FILM BUFF WANTS TO PUT S.D. ON THE CINEMA MAP

Andy Friedenberg is a tall, dapper-looking fellow who loves sports. He loves the fact that San Diego will be host to the Super Bowl and may host the America’s Cup. He wants to help San Diego find a niche in the world--and fast.

Friedenberg’s greatest love is movies. His favorites include “Hoosiers,” “Rocky” and “Breaking Away”--all movies with a sports theme and with a reverence for the underdog, who in the end always wins.

Friedenberg is a bit of an underdog--he dreams of San Diego as a movie mecca--and he desperately wants to win.

If enthusiasm is any barometer, he’s already crossed the finish line--first.

Friedenberg, 32, is director of the Cinema Society of San Diego, executive director of the La Jolla-based Visual Arts Foundation, and founder of both. The former began in 1984, the latter in 1986.

A native of Detroit, Friedenberg came here in 1983 with a background in motion picture marketing and promotions. He had worked with United Artists and Columbia Pictures in Dallas, and with Columbia in Chicago. He tired of having “five bosses in four years” and, wanting to be near his family, settled in La Jolla.

“I wanted to find out what was going on in the (local) film world,” he said. “My research lasted roughly three minutes. We had an active theater community, an active dance community, a very active opera. But what about film? It was zilch.”

The Cinema Society quickly reached a ceiling of 500 members and now has a waiting list of 300 who scramble for spots once renewal comes up each April.

For $110 a year, membership guarantees 10 “premieres”--movies that haven’t been shown in San Diego and, in some cases, won’t be released for quite some time. The latter includes “Square Dance,” starring Jane Alexander, Jason Robards and Rob Lowe.

Last year, Friedenberg delivered 16 films and a new setting for showing them--the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, which put in a new screen, a Dolby stereo sound system and other improvements for $25,000.

Last week, he premiered “Black Widow,” a psychological thriller starring Debra Winger and Theresa Russell, who grew up in San Diego. (Native sons and daughters now in the film world are frequent guest speakers.) The society showed “Black Widow” four days before its local opening. There were few empty seats.

The Visual Arts Foundation also evolved from a Friedenberg concern. A regular subscriber to Daily Variety and Hollywood Reporter, he noticed early last year that the Directors’ Guild of America was sponsoring a “golden jubilee” in nine cities across the country, showing such classics as “Napoleon” and the restored version of “A Star Is Born,” with Judy Garland.

Friedenberg fumed that San Diego had not been considered.

He went to see Gordon Luce, president of Great American First Savings Bank. He lobbied for support; Luce agreed. He then approached the Directors’ Guild, hoping to nail San Diego as the 10th city on the tour. He succeeded, with the stipulation that a nonprofit corporation (the Visual Arts Foundation) had to be formed for tax and union purposes.

On six consecutive Monday evenings last summer, the museum and Friedenberg’s foundation played host for the golden jubilee. He learned later that San Diego finished second in attendance behind the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Other big ideas include an Academy Awards winners’ series, in which former Oscar recipients (for best director, best actor, best costume design, etc.) will show examples of winning entries on successive summer weeks in 1987. Friedenberg also wants to show 22 hours of non-stop football movies as a film-festival prelude to Super Bowl XXII in San Diego.

One day, he would like his own film house and a prestigious Cinematheque outlet for San Diego. (Cinematheque is described as a “living, working museum of the movies,” with current outlets in Los Angeles as well as Paris.)

Though not directly allied, Friedenberg is a spiritual supporter of San Diego film commissioner Wally Schlotter. Schlotter’s is the group that works with the Chamber of Commerce in bringing to San Diego such “location shoots” as the upcoming “Destiny” (with William Hurt and Timothy Hutton) and “Break of Dawn.” Friedenberg predicts San Diego will soon “pick up steam” as a backdrop for major hits.

His own guest speakers have included Alan Alda, who brought “Sweet Liberty” to the group, and River Phoenix, who lives in Rancho Santa Fe and shined in the recent “Stand By Me.”

“San Diego has produced a lot of talent,” he said. “But we’re so close to L.A., it sometimes feels like a curse. They think we’re a suburb. Trying to identify San Diego as a major city--a major cultural arts center--is tough. Of course, it happens to be both. We have our own film community and our own film identity.”

He said it used to be that studios forced San Diego critics to drive to L.A. to meet touring stars--never the other way around. That, too, he said, is changing.

A chief concern remains the city’s standing as a movie market. He continually hears, “Why do we get movies like ‘Platoon’ so far behind L.A.?” He said the problem lies with the Arbitron-controlled Areas of Dominant Influence (ADI) Survey, which is gospel to the studios.

ADI ranks San Diego 26th.

Dallas, the country’s seventh-largest city to San Diego’s eighth, comes up No. 8 on ADI. The survey cites Dallas as a city of greater media influence; thus “Platoon” landed in North Texas several weeks before crossing the desert and invading San Diego.

“We have the ocean on the west, a desert on the east, a foreign country to the south and the nation’s second-largest city to the north,” Friedenberg said. “That doesn’t mean we’re a cultural backwater.”