CHAPTER ONE – AWAKENINGS
“Time to get up . . . Erich von Stroheim died.”
Possibly other ten-year-old boys would wake up to the news that Mickey Mantle had hit a game-winning homer, but on May 13, 1957, this is how my father, Leon, chose to start my day.
When I was growing up in Yonkers, New York, Leon was the one who woke my younger brother Jon and me. My mother, Julia, had already left for the day, going into Manhattan to teach at the High School of Music and Art. Leon owned an art-supplies store in a nearby shopping center and had a much more leisurely morning, listening to the classical music station WQXR and then making sure we were off to school.
Leon was a passionate film buff who passed that love on to me. I look back at that morbid news bulletin as an emblematic moment, in which he recognized the budding film fan in me. I was still quite a few years away from seeing von Stroheim’s two best-known roles, in La Grande Illusion and Sunset Boulevard, but I must have already known who the Viennese director and actor was. Perhaps it was from films shown on TV’s The Early Show or Million Dollar Movie. Perhaps it was from magazine caricatures of the bald, monocled von Stroheim, with his air of menace, who was known during his career as “The Man You Loved to Hate.” Perhaps it was from images in the Life magazine repository in our garage going back to the late 1930s, my own private library on days home from school.
CHAPTER TWO – THANK YOU, MILLION DOLLAR MOVIE
After many years of living in Vermont, I had one of those dreams that put me back in college (in my case, Columbia University) with one more semester to go. Ever the optimist, I reasoned in my dream, “Well, at least I’ll have access to all those great TV stations.” My unconscious seemed to be in touch with the television of my youth, when several local stations (WNEW, WPIX, WNVA, and WOR) had schedules to fill and often plugged the gaps with old films. Back then, I didn’t have to go to revival houses in Manhattan to experience the richness of Hollywood film. Whether they were classics or not, they were right there in my Yonkers bedroom.
CHAPTER FOUR – COMING OF AGE IN THE “HEROIC AGE”
Every time I see three-by-five lined index cards, I am transported back to my tenth-grade English class. Mrs. Beale instructed us to use those cards as an organizational aid for our oral book reports. The book I chose was Arthur Knight’s The Liveliest Art,a comprehensive history of motion pictures. Looking back, this choice said a lot about my growing interest in learning about a larger context for the movies I so enjoyed.
Knight was the film critic for the Saturday Review of Literature when he wrote his influential book in 1957. The paperback copy, which appeared in 1959, was a present from my parents. As usual, they encouraged the passions of my two brothers and me, no matter how unconventional.
The Liveliest Art was my first exposure to a coherent narrative of film history. For my report, each index card represented a different era: silent film giving way to sound; the heyday of the early sound era in Hollywood with its representative genres (such as musicals, war films, gangster films, etc.); the post–World War II crisis, created by the emergence of television; and the antitrust ruling that put an end to the monopoly that was the lifeblood of the Hollywood studio system. (My classmate Greg, a car nerd just as I was a film nerd, prepared a report on Henry Ford and as an adult became a designer of racing car engines.)
My copy of The Liveliest Art still sits on my reference shelf, tucked between Sergei Eisenstein’s Film Form and Pauline Kael’s I Lost It at the Movies. Nearby is another influential book I discovered during my teenage years: Parker Tyler’s Classics of the Foreign Film. Tyler’s 1962 book, copiously illustrated with film stills, devoted an extensive essay to each of 75 films, from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919) to Michelangelo Antonioni’s La Notte (1961). I discovered later that Tyler was a poet and novelist as well as a critic, an out gay man who wrote the first book about homosexuality and film, Screening the Sexes. At the time, all I knew was that he wrote with a passion so persuasive I wanted to see every film on his list. By my last count, I still have twenty-three to go.
CHAPTER FIVE – THANK YOU, SCHOOL OF VISUAL ARTS
A notice on the bulletin board at the High School of Music and Art provided the catalyst for my first—and only—film appreciation class. And what an enlightening class it was.In the spring of 1964, my mother, Julia, saw the notice outside her art classroom and wondered if I would be interested in taking this course. It would meet each Monday night during the summer at the School of Visual Arts (SVA) on 23rd Street in Manhattan. I didn’t have to think about it, even though I had no idea who would be teaching the course and I knew that in all likelihood I would be the youngest enrollee.
I didn’t know anything about SVA: how it began in 1947 as the Cartoonists and Illustrators School or how the visionary artist and educator Silas Rhodes turned it into the School of Visual Arts in 1956. The school’s website credits Rhodes with “reflecting a belief that there is more to art than technique, and that learning to become an artist is not the same as learning a trade.”
Rhodes was still running the school in 1964. Earlier that year he had worked with the illustrator/filmmaker/graphic designer Everett Aison to start the Film Department. One of Aison’s first acts as department head was to hire the renowned (though unknown to me at the time) film historian William K. Everson, who co-taught that summer class with Aison. How lucky I was: two accomplished figures in the film world would be my instructors.
