SLO film fest to give its highest honor to a fierce, feminist movie icon

A fierce, feminist movie icon will be honored in March at the San Luis Obispo International Film Festival.

“Foxy Brown” star Pam Grier will receive the King Vidor Award for Career Achievement on March 17 at the Fremont Theater in downtown San Luis Obispo. The evening kicks off with the George Sidney Independent Film Awards and concludes with an after-party at two downtown locations: Luna Red and Mission Plaza.

Turner Classic Movies host Ben Mankiewicz will present the award to Grier, then interview the actress onstage.

Grier, 68, will be the third woman to receive the festival’s highest honor, following Eva Marie Saint in 2004 and Ann-Margret in 2016. Other past recipients of the King Vidor Award, named after the Oscar-winning director of “War and Peace,” include Josh Brolin and Morgan Freeman.

Grier was a staple of the exploitation era of the early 1970s, playing bold, brassy, assertive women in movies such as “The Big Doll House,” “Foxy Brown” and “Sheba, Baby.” (Her character in 1973’s “Coffy,” a nurse turned vigilante, is described on the film’s poster as “the baddest one-chick hit-squad that ever hit town.”)

Grier enjoyed a career resurgence in the mid-’90s thanks in part to a movie that paid tribute to her blaxploitation roots: 1997’s “Jackie Brown.”

Her other screen credits include “Escape from L.A.” and “Ghosts of Mars,” as well as TV’s “The L Word,” “Smallville” and “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.”

Tickets for the March 17 awards ceremony cost $20, or $15 for students and film society members; after-party admission costs $45 to $50.

The San Luis Obispo International Film Festival runs March 13 through 18 at venues around San Luis Obispo County. For more information, call 805-546-3456 or visit www.slofilmfest.org.

This story was originally published March 5, 2018 at 2:15 PM with the headline "SLO film fest to give its highest honor to a fierce, feminist movie icon."