The Palm Springs International Film Festival celebrates its 20th anniversary Tuesday with a star-filled awards gala honoring the likes of Clint Eastwood, Dustin Hoffman, Ron Howard, Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet, Sean Penn and other Hollywood luminaries.

But this year, the black-tie event is just the beginning.

Programming kicks off Thursday and continues through Jan. 19. In between, 210 films from 73 nations will be screened over 12 days, including 77 premieres and 50 of the 67 films being considered for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar.

But those kind of statistics don't come easy.

The journey began when Palm Springs icon Sonny Bono launched the festival in 1990 with a dream of screening great foreign films and attracting A-list Hollywood stars. As a restaurant owner and mayor, he also sought to lure tourists to bolster the city's economy.

Fast-forward to the 2004 festival when Darryl Macdonald, Bono's first program director who became executive director in 2003, declared, “Sonny's vision was realized.”

What happened in between was, well, worthy of the movies.

Macdonald credits two main players for the development of the festival.

“The biggest driver of the festival's emergence was, of course, Sonny Bono, who, in the late 1980s felt that a film festival was exactly the kind of event that might extend the truncated tourist season in Palm Springs, and generate the kind of publicity that would help put Palm Springs on the map as a tourism destination year-round,” he said.

“That first year's event (in 1990) was an immediate success, drawing over 17,000 filmgoers in the course of its five-day run, and generating positive press coverage from publications including the L.A. Times, Variety and the Hollywood Reporter.”

The second major player in the festival's success was Harold Matzner, a longtime philanthropist-restaurateur who had been recruited by Bono and became a driving influence this decade when the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks threatened the festival's future.

“He (Matzner) brought on Earl Greenburg, who, together with Jackie Lee Houston and a committed support team of board members and Los Angeles allies, reinvigorated the awards gala,” Macdonald said, “making it the star-studded powerhouse it has become.”