S.D. Movie Connoisseurs Resent Role of L.A.’s Stepsister

Once or twice each month, David Eisenberg and his wife, Del Mar City Councilwoman Brooke Eisenberg, travel to Los Angeles to--among other things--see movies they cannot see in San Diego.

“San Diego is very poor for movies,” said David Eisenberg. “All San Diego gets are mass-produced movies.”

The Eisenbergs are among the San Diego movie enthusiasts frustrated by The System, the unofficial, undefined process by which movies flow through San Diego. They read about interesting and exciting movies opening in New York and Los Angeles. Yet, it can be months before those movies make their way to San Diego--if they make it here at all.

“Certainly, if you want to see any Japanese movies, or certainly, if you want to see any retrospective movies, you have to go to Los Angeles,” said David Eisenberg.

When movies do find their way to San Diego, they often play for a week or less before disappearing into film oblivion, to be seen again only on some obscure shelf at the video store.

“Los Angeles is treated like a major market and we’re not,” said Andrew Friedenberg, director of the Cinema Society of San Diego. “I see it getting better, but it’s nowhere near where it should be.”

Friedenberg and the Eisenbergs aren’t referring to obscure foreign films, or even American independent films that can blame their fates on poor distribution. Such major studio movies as Orion Pictures’ “September” (directed by Woody Allen) and Tri-Star’s “Ironweed” (starring Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep) played in other cities for weeks before arriving in San Diego.

San Diego’s proximity to Los Angeles, in some ways, is a curse. If a movie doesn’t make money in Los Angeles, distributors are often unwilling to promote it in San Diego, which some consider nothing more than an extension of the Los Angeles market. Movie companies often use San Diego as a test market for movies, but Los Angeles is where the movie community is based, and it’s Los Angeles that will make or break a movie.

“If a film doesn’t do it in Los Angeles, then who knows when we will get it?,” Friedenberg said. “We are the Milwaukee of the west. Milwaukee is a great film community, but they’re next to Chicago.”

In San Diego, four single-screen movie houses owned by the San Francisco-based Landmark Theaters--the Park, Ken, Cove and Guild--spotlight art and foreign films. But they are the only consistent outlets for movies not listed as “major” commercial films.

Local movie buffs applaud the variety of films screened at Landmark theaters, but they say the four screens are not enough. Landmark President Gary Meyer agrees. Landmark is planning to open a five- or six-screen complex in the Hillcrest area sometime next year.

“San Diego has proven itself to be responsive to a whole range of movies that it wasn’t six or seven years ago,” Meyer said. “San Diego over the past six years has shown itself to be increasingly sophisticated.”

Landmark practically has a monopoly on the non-mainstream movies. Unless a “small” movie develops a following, such as the surprisingly successful “The Gods Must be Crazy,” Landmark theaters are

the only chain outlet for the films in San Diego.

“Landmark can control that end of the product and they can pick and choose (movies),” said Alan Grossberg of Exhibitor’s Co-Op, a locally based film-booking agent. The San Diego market is “certainly as sophisticated as anywhere else,” he said. “I don’t see any difference in the local market, except for the quantity of pictures.”

Although Meyer tends to schedule certain types of movies in each of Landmark’s four theaters--for example, English and French films geared toward sophisticated, older audiences tend to do better at the Cove in La Jolla--he has no criteria for keeping films out of San Diego. He said Landmark often brings to San Diego films that haven’t been commercial blockbusters in Los Angeles, such as the Australian film “Shame” and the Russian film “Commissar.”

Sometimes, Meyer acknowledges, it is his fault that a film takes months to find its way to San Diego. Occasionally he commits to playing films in the theaters, and with so few screens he can’t adjust the schedule if a new film suddenly attracts attention.

The common perception that San Diego doesn’t get a lot of foreign films until well after the rest of the world because of a lack of prints of some films is only true for extremely rare foreign films, Meyer said.

“If a film shows any sign of doing more business, they will make more prints,” he said.

The flow of films to San Diego is usually dictated by distributors attempting to manipulate the process to their best advantage, Meyer said. For example, distributors often won’t release films to specialty houses until they are sure it cannot attract a broader release.

“The major studios don’t want to go into specialty or art houses until a last resort,” Meyer said.

In the case of a film like David Mamet’s “Things Change,” Columbia Pictures felt the film could be more than an “art” film, Meyer said. So it was released to a small number of theaters in the hope it would develop an audience from critical praise or possible inclusion on critics’ year-end Top 10 lists.

“Little Dorrit,” a “small” film currently receiving critical praise, is being withheld from wide release until after the Academy Award nominations are announced, Meyer said. In a similar scenario last year, director John Huston’s widely anticipated last film, “The Dead,” was similarly held up, to the frustration of San Diegans who had read about the film for months before it finally came to a local Landmark theater.

“If we had opened it (in San Diego) at the same time as Los Angeles and it bombed, then it would have been off screens by the time nominations came around,” Meyer said.

Michael Barker, Orion Classics’ vice president of sales and marketing, estimates that 75% of the time Orion Classics staggers its movie openings in Los Angeles and San Diego. In other words, the company purposely opens movies in San Diego a few weeks after Los Angeles.

“It’s a word-of-mouth kind of thing,” Barker said. “If it’s only in one theater in Los Angeles, it might take a while for word of mouth to travel to San Diego.”

Word of mouth can translate to frustration for San Diego movie-goers able to hear about--but not see--some movies. Orion Classics’ “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown” has been receiving critical praise in New York for weeks already, but it is not scheduled to come to San Diego until late December, at the same time as its opening in Los Angeles.

“A lot of national press has already hit (for ‘Women’),” Barker said.

In general, said Barker, film distributors view San Diego as a lucrative market. Its proximity to Los Angeles has helped develop a sophisticated movie audience.

“ ‘My Beautiful Laundrette’ played at the Cove for seven weeks,” Barker said. “For ‘A Month in the Country,’ San Diego was one of the most successful areas in the country.”

Barker said San Diego still suffers from a lack of available screens.

“We don’t want to be pulled off a screen early,” he said. “It’s hard to wait for pictures in front of yours to lose steam.”

Local cinema junkies agree. It’s the quantity and variety of films offered, more than the quality of the films, that bothers them. They, too, hope to see more San Diego screens featuring different, non-mainstream movies.

“There is so much product now, the four theaters can’t handle it,” Eisenberg said. “We have some faith that a movie will show up here sooner or later. But if you’re a real movie fan, there are some things that just never come down here.”