‘WAITING FOR THE MOON’ DIRECTOR : THE UN-TRADITIONAL GODMILOW

Jill Godmilow’s strong, stern face lights up when she talks about what she calls “radical” films--films, like her own, that break away from Hollywood traditions.

“These are not the only kinds of films I want to make,” the director said recently of “Far From Poland,” her unconventional 1980 documentary, and her latest film, “Waiting for the Moon,” a dramatic feature focusing on Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, which Godmilow calls “a post-modernist film” with little traditional dramatic narrative.

“But certainly, I’m the kind of film maker who wants to do something different each time out.”

Godmilow, 43, has been establishing a reputation within the independent New York film-making community as an experimental director since the mid-1970s, but gradually her work has come to the attention of broader audiences.

Her 1974 film, “Antonia: Portrait of a Woman,” earned an Oscar nomination in the documentary feature category and shows up periodically on public television. “Far From Poland” has proven popular among art-house theater circuits around the country. And “Waiting for the Moon,” being distributed by Skouras Films, is reaching first-run theaters in selected cities, including New York and Los Angeles; it’s scheduled to be seen as part of public television’s “American Playhouse” series in June.

“You can’t expect ‘Rambo’-size audiences, but at least it got made and out,” Godmilow said in her downtown Manhattan loft.

Seated on a worn sofa, surrounded by contemporary wall hangings and smoking endlessly, she expressed confidence that audience demand for unusual films like her own will continue to grow. She cited the critical and box-office success of David Lynch’s “Blue Velvet,” which she called “a radical film if ever there was one,” and the positive word of mouth on Jonathan Demme’s just-released “Swimming to Cambodia,” starring avant-garde dramatic monologuist Spalding Gray.

“The problem is convincing the people with the purse strings to take chances,” she said, acknowledging the difficulty in raising $950,000 from public television and Europe and $100,000 from Skouras to make “Waiting for the Moon.”

Godmilow said the film, which stars Linda Hunt as Toklas and British actress Linda Bassett as Stein, grew out of an idea for a much smaller project, conceived by herself and the film’s scriptwriter Mark McGill, a New York video artist and photographer with whom she collaborated on “Far From Poland.”

“We had this idea that we could make a low-budget, independent film that would cross over (to mainstream audiences), and to keep the budget low we wanted to come up with a story that could take place in one room and this led us to thinking about Stein and Toklas and their famous salon in Paris, which must be one of the most famous rooms of this century.”

In addition to exploring the 40-year affair between Stein and Toklas--”one of the most famous and successful relationships of this century”--Godmilow said she and McGill wanted to experiment with “art, history and film” in ways that resulted in what she termed “a Steinian film,” both in form and content, rather than a conventional one.

Except for a brief brush with the Hollywood film-making establishment, Godmilow has cut out an unconventional career for herself since moving to New York in the mid-1960s with a degree in Russian literature and the image of herself as a hippie.

After making and distributing a $2,000 black-and-white Spanish-language feature, she worked briefly as a film editor. However, she said fear of “getting hooked” on a well-paying, conventional job prompted her to move to San Francisco with other New York independent film makers. When their plans for a film collective failed, she began working on Hollywood studio films as an editor.

“It was while working on ‘Godfather’ (Part I) that I got a good look at Hollywood film making,” she said. “What I saw was a lot of excess, waste and egomania, and for a hippie from New York with a lot of political ideas about what cinema should be, it was a horrendous experience.”

Back in New York by 1971, she started working on “Antonia,” also on a $2,000 budget; then, on “Far From Poland,” a film about the Solidarity movement in Poland that forced her to experiment with the form when she was refused entry into that country to shoot footage.

Godmilow said she has several ideas for film projects costing from $2 million to $4 million, including a version of “King Lear” with the traditional genders reversed--”to show the assumptions about patriarchy built into Shakespeare”--and a more traditional project based on Raymond Carver short stories.

“The people with the money have just got to start taking chances,” Godmilow said. “There are enough audiences out there who are interested in a different kind of cinema.”