NEW YORK SCENE : ‘Rachel River’ Gets Big New York Press

The insider buzz around town is around “Rachel River,” an independently financed movie by first-time feature director Sandy Smolan. And it hasn’t opened, here or anywhere, and doesn’t even have a distributor.

It’s a sometimes-sad, sometimes-funny series of vignettes about life in a remote Minnesota town, starring Pamela Reed, Viveca Lindfors, Zeljko Ivanek, Craig T. Nelson and James Olson. Based on the short stories of Minnesota writer Carol Bly, the screenplay for the film was written by novelist Judith Guest (“Ordinary People”). It has been seen publicly only at the Toronto and Fort Lauderdale, Fla., film festivals, and the recent U.S. Film Festival in Park City, Utah, where it was awarded the best cinematography prize and a special jury prize for Lindfors’ performance.

The New York interest has been created by a recent series of private word-of-mouth screenings scheduled by producer Timothy Marx for local opinion-makers, journalists who don’t ordinarily cover the film scene and New York-based actors and directors.

“We figure the movie will have more value if everybody’s talking about it, than if nobody’s talking about it,” said Marx. He said the decision was made to tout the film this way, even before release plans, to concentrate these efforts in New York, where a special screening can be made more of an event, rather than in Los Angeles, where screenings are commonplace.

Shot in northern Minnesota and Wisconsin in late 1986 and financed by Minnesota-based arts organizations and foundations, public TV’s “American Playhouse” series and individual investors, the $1.5-million film would have entered a vastly different New York film market just one year ago.

“It’s already become harder to find interest in small, specialized, independent films, even in New York,” said Marx. “The small companies, like Cinecom, Orion Classics and Skouras Films started out looking for just these kinds of films, but they’ve done relatively well with films like ‘A Room With a View,’ ‘My Beautiful Laundrette’ and ‘My Life as a Dog,’ and now they’re looking for films of broader commercial interest.”

This trend among what is becoming known as the “mini-majors” has been the subject of much recent talk in independent film circles here recently, as has the “Hollywood product glut” that is making it harder for independents to find financing in videocassette sales, or to find empty theaters, more and more of which are being bought up by major conglomerates and turned into multiplexes.

Old-movie buffs also have been fighting the commercial winds since last fall, when the Cineplex Odeon theater circuit that has been buying up theaters across this country announced it was taking over one of the city’s last remaining and most treasured revival houses, the Regency, and turning it into a first-run house.

Petitions were signed, street demonstrations were held outside the stately old Upper West Side theater (some of the more famous residents of the recently regentrified neighborhood, such as Tony Randall, Betty Comden and Adolph Green, took part). Even a City Council resolution was passed demanding that Cineplex Odeon at least provide movie-hungry Manhattanites with a revival theater.

Last weekend the protests paid off, with the official opening of the Biograph, a 560-seat theater in mid-Manhattan that Cineplex Odeon renovated to show “thematic series of classic American and foreign films.” The films are to be selected by Frank Rowley, the longtime programmer for the Regency.

For its inaugural weekend, the theater gave away 1,500 pairs of tickets to New Yorkers who entered a local newspaper contest to select their favorite “New York movies,” and the selections, ranging from “Annie Hall” to “West Side Story” to “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,” were on the rotating program schedule.

Last Sunday, the theater began a 34-movie, 6-week series devoted to the films of Myrna Loy and William Powell. Loy, another one of New York’s film treasures, was on hand to introduce “The Thin Man.”

Another local tempest apparently has been calmed with the announcement that a selection committee has been formed for the 25-year-old New York Film Festival. The oldest continuing festival in the country, and arguably the world’s second most important, after the annual doings in Cannes, has been in disarray since the forced resignation last fall of longtime festival director Richard Roud.

Roud’s removal was widely reported in the press to be the instigation of Joanne Koch, executive director of the Film Society of Lincoln Center, the festival sponsor, because Koch wanted to redirect the festival more toward her own taste. Such views were aired publicly by two of the five members of the selection committee chaired by Roud, Time critic Richard Corliss and New York magazine critic David Denby. Both men eventually resigned from the committee.

The Film Society appointed film scholar Richard Pena to the new position of “program director.”

The shake-up has proven unsettling for the usually-staid, esoteria-prone festival-watchers within the film community, with charges of “interference” and countercharges flying back and forth for months--with Koch denying all charges.

Several critics declined invitations to join the selection committee out of deference to Roud, who has remained silent.

The selection committee was filled out with the appointment of Christian Science Monitor critic David Sterritt and Phillip Lopate, a free-lance critic/film programmer for the Houston Museum of Fine Arts.