Movie Mecca

For years Angelenos have been complaining that Hollywood, supposedly the film capitol of the Western world, does a dismal job of honoring its own heritage; that almost anyplace else in the world, people care more about the history of film than we do. There are Cinematheques or "film study centers" in 40 other cities around the world. Why not here?

That complaint is now officially passé. In the American Cinematheque, LA lays claim to the coolest film exhibition operation in the nation—and that's not just my opinion. One patron compared the place to the Cinémathèque Français in Paris under Henri Langlois in the 1960s, and the Pacific Film Archive in San Francisco under Tom Luddy in the 1970s—legendary institutions that inspired generations of fans, critics, and budding pros. In its present form, the AC has become one of the rare cultural institutions that doesn't just reflect the present condition of an art form, but helps transform it.

There are other sterling exhibition operations in Los Angeles, of course, from commercial art theaters like the Royal and the Nuart to non-profit outfits like the UCLA Film Archive on the Westwood campus. But for true devotees, the Cinematheque is simply unique: "I feel like I'm a part of a community," says screenwriter John McCormick, who has followed the AC from one temporary venue to another, from one-weekend-a-month events at the imposing Director's Guild Theater on Sunset to every weekend at the cozier Raleigh Studio near Paramount. "I meet people I know here, and we get into heated discussions and share our enthusiasm for the movies. That would never happen at UCLA."

The stuff on the screen is startling, too. The movie is almost certainly something you've never seen before, or even heard about. It might be a brand new film from Spain or France or Italy that hasn't even played the festivals. Or an episode of the 1950s TV series Johnny Staccato, directed by and starring John Cassavetes (the hip-young-actor contingent was out in force that night). Or a daring American indie with a gay or radical feminist theme, and an avant garde visual edge.

It is even more likely to be a violent foreign genre film from the 1960s or '70s, a Spaghetti Western or a Japanese yakuza gangster picture, presented in a gorgeous new 35 mm print, so that the garish sets and the gracefully framed arterial spew can be fully savored. This is the stuff that was showing at grind houses in scary neighborhoods while I was wasting time absorbing "film culture" at the AFI.

When I tell the Cinematheque's chief programmer, Dennis Bartok, that I'm writing a piece "about how cool you guys are," he doesn't bat an eyelash. He says, "We want our line up to have sex appeal, I'd be the first to admit that. Traditional art for art's sake booking policies worked fine in the past, but they're dying out. That's just a fact of life."

Margo Gerber, the AC's publicity director, believes that Los Angeles itself has helped shape their programming style: "Things that do well in San Francisco and New York will not necessarily do well here. By and large high-brow stuff will not sell out for us. This is a post-modern, into-pop-culture city, and you can't take that away."

AC programmer Dennis Bartok strikes a cryptic note: "I've heard it said that what we're trying to do in is make the reprehensible respectable. I'd say it's just the opposite."

Some of its most ardent fans are wondering if the revisonist, "alternative cinema" programming style of the American Cinematheque will be able to survive after December 5, when the organization will move from its current stop-gap digs at Raleigh to their first-ever permanent facility, a pair of high-tech THX equipped screening rooms constructed inside the carefully preserved shell of the classic old Egyptian Theater on Hollywood Boulevard. There will be a restaurant and a small bookstore on the premises, and there will be daily film screenings.

Some people who hear this news, who hear of it as a done deal, can scarcely believe their ears. Hasn't the Cinematheque been talking about doing something like this literally for decades?

Indeed, the dream of a permanent film center for Los Angeles has haunted the Cinematheque and its precursor organization, Filmex, for close to 20 years. It was the pet project of embattled Filmex founder Gary Essert and his partner, in business and life, Gary Abrahams—"The Garys." According to Mike Medavoy, co-chairman (with Peter Dekom) of the Cinematheque's Board of Directors., "The Garys were always interested in having a Cinematheque. But I don't know that anybody in their right mind would have thought it possible to get it this far."

When the history of the project is written, the heroine of the piece, the perosn who made the impossible occur, could turn out to be the Cinematheque's current Executive Director, Barbara Smith. She gies way back, having joined Filmex in 1974, three years after its launch.as LA's first major international film festival, and quickly became an indispensable expediter behind the scenes.

An underlying goal at Filmex, Smith says, was always "to find a place," a secure home base. Too much energy was drained off each year just hunting for screening space—"an awful lot of work to put in," she avers, "for three weeks of furious activity once a year." This led naturally to the notion of year-round facility, to be named after the Cinémathèque Français but modeled more closely upon the National Film Theater in London; something a little grander, perhaps, a little less ad hoc, than the rag-tag Left Bank original.

