OUT TAKES Dallas Festival History

Tim and DavidStarted in 1999 by Tim and David McMullen-Sullivan (pictured left), “OUT TAKES Dallas – The Annual Lesbian and Gay Film Festival” is now considered a Dallas arts institution. We are proud that the festival is organized and managed by a completely volunteer staff and Board of Directors. The Board has a broad range of experience in the business, arts and non-profit worlds. Over 75 volunteers now contribute to the success of OUT TAKES Dallas.

For its inaugural year, the OUT TAKES Dallas ’99 festival ran over four days at Dallas’ historic Lakewood Theatre. The roster of festival sponsors totaled over 40 individuals and corporations. The list of founding corporate sponsors was comprised of nearly a dozen national, regional and local companies including, PlanetOut, Genre and Curve Magazines, Skyy Vodka, Subaru of America, Kroger Food Stores, KY Liquid and Dallas Voice.

By all measurers OUT TAKES Dallas ’99 was a phenomenal success. Attendees totaled nearly 3,000 moviegoers. Sponsorship contributions exceeded $50,000. Net proceeds were positive, enabling a contribution of $5,000 to the festival beneficiary, Walt Whitman Community School, a private alternative school specializing in adolescent sexual-orientations issues.

OUT TAKES Dallas 2000 built upon the success of the previous year. To address both attendee demands and the ever-increasing selection of gay and lesbian theme film, the film festival expanded to two consecutive, three-day weekends from its original, four-day inaugural event. The festival showcased over 20 screenings of 33 films and accommodated over 4,500 moviegoers. We began to see that the public was beginning to take “ownership” of the film festival through their generous support.

Due to the outstanding artistic and financial success of the second year, we were able to present a check to that year’s beneficiary, Walt Whitman for $10,000.

The 2001 film festival was successful in its individual sponsorship donations, film quality and diversity, and integrating the general public. We had over 70 individual sponsorship packages sold in 2001, solidifying in our minds that Dallas was building a following for the festival. We also greatly expanded our shorts programs to 5 screenings. This way, we were able to screen over 66 films in just 6 days. We also brought in more filmmakers than ever before: four directors and two actors. We also screened films that were of great notoriety, including “Southern Comfort,” the 2000 Sundance winner for Best Documentary, “My Left Breast” which we partnered with the Susan G. Komen Foundation, and partnered with Beth El Binah on “Trembling Before G-d,” a film on Orthodox Jews and Homosexuality that the Dallas Jewish Film Festival refused to screen.

 

 

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