Two years ago a representative from “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno” phoned Kan Film Festival organizers. Leno’s crew was asking permission to put a young filmmaker on the TV program whose work had been screened at the event.

“I said, ‘Not if you’re going to make fun of them. Not if you’re going to deride the fact that this is called the Kan Film Festival not Cannes,'” says Pat Hamarstrom, executive director of Kan. “I never heard back from them.”

These days, the joke is really on Leno.

Now in its 13th year and boasting more than 200 entries, the Kan Film Festival is reinforcing just how vibrant the movie-making scene has become in the Wheat State. The event moves to the Lawrence Arts Center this year and has grown to include 20 categories that range from comedies to documentaries to music videos.

Hamarstrom says the festival is one of the few regional ones in which the entries are juried during the public screenings and not prior. Its student-friendly atmosphere is buoyed by the fact that it’s the only fest in the nation to feature a category for elementary schoolers.

“Our mission is to cultivate filmmaking and filmmakers,” she emphasizes. “It would be really easy to make more money by bringing in lots of filmmakers from the outside and shift the student division to an obscure slot. But the intent of most of this is to keep it focused on developing filmmakers.”

‘Patterns of Thread’

Patrick Rea and Ryan Jones know quite a bit about how to develop a film career in Kansas.

The team has made 26 movies together while both were earning degrees in film studies at Kansas University. (They graduated in 2002). Their submissions have been finalists at Kan for four years running.

This year’s entry is “Patterns of Thread,” which will screen around 4:30 p.m. at Saturday’s Open Division session. The picture is based on writer Ray Bradbury’s short story “Embroidery.”

“They showed us a lot of short films in (John) Tibbett’s class that were from ‘Ray Bradbury Theatre,'” recalls Rea as to what inspired him. “I was a big fan of ‘Twilight Zone’-ish story lines. I wanted to come up with something that could be fairly simple. The whole thing is set on a porch.”

Ryan Jones, left, and Patrick Rea collaborate during a recent shoot. The pair's adaptation of a Ray Bradbury short story screens at this year's Kan Film Festival.

The story concerns a group of elderly women casually knitting as they await some devastating fate that they perceive can’t be avoided.

“I had read the story and thought it would be interesting,” Rea says. “Some people may think it’s dated because it was written in the (1950s), but I think it’s just as important now as it was then.”

The filmmakers paid a publishing fee to Bradbury’s company for the non-exclusive rights to the story. They also mailed the author a tape of the finished piece.

“Ray Bradbury got a copy and sent us a letter saying he approved of it,” Rea says. “He said he really appreciated what we did with it. He mentioned that he had visited Sundance years ago and ‘felt like roadkill.’ He had a film there and it didn’t go as well as hoped, and he wished us better luck.”

Blood drive

• KAN Film FestivalSaturday, June 5, 8:00 a.m. – 7:00 p.mall ages, free
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Rea and Jones describe their filmmaking approach as kind of a Lennon and McCartney partnership. While both handle specific duties on each picture — Rea typically directs while Jones orchestrates the post-production editing and effects — they generally share all the credit.

“We just kind of bounce ideas off of each other,” says Rea, who also works as a production assistant at Sunflower Broadband Channel 6. “The last project we did had a script, but we came up with numerous ideas while shooting that aren’t even in the script.”

So far this strategy has helped draw national attention to the duo’s talents. Recently, they were announced as winners in Fangoria magazine’s Blood Drive contest.

“I don’t know how many films were submitted, but seven were picked and two of them were ours,” says Jones (who is oddly enough NOT the Ryan Jones from Shawnee whose documentary is in competition at this year’s Kan Film Festival).

Their movies “Disturbances” and “A Man and his Finger” are selected to be part of a nationally released horror anthology. The DVD is emceed by shock rocker Rob Zombie and hits stores on Tuesday. Jones says the compilation will be available locally at Best Buy and Blockbuster.

It’s not the only horror-themed flick calling attention to the 24-year-old filmmakers.

“We won a top prize at a contest in Los Angeles from Cinescape magazine for making a ‘Friday the 13th’ spoof,” Rea explains. “The original plan was they were going to put it on the box set, but they’ve dropped a few of the extras because they’re trying to fit it onto five DVDs instead of eight.”

• 6News video: Lawrence filmmakers chosen by Fangoria magazine

The pair also has finished a grim project called “A Few Miles Back” that they hope to submit to high schools to use for drinking-and-driving campaigns.

And their short “Cell-ular” has been accepted to the Tel Aviv International Film Festival.

Any chance they’ll be traveling with it to Israel?

“It costs $1,200 to go there,” says Jones. “If I had that kind of money I’d buy another computer tower.”

Festival atmosphere

Rea is both a competitor and a juror at this year’s Kan — though he is quick to stress that he is obviously not judging any divisions in which his work is entered.

“I liked a lot of the stuff, especially in the high school category,” he says. “They had a lot of outlandish imagination, probably because they don’t have restrictions that the college categories have.”

Regardless of the success he has found on his own, Rea views the festival circuit as crucial to his ongoing development as a filmmaker.

“It’s good because it shows the film to an objective audience,” he explains. “You start off showing a film to friends and family, and they’re never completely as honest as an audience.”

Rea says it’s always thrilling to witness his work being unveiled at the Kan Film Festival.

“It’s fun to sit behind some people and listen to what they say,” he confides. “Unless, of course, they say, ‘That was crap!'”