Essert, a visionary originator but a problematic manager, was expelled from Filmex in 1983, charged with financial irresponsibility by a Board of Directors that included Medavoy, attorney Tom Pollack (later top dog at Universal), and '70s screen icon Tom "Billy Jack" Laughlin. "I'll be the first to admit that budgeting is not my forte," Essert acknowledged at the time.

In 1986, Essert and Abrahams launched a non-profit corporation to work toward a permanent Cinematheque, devoted (in the words of an early prospectus) to "the Moving Picture in all its forms—video, television, multimedia, silent cinema, holography, works-in-progress, emerging technologies."

Again and again, the dream seemed to be just on the verge of coming true, only to evaporate at the last minute. Likely prospects included a niche as the legally-mandated "cultural component" in a luxury hotel complex planned for the old Pan Pacific Theater, and a similar berth at the ill-fated Hollywood Promenade urban renewal project.

Essert and Abrahams were still plugging away when they succumbed to AIDS in 1992, within a few weeks of each other. Filmex morphed into the AFI Fest in 19TK and finally dried up and blew away. The Garys, it was widely thought, would be an impossible act to follow.

Psychologist Leonard Levy, a member of the Board of Directors of both Filmex and the Cinematheque from the beginning, credits Smith with pulling the organization and the film center project back together. "She was always very important," Levy says, "but she was a smaller person in the eyes of the world when the Garys were alive. When they died, she was seen as the transitional person, the indispensable staffer who knew the day to day operations. I think she knew all along that she was capable of taking over, and I don't think we did, at first."

Listening to Smith, today, as she explains her master plan, it's hard to imagine anybody underestimating her. Her office, overlooking the Boulevard from a dowdy old pile on North Highland, suggests uncluttered efficiency; a couple of family photos the only non-work related objects. Her manner is cordial but a bit remote, as if at least half of her attention is fixed firmly upon a list of dates and facts and dollar amounts scrolling past on a mental TelePrompTer.

Faced with the prospect of bootstapping an organization that was, in the eyes of many, indistinguishable from its the late founders, Smith says, she made a couple of sweeping changes: "Filmex was a product of the 70s, and this was the 90s. Nostalgia is all well and good, but it was time to move ahead. At Filmex, we announced things very grandly, and quite often the things we announced didn't happen. I decided that in the '90s we were not going to announce anything. We would have only one goal: to build an audience."

For starters, the organization's core audience "skewed old," heavy on those who had been on board since the Filmex days; it had to be rejuvenated. "Those older viewers are people like me," Smith admits, "especially now that I'm pushing 50 and have my daughter at home. You just can't run out to a movie at the drop of a hat. If we continued to cater to the same old audience we were facing a predictable decline."

Smith determined early on, she says, "not be doctrinaire about what people's jobs were. I wanted to get really talented young people and give them some scope to exercise their talents. Just because you were hired to do public relations doesn't mean you can't be an effective programmer."

It seemed to Smith that some of her more recent younger hires, people with no visible nostalgia for the glory that was Filmex (or for established high-brow traditions of "museum" movie exhibition), might be well equipped to attract the new audience she was looking for.

There was some initial resistance to Smith's approach. Certain members of the Board ("who shall remain nameless") urged her to hire an established "star" programmer from outside LA, as a way of announcing to contributors that the Cinematheque was still viable. "But," says Smith flatly, "I decided that I was not going to hire a quote-unquote Artistic Director. I never made an announcement to that effect, and I even interviewed a couple of people. I just never did it."

In effect, Smith was buying time, so that young staffers already in place, Dennis Bartok, Margot Gerber, and Andrew Crane, all barely into their 30s, would have a chance to prove themselves.

"It all came to pass without any sort of bad feeling or confrontation," Bartok says. "And it was an amazing vote of confidence for all of us."

Smith grins: "I just never had any doubt that they could handle it."

Andrew Crane had been hired in 1991, fresh out of Cal State LA, with a BA in Film and Television, as the Cinematheque's receptionist. Within a year, Bartok had asked him to take over the programming of short films, and he'd been asked by Smith to ocersee her expanded membership drive.

Margot Gerber, too, signed on just a few months before the Garys died, in her case to oversee publicity; to be the lead the drive to expand the audience. This task she undertook with a venegeance. Membership rose from around 600 five years ago to 1,000 today, with the additional difference, Gerber says, that where older members often joined just to support the orgnization, today's members tend to be people who actually attend screenings regularly. Distribution of the bi-monthly promotional flyer increased from about 1,000 copies to the current high of 30,000.

"Now for the first time we're getting a lot of students," Gerber says, "especially from the art schools, from Cal Arts and Art Center."

