THE LITTLE FILM THAT COULD: ‘ROOM’ ALREADY A BIG WINNER

March has become a very big month for the young executives of Cinecom Entertainment Group. It was March, 1985, when they signed an agreement with producer Ismael Merchant guaranteeing him $950,000 for the American and Canadian rights to “A Room With a View.” It was in March, 1986, that the movie opened to rave reviews.

Now, in March, 1987, they have eight chances to add Academy Awards to a success story that has already been measured with a $20-million reception at the box office.

“When we looked at the script, we thought it had more potential (than Merchant’s previous films with director James Ivory),” said Amir Malin, president and chief executive officer of Cinecom. “Their most successful film, ‘Heat and Dust,’ had done about $3.5 million at the (American) box office. We pegged ‘Room’ as about a $5-million grossing film.”

When Malin and Cinecom Marketing/Distribution President Ira Deutchman flew to London at Christmas, 1985, to see the rough cut of “Room,” they quickly revised their appraisal of its box-office potential. With careful handling, they figured, the movie could do as much as $10 million.

“We were pretty excited,” Malin said. “A $10-million gross would be a very significant film for us.”

Considering Cinecom’s investment--less than $3 million, including advertising--the $20 million that “A Room With a View” has grossed qualifies it as an art-house blockbuster. Besides setting tiny, 4-year-old Cinecom up as one of the most flush of the specialty film distributors in the United States, it is one more in a series of positive signs that discriminating adult moviegoers will be fed a steadier diet of quality films.

For one thing, “Room” proves that the success of last year’s “Kiss of the Spider Woman” was not a fluke. “Kiss” grossed almost $20 million and made the final five in several Oscar categories, too. It is not just a thoughtful core of academy members endorsing these small, commercially difficult films, but large numbers of paying customers.

It is one of the season’s best chuckles that most of the major studios rejected “A Room With a View” before Merchant began shopping the script around for independent financing. But it’s doubtful that many of the rejectees regret the decision. With their overhead, none of them could have squeezed enough profits out of the movie to have justified the effort. They aren’t set up to handle films like this.

What Cinecom was able, and willing, to do with “A Room With a View” was to open it slowly with its relatively paltry ad budget spent on spots in local newspapers and on radio stations with classical music formats. There are only so many people in each market who are potential customers for a film with literary pretensions. They are not the people who rush out to see any movie on opening weekend.

“There was no way that ‘Room’ was going to break through to really general audiences,” Deutchman said. “It was going to make its money from a long play before sophisticated audiences.”

There were never more than 200 prints of “A Room With a View” in circulation, Deutchman said, and even with all the good reviews and word of mouth, the film has still not done well in many smaller cities. When the movie tied “Platoon” for the most Oscar nominations (each has eight), Deutchman said he received calls from exhibitors all over the country wanting a print. But not many were accommodated.

“The toughest part was having to say no,” Deutchman said. “Every chain wanted a print here, a print there. But it simply didn’t make sense (to send lots of prints out). Even with nominations, it is a movie with a limited audience.”

The major studios can’t support themselves courting limited audiences. As they proved with their classics divisions in the early 1980s, they can’t even support a small division catering to sophisticates. It was the failure of the classics divisions, combined with the simultaneous boom in the videocassette industry, that convinced Amir Malin to form Cinecom as a small distributor of quality English-language movies.

Malin, formerly an attorney for Boston’s WGBH PBS affiliate, said that when he drew up the business plan for Cinecom, no one was paying much attention to small English-language films at all. The majors were in their home-run stance, trying to beat one another out with the next Lucas-Spielberg look-alike, and the studios’ classics divisions and the existing independent distributors were concentrating mostly on foreign-language films.

“You saw Truffaut, Rohmer, Fellini and whatever,” Malin said, “and occasionally, the majors would come up with ‘Chariots of Fire’ and other sophisticated films. But there weren’t many.”

Malin’s interest in English-language films was based on a couple of assumptions tied to the video industry. He believed that the income from the videocassette and pay-TV markets would result in more quality independent productions, and that because subtitles would be a problem for TV viewing, most of those new films would be in English.

Chris Blackwell, Shep Gordon and Carolyn Pfeiffer, the original principals in Island-Alive Pictures, spotted the same trends at about the same time.

Island-Alive has since split into two companies, Blackwell’s Island Pictures and Gordon and Pfeiffer’s Alive Film. Both companies continue to produce and distribute mostly English-language specialty films.

Suddenly, there is competition for the kinds of films that couldn’t get a hearing five years ago. The Samuel Goldwyn Co. Skouras. Circle Releasing. Hemdale. Even New World Pictures, a company specializing in exploitation films aimed at the retail video market, puts out an occasional art-house movie. Orion Classics, the only surviving studio art-house division, continues to concentrate--profitably--on foreign-language films for American theatrical release.

The competition among independent distributors will continue, and if there are many more successes like “A Room With a View” and “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” they may get the studios lumbering back into the game.

Malin and Deutchman said that the people they keep bumping into while checking out potential projects are “the two Davids,” Columbia Pictures’ Chairman David Puttnam and Production President David Picker.

With the average major studio movie budget near $17 million, smaller is beginning to look better to everyone. And however it does at tonight’s Oscar extravaganza, smaller will never get much better than “A Room With a View.”