CHAPTER SIX – TWO CAMPUSES, TWO UPHEAVALS
It was a surprise to learn that Berkeley had an even more active film culture than Columbia. If I had done my Berkeley history homework, I would have known that Pauline Kael, Ernest Callenbach, and Edward Landberg had been at the center of a lively film scene there throughout the 1950s and 1960s. The Cinema Theater and the Guild Theater, which they helped found, still stood in downtown Berkeley.
Just a block from campus was the Northside Theater, named for that extremely hilly neighborhood. Whoever programmed that theater had a fondness for the French New Wave, and that is where I caught up with many films I had missed in New York (like Jean-Luc Godard’s Vivre Sa Vie). There I also laughed as loud as I ever had in a theater, seeing Woody Allen’s What’s Up, Tiger Lily? Allen had bought the rights to a low-grade Japanese spy movie and redubbed it in English. Now with a plot involving a secret recipe for chicken salad, it featured such lines as “I’d call him a sadistic, bestial necrophile, but that would be beating a dead horse.”
The theater where I spent the most time was right off the campus on Telegraph Avenue. Tom Luddy and others had just founded the Telegraph Repertory Cinema. In 1971, this venture became part of the impressive Pacific Film Archive, a few blocks away. But in its original incarnation the Telegraph Rep, as it was known, was, to put it generously, funky. I quickly learned not to sit on the left side of the theater, lest the dialogue be drowned out by the all-night laundromat next door.
CHAPTER SEVEN – ARRIVING AT THE “CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE”
Some acquaintances of mine from those days still assume that, like them, I am a Goddard graduate. Why, they even saw me taking classes there. It’s true: the Goddard instructors I met at the time didn’t care who was enrolled and who wasn’t. They longed for eager learners, regardless of their status at the school, who could get up in the morning and take part in the discussion. I took three classes during my first two years in Vermont that ranked with the best I had taken during my years at Columbia and UC Berkeley: Virginia Heffron’s course Myth and Symbol, Marc Estrin’s listening class in the Beethoven late quartets, and the Javanese gamelan ensemble, led by Dennis Murphy, who is to this date the only authentic mad genius I have ever encountered.
The Goddard campus, with its full enrollment at that time, was a lively place, and I spent many hours there. There were concerts by Mose Allison and Elvin Jones, readings by Allen Ginsberg and Anaïs Nin, and plays by David Mamet. (A recent Goddard graduate, Mamet had returned as a drama instructor.)
There were also films each Sunday night at the Haybarn Theater, but this was a haphazard affair, with student projectionists either showing up in an impaired state or forgetting to show up altogether. The Sunday night movies were a particular concern of a new friend, Ann Dumaresq Ryder, the coordinator of campus activities. Ann knew a lot about music, especially jazz, but not as much about film. She asked me to help her curate the Sunday night films. I wish I could remember that lineup for the fall of 1971, but there is a good chance that the list included films I had seen during the past five years at Columbia and Berkeley.
CHAPTER EIGHT – A FILM SOCIETY IS BORN
I was seized by the possibility of a film society—like the ones that had expanded my vision in college—here in central Vermont. It may have been the very next day that I drove to nearby Montpelier, the state capital. The office of the recently established Vermont Council on the Arts on State Street seemed a good place to start. Perhaps it was a slow day, but I was directed immediately to the office of the agency’s program director, Ellen McCullough Lovell.
Ellen turned out to be a guardian angel for the film society that was born then and there. I spilled out my inchoate idea and her immediate response was “Sure, we can do that.” Next she said, “First, you need a place, and I think the Pavilion Auditorium would be ideal. Then you need a state sponsor in order to use it, and that would be us.” I had been to the auditorium once and agreed; it had 200 seats and a sloped floor.
Until Ellen’s suggestion, I hadn’t given much thought to holding my screenings in Montpelier. Plainfield, with its thriving Goddard College community in the early 1970s, was the center for most artistic and cultural activity in the region, and it had been the center of my own world thus far. Montpelier, by contrast, was the commercial and political center—in the parlance of 1972, “the straight world.” But the prospect of a sloped floor and fixed seating was tantalizing.
CHAPTER NINE – WHAT’S HAPPENING ON MAIN STREET?
Recently I came upon an artifact that I thought had long since disappeared: a three-inch piece of yellow card stock that I carried around with me during the summer and fall of 1980. In those days, I had trouble running a simple errand on Main or State Street without someone pressing me with questions about the rumored theater. Long before the acronym FAQ entered our vocabulary, the heading of my typed card was “Answers to the Ten Most Frequently Asked Questions about the Savoy.”
The answer to Number One was “Early December”; this was written in pencil, after the original “Around Thanksgiving” was crossed out. However, this, too, proved to be overly optimistic as October turned into November. Number Two was “Casablanca,if possible.” This turned out to be true, but not in the way we had planned. Number Three was “Seven nights a week,” an exciting prospect for central Vermonters who had to wait from one Friday to the next to get their Lightning Ridge movie fix. Number Four was “All kinds: new and old, U.S. and foreign.” And Number Five was “Yes, I am excited.”
