A SLY OWNER MAKES THE FOX A SUCCESS

Just about a year ago--an August day he wants to forget--the owner of the Fox International Theater in Venice canceled the afternoon’s feature film because the audience consisted entirely of the woman in the 17th row.

Nowadays, Rafigh Pooya can look back and laugh--well, chuckle lightly--about such box-office busts. Because in only 12 months, he has escorted the Fox out of both obscurity and financial disaster. And all that without a single screening of “Rambo First Blood II” or any other Hollywood blockbuster.

Amazingly enough, Pooya says he has succeeded by doing what he wants to do, showing what he wants to show. He is so confident in his tastes, in fact, that he offers all patrons a money-back guarantee: If you don’t like the film, you don’t have to pay.

Not that he’s had many takers. As the audience for the Fox has grown, so has its reputation for showing quality films unavailable nowhere else in Los Angeles. Area film critics have praised the theater for its innovative approach, for its courage to provide rare and eclectic movies.

In its first year, the Fox introduced 75 international films, including five world premieres, 13 U.S. premieres and 50 Los Angeles premieres. The Fox celebrates its first birthday with the world premiere of the Brazilian film “Memories of Prison” on Friday.

The success of the 850-seat Fox is, given present circumstances, a rarity. Specialized film programming has suffered greatly in recent years. Repertory theaters (the recently closed Vista among them) have been driven out of business by the videocassette boom, and new theaters featuring alternative programming (the Laemmle Grande and Cineplex, for example) often struggle to fill the smallest of auditoriums.

But the Fox has the advantage of Pooya, somewhat of a charming and precocious rarity himself. While a graduate film student at UCLA, his 1981 film “In Defense of People” was seen by the cognoscenti at Cannes before his college advisers got a peek at it.

After graduating from UCLA, Pooya, who was born in Iran and came to the United States in 1972, leased the remains of the Fox Venice. The Fox Venice, a once-famous repertory theater, had succumbed in the wake of videocassettes. It was renovated and reborn as the Fox International.

Pooya brought both determination and vision to the venture. “The way I see it,” he explains, “is it’s far better to do what you believe in. Why not do things that make you feel good? Why not provide things that you feel are lacking?

“Fortunately,” he continues, “the need was equal to what we wanted to do.”

Specifically, what Pooya wanted to do was showcase independent cinema from around the world. “There are so many wonderful films that don’t get shown,” he says. “But our biggest obstacle is in addressing an audience that has not been exposed to international film.

“And American independent film shares the same problem as international film,” Pooya says. “As soon as people hear the word ‘independent,’ they say, ‘Oh, that film isn’t commercial enough.’

“But if the audience isn’t exposed, it’s like someone who isn’t exposed to good food: If you don’t eat it, you don’t know what you’re missing.”

To stretch the metaphor a bit, Pooya looks for food that sticks: “I can’t stand shallow movies. I prefer movies that are entertaining, that are good cinema, but most of all, films that are not shallow.”

Where the Fox has triumphed is in making independent movies with these qualities commercially viable. Viable, at least, to the point where the Fox is now breaking even. To be sure, it has been a struggle to reach the break-even plateau. The Fox is not ideally located, and the theater has only recently established an identity separate from the Fox Venice.

“When you get down to it,” Pooya says, “we’re really the small guy. You have these chains with hundreds of successful theaters, and we come along and buy a theater that nobody is going to. But even when our audience was small, we continued to do what we set out to do. Obviously, we must be doing something right.”

To keep the Fox afloat, Pooya says he has labored 16-hour days during most of the theater’s first year--working the ticket booth, manning the concession stand, greeting the audience after screenings. The Fox is only a small part of Pooya’s involvement in film. He also operates a distribution company (International Home Video) and is an award-winning independent film maker.

The theater, though, is his love. He has just added a small cafe to it, and patrons can visit a one-hour photograph service in the lobby.

Yet the emphasis remains on programming. “If we didn’t exist, people might not have the chance to see a number of wonderful films,” Pooya says. “I’m not being snobbish, but it’s true.”