Filmmaker honeymoons at CLIP 19 festival

Got a blast from the past last week when Eileen Connors got in touch. Eileen and I spent plenty of Friday nights in the 1980s strolling prep sports sidelines, me covering games as a Times stringer, and she as a Tampa Tribune photographer.

Eileen uses a different camera these days, as an independent filmmaker living in Los Angeles. She wanted to tell me that her short film Out of Step will be shown Oct. 12 at the CLIP 19 festival (aka Tampa's 19th annual gay and lesbian film showcase).

Eileen also informed me that her festival visit will also be part of her honeymoon, after last Saturday's marriage to Shelley Sizemore in California, a state allowing same-sex weddings. They're spending much of this week at Disney World before arriving in Tampa for the final weekend of CLIP events.

Let's wish them all the best.

Eileen said her parents and younger sister still aren't ready to do that. It's a personal thing that Eileen is working out on screen with Out of Step, first in short form and possibly a feature-length movie some day.

"It's a story about coming out, told from a straight perspective," she said in a telephone chat. Out of Step, she explained, is about a father cleaning out his daughter's home after she commits suicide. He arrives at night with the power turned off, settles down to sleep and awakens to see personal effects -- art work, books, etc. -- indicating his daughter was a lesbian and he never knew.

Out of Step will be shown at Tampa Theatre on Sunday Oct. 12 at 3:30 p.m., before the feature film Sugar Rush. This is Eileen's first foray into filmmaking, after earning a screenwriting degree at the American Film Institute in L.A. Writing about something so personal wasn't enough; she needed to take the extra step of making Out of Step herself.

"I just got frustrated waiting for somebody to think I had a good idea," she said. "It was a 4-day shoot using my own bedroom, with exteriors shot at my next-door neighbor's." Contacts made through the AFI program enabled Eileen to spend four months editing and sprucing up the project in post-production. "It's really who you know," she said. "I got a lot of freebies."

Out of Step has been officially submitted for Academy Awards consideration, and for a slot in next year's Sundance Film Festival. She already has a feature-length screenplay written, just in case. "It's all part of the plan," she said.

Wish her luck, in film and marriage.