Rick and Gary Ireland in what was to be the lobby of the Savoy Theater
CHAPTER TEN – BUMPS IN THE ROAD
I had been reading the New York Times movie page since I was ten. Now it was for more than mere amusement. Reviews such as the glowing one in the Times for Atlantic City (Canby had concluded his review by calling the film a “rich, gaudy cinema trip”)sent up an early alert signal: let’s keep our eye on this one. Gary and I had faith in our audience; even if a film proved a commercial flop elsewhere, it just might get an appreciative audience in Montpelier. Sometimes we were dead wrong, as with Lamont Johnson’s Cattle Annie and Little Britches (a western with the ever-adventurous Burt Lancaster), Chilly Scenes of Winter (Joan Micklin Silver’s adaptation of an Anne Tyler novel), and Comfort and Joy (Bill Forsyth’s Scottish comedy). Now and then, though, we struck gold with cast-off films: Atlantic City; the future cult film Repo Man, directed by Alex Cox; Dreamchild, a British tale about Alice Liddell (the “real” Alice in Wonderland), directed by Gavin Millar; and Patricia Rozema’s offbeat Canadian comedy I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing.
CHAPTER TWELVE – A CULTURAL “SPEAKEASY” DOWNSTAIRS
By the mid-1980s, the effects of the video store phenomenon became impossible to ignore. Our industry friend Jeffrey Jacobs put it succinctly: “The rise of the video store devalued the repertory cinema.” But as much as this development spelled challenging times for the Savoy, I had a grudgingly positive attitude about some aspects of this technological advance.
The emerging video market—especially as practiced by discriminating companies like Facets, Inc.—meant that a large number of hard-to-find films now could be located, rented, and enjoyed at home. In the mid-1980s, Andrea and I broke down and purchased a video player. If I remember correctly, the first film we watched was the British postwar comedy Passport to Pimlico, which I had chased for years. It was only the small screen, but it was better than nothing.
As we fretted over the increased competition from video stores, our Northampton friend John Morrison looked at things differently. In 1986, John and Richard Pini had opened Pleasant Street Video, right next door to their Pleasant Street Cinema. “You should think about starting your own store,” John advised. “People will take out videos five nights a week, but still want to see the latest film on the screen on Friday and Saturday.”
That was certainly something to think about. We didn’t even have far to look for another space, since we already had a completely empty basement that housed only our bathrooms. Some patrons confessed that they avoided making bathroom trips since the cavernous downstairs space was “creepy.” Now we could convert this dank, forbidding space into a brightly-lit, welcoming room.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN – A CINEMA VILLAGE ON MAIN STREET
We were ready for a seven-day festival in late March 1999, with twenty-five events, from low-budget made-in-Vermont features to recently restored classics to American independents. We had scheduledenough films to warrant a second venue: the Pavilion Auditorium, the old home of my Lightning Ridge Film Society. Susan Green, a reporter at the Burlington Free Press, quoted me about my experience with that 9 a.m. turnout for the Polish film in Montreal: “We’re not at that point yet, but our mission is to ratchet up the interest in film a few more notches.” Susan, a longtime film buff herself, could always be relied upon to give the festival a boost each March.
One of the independent films we showed was David Riker’s brilliant La Ciudad: four short tales, shot in black-and-white, poignantly depicting the Mexican and Central American immigrant communities in New York City. Another highlight was the appearance of documentary filmmaker John Cohen, better known to many as one of the founding members of the influential traditional music group, the New Lost City Ramblers. John was also an excellent filmmaker, devoted to the study and appreciation of disparate cultures. He brought a selection of his films, which explored the indigenous Andean population (Mountain Music of Peru), the music of Appalachia (The High Lonesome Sound), and a Greek community in New York trying to hold on to its traditions (Pericles in America).
One film that did not draw a large audience was one of our favorites, Judith Helfand’s documentary A Healthy Baby Girl. Judith traveled from New York City to talk about her very personal film, in which she explored her mother’s decision to take the drug DES during her pregnancy with Judith. This synthetic estrogen, commonly prescribed at the time to prevent miscarriage, was later discovered to have a high cancer risk; it was banned in 1971. The drug had unforeseen and devastating consequences for the entire Helfand family. We lined up several sponsors for this show: the Vermont Public Interest Research Group, Fletcher Allen Health Care Community Health Improvement Office, and the Governor’s Commission on Women. When only twenty people showed up, Andrea and I felt the need to apologize to Judith. She waved us off. “Please don’t apologize.” In what was to become our own mantra, Judith told us, “If twenty people are here, then they are the right twenty people.”
By the end of the seven days, we were all “exhausted and exhilarated,” to quote Andrea. This was going to be a recurring chorus for the remainder of my fourteen years as programming director of GMFF, as we called it. All my previous hesitations about producing a film festival in Montpelier vanished. Instead, I now had the sense that it would be a festival setting, rather than a week-to-week movie house, that had a better chance of promoting our vision of a local film culture. As the 1999 festival came to a close, the question was not “Should we do this again?” but “How can we do it better?”