success that we attained is something that I cherish.”
He says that when he thinks of his success, “evenings like this evening are an extraordinary icing on the cake.”
Maltin told Lindo during their talk: “When I saw Da 5 Bloods — I don’t mean to make you feel uncomfortable in any way — but I think it’s one of the greatest performances I’ve ever seen in a movie.”
The audience applauded in agreement.
Though he was often discussed as a potential Oscar winner for his work in the film, Lindo ultimately wasn’t nominated. He said that one takeaway from the experience was realizing that no matter “the awards that one gets or does not get… film is forever. Film lasts forever.”
The audience applauded again.
Lindo added that for anyone working in a creative field, “whether or not one gets an award, the work in itself stands and speaks for itself.”
Beau Bridges, Actor and Recipient of the Coronado Island Film Festival’s Legacy Award
Beau Bridges, who has been in films since his work as a child actor in the 1940s and has appeared in projects from Norma Rae to The Fabulous Baker Boys to Jerry Maguire to The Descendants to the new Matlock, brought the evening full circle when he recalled shooting a film on the hotel grounds more than four decades ago.
He recalled that he once took a trip to San Diego with his mother and father, actor Lloyd Bridges, while preparing to play Richard Nixon in the 1995 film Kissinger and Nixon. He realized that they would be passing the Nixon Presidential Library in Yorba Linda on the way home to Los Angeles.
“I said, ‘Mom and dad, do you mind if we stop off at the Nixon library to just check out some stuff? And please — don’t tell them anything about the fact that I’m portraying Nixon. I just want to go in there and look at this stuff,'” Bridges recalled.
“And then we went in, and as soon as my dad goes through the door, he goes, ‘My son is playing Richard Nixon!'”
The audience laughed again.
“He’s a dad,” noted Maltin. “He can’t help it.”
You can read more coverage of the Coronado Island Film Festival, one of our 50 Film Festivals Worth the Entry Fee, here.
Main image: (L-R) Heidi Moneymaker, Beau Bridges, Delroy Lindo, Adam Smalley, Leonard Maltin, Deborah L. Scott, Austin Kolodney, Coronado Island Film Festival founder and chairman Doug St. Denis, CIFF CEO and Artistic Director Merridee Book. Photo by Joel Ortiz for CIFF.