AFI as a 21-Year-Old Achiever

The AFI’s annual Life Achievement Award banquet, which tonight honors Jack Lemmon, has become one of the hottest tickets in Hollywood--never hotter than for Lemmon, one of the industry’s best-liked figures.

The award itself, devised more than a decade ago as a fund-raising activity by the AFI’s founding director George Stevens Jr., has like all honors been defined by those who have won it (e.g., Cagney, Hitchcock, Welles). It is accordingly one of the most prestigious tributes Hollywood has to offer.

But the appeal of the night and the importance of the award also affirm that the AFI, after a tumultuous and frequently controversial start, has achieved a solid but still-spunky maturity.

It was born in 1967 as a kind of contingent beneficiary of Lyndon Johnson’s vision of a Great Society. (It was urged into being and principally funded, as it still is, by those other Johnson creations, the National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities.)

Since late 1979, when Stevens turned to other projects, the AFI has been guided by Jean Firstenberg, who was born into a film family--her father, Eugene Picker, and her grandfather were in exhibition. She had previously been at Princeton, in charge of publications, and at the Markle Foundation, which in 1974 at her urging had provided a grant to underwrite the Women’s Directing Workshop at the AFI.

“Here we are, starting our third decade,” Firstenberg said a few days ago. “The first decade was spent simply getting the AFI established. In the second we were putting down permanent roots here.” Here is the former campus of Immaculate Heart College on a hillside at Franklin and Western on the eastern edge of Hollywood. Acquiring the campus in 1980 was Firstenberg’s first challenge at the AFI, confronting her almost before she had unpacked her bags.

“What about the third decade?” she asks rhetorically. “A continuation, essentially, but we’ll keep trying to see what the needs are and how we can fill them.”

The AFI’s initial and very broad charge was “preserving the heritage and advancing the art of film in America.” But in the first years, most of the attention--and the controversy--fell on the Center for Advanced Film Studies.

The Writers Guild threatened to boycott the whole enterprise because the role of the writer in film making appeared to be neglected (a lack that was quickly set right). There were internal dissensions that leaked to the press; there were charges that expensive equipment was being ripped off and, what was uncomfortably true, that more than $100,000 had been sunk in a feature film that was never completed.

In retrospect it seems clear that the new AFI was riding off in several directions at once and trying to achieve overnight what academic institutions evolved over the decades.

Yet out of the first-year turmoil emerged not one but several talents destined to be heard from, including Paul Schrader (“Mishima”) and Terrence Malick (“Badlands”). The growing roster of successful alumni (and alumnae) includes Amy Heckerling (“Fast Times at Ridgemont High”) and Martin Brest (“Beverly Hills Cop”).

Under Tony Villani, the center’s longtime dean, things have stabilized. At present, Firstenberg says, the center has 100 first-year students (drawn from nearly 500 applicants). Of these, no more than 20 are invited, on the basis of work done on videotape, to return for a second year of study. Of short film projects submitted by the 20, perhaps a half dozen are funded for production.

Meanwhile, as the center goes on, the AFI has moved strongly into other areas, most notably in preservation.

“Preservation has taken off everywhere, finally,” Firstenberg says with some satisfaction. “The pioneering work by the Museum of Modern Art, George Eastman House, the Library of Congress, is being augmented by wonderful work at UCLA and elsewhere--the TV news archive at Vanderbilt, the Selznick collection at Texas.

“There’s so much material and so much information that it’s become a complicated matter to locate it. We’re trying to coordinate the information.”

The AFI, through its National Center for Film and Video Preservation, has been compiling a National Moving Image Database. The University of California Press will publish the first chunk of the information, by year’s end it is hoped. “You’ll also be able to access it by computer,” says Firstenberg. The database will say what exists and who’s got it.

An earlier massive AFI project, its decade-by-decade index of all American films, is continuing. Only two decades have been published so far, the ‘20s and the ‘60s, but a third, on the ‘30s, is about finished, and Firstenberg hopes that by the end of the century the project will be up to date, although it is hugely labor-intensive and accordingly expensive.

In addition, the AFI has inherited the film festival that was Filmex and, under the guidance of Ken Wlaschin, it will have its second running later this spring.

Most of the AFI’s programming is now run by James Hindman, AFI deputy director. “I’ve shifted, to my regret,” Firstenberg says. “But the fund raising goes on, and it never gets any easier. We’re no longer the new kid on the block, and the question is not just how we support ourselves in our 21st year, but in our 31st.

“I think philanthropy in this decade is more difficult than it has been. It depends always on the tax climate and the economic climate generally. But it’s also true that the moving image, television and film, is perceived as commerce as well as art, perceived as profit making. But the moving image has to be seen as part of our cultural heritage. But it’ll be decades before that’ll be as it should be.

“If we didn’t have the support of our industry, I don’t know what we’d do because it would be hard to get significant support from other industries.”

Just recently Firstenberg and the AFI struck one windfall: The trustees of the Harold Lloyd Foundation turned over the $1.1 million in the trust to the AFI. Lloyd had been the first guest at an AFI seminar for the fellows, 17 of them back in 1969. Hal Roach and others who remembered Lloyd came for a seminar to celebrate the gift and there were more than 100 fellows on hand. “They were hanging from the rafters,” Firstenberg says. “It reminded us all that film is still such a young form. There’s a lot of history behind us, and here was Hal Roach at 96 telling us about it. But there’s a lot of history still in front of us.”