Programming became a part of Gerber's job description in December, 1995, when, with Thomas Harris, she launched the bi-monthly Alternative Screen showcase for new independent cinema. From the start, she was looking for films that were independent not just in content but also in "personal style, in spirit, vision and form," Alternative Screen has favored edgy works that are "using cinema in new ways. Traditional narratives that happen to be done on low budgets are not interesting to us." It quickly became a place where outlaw-cinema stalwerts gathered to cross-pollinate and swap trade secrets. Deals are made in the lobby during these shows, and the LA indies scene is stronger for it.

Dennis Bartok, Smith says, "was originally hired not to program but to work in the programming department, at a time when the Garys were fading and doing less and less of the actual work." A recent NYU Film School graduate, Bartok had been working for Tribeca Films in New York, as the personal assistant to Robert De Niro's producer partner Jane Rosenthal.

"I think it was felt," he told me, "that my connections in the industry might be helpful in getting guests to come in, and in prying prints loose, which in terms of time spent is still a major part of my job."

But as a matter of course, more and more of the actual work of programming fell to Bartok, "and it dawned on people on the Board," Smith says, "that I never had hired an artistic director. By that time, of course, our attendance figures were climbing and it was clear to all that there was no need."

New films from Asia, for instance, were already showcased superbly at UCLA's annual Asia Pacific Film Festival. And older American pictures were staple fare on Turner Classic Movies. Bartok "made a conscious decision to put the Golden Age of Hollywood on the back burner."

As Dennis Bartok told the LA Weekly's Hazel-Dawn Dumpert last year, attendance picked up when he stopped trying to program standard art house fare, "things that I thought we ought to be showing," and began following his own eclectic instincts. A clear turning point was a 1993 tribute to Italian horror specialist Mario Bava, a genius of the lurid, a unique candy-colored-gothic style. Incongruously gorgeous slasher films like Blood and Black Lace endeared Bava to horror freaks and to genre-friendly directors like Martin Scorsese and Joe Dante. But he had no critical or academic profile.

"When we were planning the Bava series," Bartok says, "there was a lot of anxiety around the office. Would people really come out for a bunch of obscure European horror films? And we ended up selling-out every show. That showed us that there really was an audience for this stuff."

Some AC patrons must be looking for cheap thrills with the imprimateur of a Serious Cultural Institution. And there are times when that's exactly what's delivered, neither more nor less. Tributes to the schlock specialists of Troma Films, who foisted Rabid Grannies upon an unsuspecting populace, or to Italian splatter sagas of Lucio Fulci and Jess Franco, were AC shows for which no real aesthetic case could be made—and, interestingly, attendence fell off at those events.

Suprisingly often, however, Bartoks' programming coughs up revelations. A pristine wide-screen print of Bava's sensous stalker thriller Blood and Black Lace revealed clear stylistic parallels with the work of some of his revered contemporaries, like Bertolucci and Visconti. Perhaps there was an operatic "Italianate" film style abroad in the 1960s and '70s that cut across distinctions of genre and even of "quality." (Later AC shows of Italian horror pictures by Dario Argento, and of various Spaghetti Westerns, only confirmed this impression; there must have been some in the Roman air in that period.)

Bartok meets programming challenges boldly, but not without caution. His popular Japanese genre cycle began as an attempt to find something fresh with the zing of the popular action films from Hong Kong. A killer retrospective of samurai films by neglected master Hideo Gosha and led to last year's sold-out series "Outlaw Masters of Japanese Cinema," with its vintage yakuza gangster pictures and startling "pink films," specimens of a distinctive Japanese sub-genre of S&M inflected softcore porn. The Japanese genre directors were plainly brothers under the skin of the American termite autuers Bartok loves and has programmed often: Don Siegel, Robert Aldritch, Budd Boetticher, Anthony Mann.

"Dennis is not a snob, like a lot of the film festival people I've met," declares Chris D. The former Flesheaters lead singer and lifelong filmfreak has co-programmed several of Bartok's "outlaw" programs, including the Italian horror and Spaghetti Western cycles. "Dennis doesn't get bogged down in what is academically respectable. What we look for is a willingness to go beyond a certain point in telling the truth about something, even if that might be unpleasant to some people."

Bartok's programming is perfect for a core film-buff audience that has come of age with the video cassette, that is comfortable with pop forms and cultural variations and can "see through them" to emotional and stylistic qualities that, by now, we are accustomed to acknowledging in domestic genre product, in Westerns and gangster films.

If there's a persistent beef about Bartok it's that he books too many "boys movies:" Margot Gerber thinks the AC could probably use at least one more regular programmer, so that the schedule won't reflect just "one person's taste." Smith, however, insists that the Cinematheque can't be judged on the basis of any one bi-monthly schedule, or even three or four: "Someone might say to me, 'You haven't been showing enough films directed by women,' but if you look at things like our recent Spanish and Italian series you'll see many films by women, reflecting a global trend. You need to look at our programs over a period of years, and you have to look within the programs."

