Pop quiz: Which of the following movies have you heard of? That’s right — not seen, just heard of.
• “Boynton Beach Club”
• “Nina’s Tragedies”
• “Bonjour, Monsieur Shlomi”
• “Modigliani”
• “Watermarks”
• “Free Zone”
• “La Petite Jerusalem”
• “The Tollbooth”
• “Live and Become”
• “When Do We Eat?”
• “Lost Embrace”
• “Or”
• “Amen”
• “The Ninth Day”
If you checked seven or more, consider yourself a film maven. You’re probably a loyal supporter of one of the local Jewish film festivals and a regular reader of j.’s arts section.
But if you’re a casual moviegoer, even one who makes a point of checking the entertainment section of the daily paper every Friday to see what’s opening, those films likely never made it onto your radar.
It’s not a matter of discrimination, by any means. Those movies suffered the fate of most low-profile foreign and independent films lacking big-name actors and TV ad budgets. Namely, either they never received a booking in a Bay Area theater, or they played one week and were gone before you knew about it.
“Distributors are under a lot of pressure to have new things in their pipeline, so they pick things up they like and hope will be successful,” explains the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival’s artistic director, Nancy Fishman. “Then they open them in New York or Los Angeles. And if they’re not successful there, they cut their losses and don’t open in other markets around the country. And I think that might be a mistake for some films.”
Thinkfilm, for example, did a targeted test release of “When Do We Eat?” in three markets last spring. The distributor promoted the edgy seder comedy at singles groups and social organizations. In South Florida, they approached a slew of synagogues. They tried a mixture of both strategies in Los Angeles.
The film, which includes an ecstasy-dosed patriarch and an incestuous coupling of cousins, didn’t get great reviews or generate much box office. So Thinkfilm pulled the plug, and didn’t open “When Do We Eat?” anywhere else — though it now is available on DVD.
It should come as no surprise that Jewish-themed films regularly get theatrical releases in New York and, to a lesser degree, Los Angeles. Distributors consider the sizable Jewish populations, along with the multitude of print and radio outlets, and take the plunge.
While it’s expensive to launch a film in those two cities, the potential return makes the gamble worthwhile. But the numbers are less enticing in other cities around the country. Even San Francisco, which is right behind Los Angeles in ticket sales for foreign-language films, is far from a slam-dunk.
“It’s very expensive and takes a lot of resources to release a movie in San Francisco,” said David Fenkel, vice president of marketing for New York-based Thinkfilm, which distributed “Fateless,” “Protocols of Zion” and “I Like Killing Flies” in addition to “When Do We Eat?”
“You need one of two things, if not both,” he said. “You need a national campaign, which costs a lot of money, and money for advertising, marketing, publicity and promotion.
“You’re talking about specific types of movies, and a lot of distributors go market-to-market and don’t have those resources,” he continued. “You can’t try San Francisco without doing it right.”
The ones with the deep pockets to “do it right,” of course, are the Hollywood studios. But they don’t loom large in this discussion because the ad campaigns for mainstream movies — “Bee Season” is a recent example — generally play down any Jewish elements. (We’ll see how Paramount Vantage promotes its adaptation of Marianne Pearl’s memoir, “A Mighty Heart,” coming in June with Angelina Jolie starring as the wife of Daniel Pearl.)
“Let’s face it, Hollywood has only rarely dipped its toe into the waters of Jewish identity and Jewish subject-matter film,” said Peter Stein, executive director of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival. “When it has, it has often slipped and stumbled headfirst into a bucket of stereotypes. On the other hand, when a studio makes or releases a picture, you can guarantee it will at least be noticed in theaters because they will market it well.”
But Hollywood’s general lack of interest in Jewish-themed pictures hasn’t stopped independent filmmakers and foreign directors from picking up the slack. As noted, the smaller distributors acquire a portion of the titles for limited theatrical release. Lately they are adding a new wrinkle to an old strategy — film festivals.
Once upon a time, a distributor used a film festival as a kind of sneak preview for a film that would open theatrically shortly thereafter. The company viewed it as a promotional opportunity, and gave the festival the film for free.
These days, festival screenings increasingly end up being the only time the movie plays in a theater in that market. Consequently, the distributor charges the festival a rental fee.
“It is true that with the proliferation of screens in the Bay Area, and the number of art house and international distributors, we’ve come to expect that a festival is not the last chance to see a film,” Stein noted. “We want those films in our local theaters — and that is not the case.
“More and more, festivals are proving to be the first and last opportunity to see films with other people,” Stein continued. “The big difference is that there is revenue to be made finding the audience in front of their TV sets through DVD distribution. The cost of distribution is extremely high, so the [theatrical] method of matching audiences with films is slowly shrinking. And that’s a real shame.”
DVD is the elephant in the room in any current discussion of movies. We’ll return to that notion shortly, but it’s worth taking a moment to reflect on how accustomed we have become to seeing Jewish stories and characters onscreen. What once was an everybody-pile-in-the-car-and-go event has become something we take for granted.
What is it about movies that give them such a prominent place in mass culture and in our individual psyches? The communal aspect of moviegoing — admittedly more so in the past than now — is an important element. But Rabbi Judah Dardik, the movie-mad spiritual leader at Orthodox Beth Jacob Congregation in Oakland, pinpoints the visceral effects of screen stories.
“Films are a powerful medium. They possess an ability to pull us in, that other media can’t match,” Dardik said. “We tend to be visual creatures. We can more easily recognize aspects of our own lives or character onscreen.”
