Acting on a hunch that Baltimore just might have enough cineastes to support an annual gathering, Jed Dietz in 1999 launched the Maryland Film Festival.

Nine festivals later, Baltimore's early-spring celebration of all things cinematic is still going strong. It's not the world's biggest or flashiest, but with such unique touches as an opening-night shorts program and a film screening chosen and introduced by the incorrigibly decadent John Waters, it suits Baltimore just fine.

Over four spring days, films and filmmakers from all over are brought to the five-screen Charles Theatre. No prizes are awarded, and big-time celebrity sightings are rare. But nobody complains. The atmosphere is genial and pressure-free. The movies are often small-budget, low-profile productions (a film cast entirely with sock puppets, like 2006's The Lady From Sockholm, probably won't show up at the local multiplex). And it's nice, for a weekend at least, to have a block of North Charles Street turned into a movie lover's heaven.

Dietz, 60, has no special plans for this year's 10th festival, which is scheduled for May 1-4 - just more of what festival-goers have come to expect, including a popular program in which politicians, artists and other celebrities outside the film community present a movie that means something special to them. At his cramped office in the festival's Read Street headquarters, we asked Dietz about the event's past and its future. Did you see the festival as a long-term thing, or did you see this as a one- or two-year thing that would go up in flames, but be great?

What I said [to potential funders] at the time was, "Stick with us for three years, give us at least three years." So if we really stumbled coming out of the box, we'd at least have a couple years to get it right.

The first impulse was to do an event that would draw filmmakers to the area. When they come here, they like us. ... Even films they didn't get to shoot here, when they were scouting locations, people would always go away saying, "Gosh, what an interesting place. Visually interesting, people are friendly, the crew base is better than we thought," all that stuff.

We certainly didn't know whether anybody would show, or come to see movies that, by definition, nobody had yet heard of. Would they be interested in the first place? We didn't know anything. The city's film history at that point was not really positive. The old Baltimore Film Forum had gone under, the Charles had had its problems. What made you think that you'd be able to do what others hadn't been able to do?

We didn't know, not really. But one thing that I thought was very clear, about the Baltimore International Film Festival and the Film Forum: They had never had the capital resources to get the word out about what they were doing.

I didn't think we were going to start with a big advertising campaign, like any sizable art presentation, even in this town, needs. But I thought we could get the word out, and that that might be the key. That we could invite people in a way that hadn't been done before. How long was the planning process for that first festival?

A year and a half, maybe? Some of that was mainly fundraising, because I was so determined that we get some money up front, so we could get through a couple of festivals. I thought we'd be received well, and we were. Has it been hard, getting corporate sponsorships?

No. The minute you got one, you started in for the next one. The big issue, the place that we are right now, is that we put this thing together really on a shoestring. Our budget is small, between $300,000 and $350,000 a year.

If you look around at the festival world, the biggest guys - I don't know Cannes, but I do know Tribeca, Sundance - are probably in the $20 million operating range. Toronto's probably $30 million, Cannes is probably bigger than that.

But Telluride's a little over $3 million. Full-Frame, the documentary weekend festival in Durham, is about $1.4 million. We need to get to that $1.2 million operating budget.

We're in the middle of a planning process to get to that. That would be perfect. Can we get there? Yeah, we can. But is it a certainty? No. What if you don't get there? Can the festival keep going on a $350,000 budget?

You can certainly stage something for $350,000 a year. But you can't take advantage of the chance to build a major new event in the community at that level. You can fit anything to any level, but my goal from the very beginning was to really build a world-class, top-rated film festival on our own terms, that reflected all of Baltimore's wild and crazy personality. To get to that next level, we're going to need a big infusion of capital. How do you market the festival to potential underwriters?

It's very simple. When you look at what we had in the city already - great museums, two big sports teams, great symphony, great school for the arts, great educational base - one thing you didn't have was a film festival.

We didn't start with [Robert] De Niro or Harvey Feinstein or Robert Redford. But we did start with something really great, which is an artistic core, a city that's sort of proud of its eccentricities - which I think we've brought into the film festival in a great way.

The demographics of these things are great. You look at the major sponsors of Sundance and Telluride, you're looking at corporations like The New York Times and Entertainment Weekly and Volkswagen. They're not interested in Park City, Utah, or Telluride, Colo. They're interested in the crowd that's there, the crowd of filmmakers and the crowd of audiences. How much of your budget are you able to cover through earned income?

In pure earned income, merchandise and ticket sales, between 25 and 35 percent in each year. Sundance and Telluride will get to the 40- to 45-percent level because they sell a lot of very high-priced, all-access passes. We haven't gotten to the stage where you have to buy those passes to get the best access. At Sundance, those are the first things that sell out, even though the high-end passes are ludicrously priced, compared to individual ticket prices. It's $3,500, and if you went to see every film you could possible see, you'd probably see 30 films, maybe spend $300-$400. It's about access.

We're starting to see some growth, where people are starting to buy the more expensive passes, just so they don't have to worry about whether they can get into screenings. Any examples of people you've asked for the guest-host program, but who have yet to accept?

There are whole bunch of people I would love to have as a guest host. Cal Ripken, he and Kelly have attended the festival, to be part of the presentation of a film about him, a documentary that was made about his last year as a baseball player. I'd love to get him back as a guest host. I know what he would pick, and I know the filmmaker. If we could put that all together, it would be really special. Would he do Silence of the Lambs, which he's said is his favorite film?

That's what he would like to do, and that would be really fun. Scheduling everybody would be tough, but [director Jonathan] Demme would love to do it. That would be fun.

Another one where we've just never been able to work it out with her schedule, but I would love to do, is Sally Mann, the photographer. She would like to do The Dead, John Huston's last film. I would love to do that with her. Obviously, the visuals are part of what appeal to her about that. I would love to have part of the Huston family. That's a dream one. Is there one guest host that really stands out, that typifies what you're trying to do?

Branford Marsalis doing The Scent of Green Papaya was such an amazing choice to me. A really beautiful movie that virtually nobody saw, from a Vietnamese filmmaker who I don't think has made another movie. We turned away a lot of people for that one. And he was articulate about the film. It was a beautiful screening.

chris.kaltenbach@baltsun.com