The 90-Second Newbery Film Festival relies on your donations! Want to support what we’re doing? Please donate the 90-Second Newbery here! We are a sponsored project of Fractured Atlas, a non-profit arts service organization.

Just got back from a whirlwind visit to beautiful San Francisco and Oakland, California! It’s always great to go there, because I have the privilege of staying with my friends Alisha and Sharon (an amazing chef who owns the must-visit San Francisco restaurants Gialina and Ragazza).

My business in the Bay Area? Last Saturday we did back-to-back screenings of the 4th annual 90-Second Newbery Film Festival at the San Francisco Public Library and the Rockridge branch of the Oakland Public Library.

Unfortunately I don’t have many pictures, but gigantic thanks to Leah of the Rockridge branch, a young girl who stepped in at the last minute to rock it as my co-host there! She was natural, a real pro! Thanks also to Nina Lindsay and Erica Siskind who set up the screening, too. I’m looking forward to lots of entries from Oakland next year.

On the San Francisco side, thanks to Annie Barrows (author of the Ivy and Bean books), who nailed it as my San Francisco co-host. My daughters Lucy and Ingrid are fanatics for the Ivy and Bean books, and I showed a short video to Annie and everyone in which they made their love of those books plain. Annie’s in the lower right picture in the above collage, in between me and Carla Kozak of the San Francisco Public Library—Carla and Christy Estrovitz were the librarians who made the SFPL screening happen, thanks to you both (and thanks for the toffee)! Also thanks to Summer Dawn Laurie and Katherine Megna of Books Inc., who kindly sold books after the show. After a few years of doing this film festival, they’ve become true friends (and Katherine is the one who has a tattoo of a line from my book The Order of Odd-Fish, no joke! How cool is that?!).

Every year we get some great movies from St. Andrews School in Saratoga, and this year was no exception. I featured all the movies they made on this special page, and here’s the one we showed at the festival, of Carl Hiassen’s Hoot:

Great work! We brought the filmmakers Alex and Ankith onstage when we showed this movie, and the crowd gave them the applause and recognition they deserved.

Thank you to all the young filmmakers who made this the best 90-Second Newbery yet. Here’s a montage of all the movies we showed in San Francisco. Looking forward to next year!

Next up on the 90-Second Newbery tour: Portland, Tacoma, Minneapolis, Manhattan, and Brooklyn! Looking to make your free reservation(s) to these screenings? Find all the details here.

The 90-Second Newbery Film Festival relies on your donations! Want to support what we’re doing? Please donate the 90-Second Newbery here! We are a sponsored project of Fractured Atlas, a non-profit arts service organization.