Indeed, the original impetus for a Jewish film festival back in the early 1980s was to present and encourage images of Jews that were missing from mainstream movies (Woody Allen notwithstanding). The programming was an explicit effort to reflect the global range of Jewish experience — not just to contradict stereotypes but to destroy them. At the same time, an audience existed that was hungry to see stories about Jews who were neither New Yorkers nor shtetl-related.
That was not just a Jewish phenomenon, incidentally. Similar frustrations with being ignored or insulted by the popular media inspired other ethnic and identity-oriented groups to create their own film festivals — from Asian American to lesbian and gay to Latino to Arab. The filmmakers were applauded loudly for focusing on their own communities, and that encouragement led to an explosion in those so-called “niche” movies.
Dardik notes that films with a Jewish theme were once so rare that every Jewish moviegoer would run out to see “Exodus” or “Cast a Giant Shadow,” or even Gene Wilder opposite Harrison Ford in “The Frisco Kid.”
“‘Yentl’ was very unusual,” he said. “Nowadays there’s more out there, and that attracts different audiences.”
In other words, the number of Jewish-themed films and the range of subjects they cover have grown to the point where the audience has fragmented. Fans of the secular American comedy “Keeping Up With the Steins” mostly avoided the Israeli Orthodox comedy “Ushpizin.” Aficionados of the latter, in turn, weren’t drawn to the retirement-community comedy “Boynton Beach Club.”
Of course, our motives for choosing films are individual, varied and complex — as is our relationship to the work itself.
“Some [people] may be going for the movie — going to a Jewish film as they would go to any other film,” Dardik said. “For others, it’s an expression of connection with [their] Jewish identity. I enjoy seeing a Jewish-themed film because it relates to my identity or a different portion of the Jewish community. Or I enjoy it because it reflects my life or a Jewish life that’s not my own that I’m curious about or I want to experience on some level. And [film] is a safe way to experience different Jewish worlds.”
When all is said and done, however, even a film that hits a bull’s-eye with Jewish audiences isn’t assured of financial success. The population of Jews, even in urban centers outside of New York and Los Angeles where specialty films get releases, isn’t large enough to make a movie a hit.
“Just because a film has a Jewish theme or is Israeli [doesn’t mean] that’s the only audience a distributor or filmmaker wants to get,” said Rebeca Conget, vice president of theatrical distribution for Manhattan-based New Yorker Films, whose titles include “Free Zone.”
“You want to get a broader audience. If that’s all you’re getting, that puts the film into a ghetto.”
At the same time, a distributor would be foolish to overlook a film’s obvious primary audience. So New Yorker Films agreed to show “Free Zone,” a drama by veteran Israeli director Amos Gitai and featuring actress Natalie Portman, in last year’s San Francisco Jewish Film Festival. But Conget concluded that festival screenings don’t have the same carryover effect on the theatrical release that they once did.
“They’ll do very well at the festival — sell out, win an award, get some attention,” Conget said. “But you open the film a month or a couple of months later, and it’s like it doesn’t exist. The press doesn’t respond, and the audiences really don’t go to see it either.”
Indeed, New Yorker Films has yet to release “Free Zone” in Bay Area theaters, and it seems unlikely it will ever open here. Chalk it up as another casualty of the increasingly brutal theatrical climate for foreign and specialty films.
Conget and others lament the dwindling coverage in daily newspapers, with Hollywood fare automatically given bigger reviews while the brief critiques of smaller films are buried. The unending stream of movie-star profiles and the latest celebrity scandal eat up even more of newspapers’ arts and entertainment section.
Distributors — and filmmakers, for that matter — are generally careful not to indict audiences, although there’s no question they are a major element in the equation.
“You know, American popular taste is hard to get a handle on in terms of what inspires folks to attend,” mused Rabbi Martin Weiner, retired spiritual leader of Congregation Sherith Israel in San Francisco and a longtime film buff.
“Some people will just write off certain troubling themes,” he said. “Downfall,” the German film about Hitler’s last days in the bunker, “was an incredible film and it stayed here, what, two weeks?”
Perhaps a bit longer, but his point stands. So for some time now, niche distributors (as well as major studios) have relied on home video, not the theatrical release, to make their profit.
On occasion, the theatrical run — especially when it’s limited to New York and Los Angeles — seems intended more to promote the inevitable DVD release than to publicize the big-screen booking. (That shift in emphasis has overtaken Hollywood, where it seems as if fully half the studio movies are aimed at the rental and sell-through markets.)
For independent filmmakers, the economy of producing DVDs and marketing them via a dedicated Web site or an online retailer eliminated some of the traditional barriers to reaching an audience. By all accounts, that’s a good thing.
But short-term benefits may run the risk of ignoring long-term problems. And that’s where the accumulated behavior of thousands of individual moviegoers comes into play.
“DVDs have made audiences feel complacent that, somehow or other, there are these films out there that I will hear about and enjoy,” said the S.F. Jewish Film Festival’s Stein. “But the fact is, what gets made and what gets financed is a direct reflection of what people voted for with their feet and dollars in the past year or two or three.
“So if people insist on showing up at the screening of the wonderful Israeli feature ‘Broken Wings’ or ‘Walk on Water’ or ’51 Birch Street’ — and they demonstrate that this subject is vital and important to enough people — distributors will listen. And financiers and independent film production companies will fill the pipeline with more content of interest to that audience.”
Cover and cover photo by Cathleen Maclearie