Withering Heights

FLIFFy Farewell

Well, put away the red carpet, and kiss the movie stars goodbye. After 185 movies and 37 days of frenetic Ping-Ponging from theater to theater, FLIFF is finally over.

Every year, Broward movie buffs sidle up to the Tinseltown glamour machine, hoping to catch a little of the razzle-dazzle. The Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival invites some actors to town, wrangles a few world premieres, and, if it's a good year, keeps the party going just loud and festive enough to stay on the cultural radar. Tailpipe, who has paid his dues covering stars on red carpets, hung around the festival to try to catch a whiff of the greasepaint and the sweat.

So Tinseltown is Tinseltown wherever you find it, right?

Not exactly. In the real Hollywood (not the Broward one), they don't make you wear a paper bracelet to get into the party, which is usually in a chic, polished-to-a-ritzy-sheen eatery in Beverly Hills rather than a hotel banquet room. Get up there with A-list, and you're sipping Cristal and rubbing elbows with George Clooney or Catherine Zeta-Jones.

But, hell, drinking a rum and Coke in the ballroom of the Signature Grand — that ain't half-bad, especially when there's a band that can segue seamlessly from "I Will Survive" to "One O'clock Jump" as well as a couple of B-list stars dutifully making their way around the room. The 'Pipe approached movie tough guy Dennis Farina, there to represent the opening-night movie The Grand, a poker comedy, and asked him if doing the festival circuit was a pleasure or a chore.

Farina, looking at Tailpipe as if he might have explosives strapped on under his shirt, muttered, "I haven't found anything in this business that's too much of a chore." Richard Kind, Farina's tall, gawky-looking costar, was a little more forthcoming about how welcoming festival participants had been, though his round of golf at a fancy country club got rained out.

On the last Friday of the festival, Tailpipe caught Gary Sinise on the red carpet (a modest 56 feet of it, now stored safely away at Cinema Paradiso). Sinise, a winningly earnest man and one of the industry's most versatile character actors, answered a lot of naive question patiently. He said that he had been to a lot of festivals where the paparazzi clustered ("Cannes is madness") but that FLIFF was more to his liking. "Very laid-back," Sinise said. "More my speed."

Laid-back, maybe. But by the last weekend, festival organizers had all taken on a slightly glassy-eyed look. Bonnie Skop, who had been chipping in to assist publicity director Jan Mitchell, helpfully pointed out two British actors arriving at an event at the Miniaci Performing Arts Center. "It's the magicians," she said. Actually, they were David Mitchell and Robert Webb, stars of the British movie Magicians.

Who? Skop was momentarily nonplussed. "All I know," she said confidentially, "is that Jan said, 'It's the magicians. They're in the limo.' We're all exhausted."

Forget the Orange Bowl

Wednesday night at Boca Bowl, just off of Town Center Road in Boca Raton, and the collisions between bowling balls and pins sound especially explosive, like a World War II battle in Sensurround.

A skinny guy with an unruly mullet chugs a beer and tightens his laces. The laces are highlighter-yellow. He looks hungrily toward the polished lanes, a gladiator about to step into a cage.

A third-grade girl with braces stumbles toward the alley, eight-pound ball in hand, heaving it, kerplunk, straight into the gutter and watching it roll ignominiously away.

A stern-looking woman in churchgoing attire watches her own ball rumble toward the pins, miraculously smashing them into a collapsed mess. A lifetime of keeping it buttoned up seems to sail momentarily out the window as she breaks into "the sprinkler" dance.

It's been going on like this since 1981, a contest of kinetic weight versus grace, a human drama, a classroom of life lessons. In less than a year, though, it'll all be over. The plans are in. Boca's favorite 65,000-square-foot bowling alley will be gutted and transformed into a shopping plaza. The town needs it — hadn't you noticed?

In May of last year, Woolbright Development Inc., owner of multiple South Florida shopping centers, bought the property, temporarily leasing it back to the original owners. But that lease runs out next May. The company originally planned "a Mizner Park on steroids," as Boca Bowl manager Ronnie Belletieri put it, but later decided on something more modest. They'll call it the Commons at Town Center, and all Tailpipe could find out was that they're putting in $5 million in palm trees. The 'Pipe envisions a shady oasis with grunting camels and visitors nibbling on dates (the fruit, that is).

Three generations of bowling alley patrons and employees are miffed.

"There's a lot of people who grew up here," says a bespectacled woman from Delray who has been coming to Boca Bowl (formerly Don Carter's All-Star Lanes) for 18 years. She's part of the Wednesday-night Highroller League, with 25 teams of five players each.

Starting next year, they'll either have to go south to Pompano or north to Boynton Beach. For some, that means an extra 40 minutes' drive.