At the Egyptian, the Cinematheque will have more seats to fill, more often, than ever before. The danger, according to Smith, is that having succeeded in attracting one new group of moviegoers, the Cinematheque will get lazy. "We always have to be attracting a new audience," she insists. "That means keeping our ears to the ground, and listening to people, making sure we're always connected,. Of course that's tricky, too, because you don't want to just be trendy.

"Besides, it's not as if we don't still do things for the older audience. We still do French movies—and that's when they come out!"

In the early '90s, the crumbling Egyptian Theater, a relic of the silent era, was a National Historic Landmark. A site with resonance to burn, the Egyptian was by impresario Sid Grauman in 1922, with the world premiere of Douglas Fairbanks' Robin Hood. The Egyptian was the first big theater in Hollywood city limits, and was for years a hard-ticket luxury venue. Toward the end it was hosting double bills of third and fourth run duds, and the owner, the United Artists theater chain, was eager to unload it. Smith notes that the base ticket price at the Egyptian was exactly the same on the day it opened as the day it closed: a cool buck-fifty.

The city purchased the property and tried to find a buyer to "do an El Capitain" on the place, a showcase restoration. When that effort fizzled, Clarke Sanou of the Community Redevelopment Agency told Smith about an obscure urban renewal loan program operated by HUD; if the AC could secure a loan to cover the costs of restoration, the CRA would sell them the property outright for exactly one dollar.

Smith came away with a $2 million dollar loan, interest free, with 20 years to pay — an on-going expense that was comperable to what they were paying already to rent theater space on weekends. With the addition of a major grant from the CRA itself, one from the NEA, and another from Time-Warner, the $9.5 million project was finally solvent.

Because the Egyptian is a landmark, though, the Cinematheque can make no major changes either to the external features or to the shape of the interior space. Architect Craig Hodgetts got around the problem in an ingenious way, by inserting two new THX equipped screening rooms (a main auditorium of 650 seats and another with 78) inside the restored shell of the original structure. Los Angeles Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff has already declared the design "a perfect fusion of old and new."

The preservation imperative ended up paying dividends. Because the theater was built for screenings of silent movies, with live orchestral accompaniment, it has been a disaster acoustically for most kinds of electronic sound. "The more technologically advanced theater sound became," Smith says, "the worse the Egyptian sounded." Hodgetts solution is a pair of ceiling-high sound-baffled acoustic panels that will slide into place as the lights go down, enclosing the crowd in a small space that's perfect for modern sound reproduction. And when a silent film is screened with live music (a 1922 Wurlitzer theater organ has been donated and will be permanently installed behind the main screen), the panels roll back and the original acoustics shine forth.

This will be a distinct plus when the American Cinematheque at the Egyptian hosts its opening night gala on December 5: a screening of the movie that opened there 75 years ago to the day, Cecil B De Mille's 1923 version of The Ten Commandments. The original score will be performed by a full orchestra.

"The first third of the movie takes place in ancient Egypt," Smith beams. "What could be more perfect?"

Will the American Cinematheque's cutting edge rep as a haven for dangerous cinema survive the move to such a monumental exhibition space?

Board member Leonard Levy is optimistic. As the Cinematheque's programming expands and diversifies, he suggests, "the audience will follow, because they've come to trust the organization." Even the changes of venue that have dogged the enterprise, bouncing it from the Director's Guild to Raleigh, could turn out to be a blessing in disguise, because the loyalty that's been built up adheres to an institution and to a style of programming, not to any one physical location.

Plans announced at press time suggest that the AC is sticking to its guns. A major Hong Kong cinema series is in the works, and another on the wilder side of Japanese animation. "Outlaw Masters of Japanese Cinema 2" is on the way, and retros on the work of France's Leo Carax and Taiwan's Hou Hsiao-hsien.

The first major event in the silent film arena will be a huge series of legendary serials by the French pioneer Louis Feuillade, complete screenings of Fantomas, Tai-Min, and Les Vampyres, a world-class programming coup.

The wild-ass shows the Cinematheque is known for will keep on coming, but will be visible in a larger context.

:"What we want to do," Bartok says, "is establish a level playing field for all films, where everything can be considered. We want people to be able to look at Dario Argento's Suspiria, or a film by Agnes Varda, and approach them both with the same wide-open point of view."

At the Cinematheque, the obvious differences between films are less important than what the best of them have in common. What it comes down to is a search for buried treasure in places no one thought to look before.

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