‘Veiled Threat’--Hype or Censorship? : AFI and Film Makers at Odds Over Withdrawal of Anti-Khomeini Film From Festival

For producer Behrooz Afrakhan, a 27-year-old Iranian-born graduate of Agoura High School, his adopted American Dream was to have been realized this week with the world premiere of his first film at the Century City Cineplex Odeon.

It was there that “Veiled Threat,” a low-budget thriller based on the real-life murder of an Iranian journalist living in Orange County, was to have been shown as a featured selection of the American Film Institute Los Angeles International Film Festival.

In the audience, Afrakhan believed, would have been representatives from U.S. distribution companies, some of whom he felt would surely have been interested in releasing the film. More than 50 foreign markets had already been sold, with commitments that would have more than covered the film’s $1-million budget. But the biggest market, the one where profits and careers are made--the United States--was still available.

But there was no screening. Because of publicity surrounding what Afrakhan refers to as “two 20-cent telephone calls”--bomb threats--his film was pulled from the festival and he fears the movie may never be released in America.

“I am amazed that this could happen in this country,” Afrakhan said this week. “We have chosen to speak out on an issue and instead of being supported, we are being silenced. Not by the Ayatollah, but by people here.”

“Veiled Threat,” co-starring American actor Paul Le Mat and Iranian star Behrouz Vossoughi, is reportedly critical of the Ayatollah Ruhullah Khomeini but, unlike Salman Rushdie’s “The Satanic Verses,” it is not critical of Islam. The parallel between “Satanic Verses” and “Veiled Threat,” drawn by the film makers themselves in interviews and press releases, is that the Khomeini faithful approve of neither one and that death threats have reportedly been made.

The question now, as Afrakhan and “Veiled Threat” co-producer Bob Graham count their losses and assess their options, is whether the AFI buckled under pressure from legitimate threats, or the film makers, in their haste to draw attention to their small film, heaped grief upon themselves.

“They are publicity hounds, they generated a publicity machine to make (showing the film) seem dangerous, they behaved irresponsibly,” AFI/L.A. FilmFest director Ken Wlashin said angrily this week. “If the Iranian government said, ‘You can’t show this film,’ we would have hocked everything to show it. But this (incident) had nothing to do with anything but what the film makers themselves created.”

Wlashin was reacting to two critical pieces that appeared recently in the New York press. An editorial in last week’s New York Post condemned the AFI for appeasing the Ayatollah. Tuesday, the New York Times ran an editorial-section essay by “Veiled Threat” director Cyrus Nowrasteh that served as both a eulogy for his film and as an object warning about the fragility of the First Amendment.

Nowrasteh charged the Los Angeles media with concentrating on the threats to the film makers while ignoring the film and the larger issues of “censorship, freedom of expression and foreign intimidation.” Nowrasteh said that everyone has pulled back from “Veiled Threat” for reasons having nothing to do with his work.

“There is no cable deal, no video deal,” he wrote. “My film is dead.”

Based on Nowrasteh’s article in the New York Times, the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California announced Wednesday that it will examine whether the AFI action violated the film makers’ civil and constitutional rights and simultaneously issued a statement by its executive director Ramona Ripston charging that the AFI “has succumbed, and therefore been a party to, censorship of the worst kind.”

AFI Director Jean Firstenberg said Ripston spoke before getting both sides of the story. Firstenberg said the AFI will “fight for the creative rights of all artists . . . but does not stand for the publicity rights of any film maker.

“We do not believe that by yelling fire in a crowded theater one exercises First Amendment rights,” Firstenberg said. “That’s what this story is all about, yelling fire.”

Co-producer Graham said Nowrasteh exaggerated the film’s death, but acknowledged that large foreign deals have been canceled by distributors in France, England and Italy and that smaller deals in about 50 other markets are in jeopardy because their foreign sales agent--Image Organization Inc.--has decided to stop representing the film.

“We were feeling quite comfortable,” Graham said. “Then the whole foundation started to crumble.”

Graham and Afrakhan say that failing to get a distributor for the U.S., they will open the film themselves. But they say that exhibitors are demanding from them the same thing they demanded from the AFI: costly security.

Wlashin and AFI director Jean Firstenberg insist that security would not have been necessary if the producers and Nowrasteh hadn’t publicized private threats for personal gain. Wlashin, who said he frequently resisted threats from the Irish Republican Army while showing controversial films as the director of the London Film Festival, said there are other politically sensitive films in the AFI/L.A. Film Fest, but the film makers aren’t out trying to exploit the issues.

“If a man’s being assaulted by a bull, you run to help him,” Wlashin said. “If he’s out there waving a red flag in front of a bull, you say, ‘The heck with him,’ he has no common sense.”

Wlashin found it a bitter irony that Nowrasteh, who was the first of the “Veiled Threat” principals to publicly reveal death threats and draw the Rushdie parallel, is now complaining that no one is paying any attention to his movie. The reference was to comments attributed to Nowrasteh by reporter Charles Fleming in the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner. In a March 3 story, Nowrasteh said his film had been inadvertently drawn into the furor over Salman Rushdie’s “The Satanic Verses” and was quoted as saying, “We have had the spectre of death threats hanging over us for a long, long time.”

Nowrasteh acknowledged in an interview with The Times this week that he had initiated the Herald-Examiner story, but claims that he was misquoted. Fleming said Nowrasteh volunteered the Rushdie parallel and was so eager to accommodate that he appeared in the Herald newsroom two days after the interview to deliver a photo of himself.

In any event, the threats Nowrasteh related to Fleming were news to Wlashin. The festival director said he had been talking to the “Veiled Threat” film makers since last August when they submitted the film for consideration in a festival the AFI was managing in Las Vegas, but they had never mentioned any threats. There had also been no reported problems during the American Film Market where the film was shown to potential foreign buyers in February.

Wlashin believes that by drawing attention to the film’s anti-Khomeini themes and openly discussing death threats prior to a March 8 press screening, the film makers “invited” an incident.

Afrakhan and Graham said that festival publicist David Hunter was told of their intention to publicize the controversial nature of their film and that he encouraged them. “He said, ‘Absolutely, go for it,’ ” Afrakhan quoted Hunter as saying. “He said this kind of publicity helps.”

Hunter denied making that comment and said that had he known what the producers were putting in a dispatch that went out over the City News Service wire the morning of the press screening, he would have stopped them. City News Service provides local media with a daily schedule of events. On March 8, it carried an item about “Veiled Threat” that referred to it as “an anti-Khomeini” film and broke this news: “The film caused concern last week at the American Film Market because of fear of terrorist reprisals.”

“We just wanted to make sure as many critics as possible showed up,” Afrakhan said.

The item drew more than critics to the afternoon screening. The Los Angeles Police Department, which monitors City News Service, sent a member of its anti-terrorist squad to the AFI theater on Western Avenue, and he was in the theater with about a dozen critics when the film was interrupted by a phoned-in bomb threat.

The building was evacuated while police made a sweep of the facilities and the screening eventually continued. The bomb threat was reported the next day in both Daily Variety and the Hollywood Reporter.

Afrakhan said the film makers tried to talk Variety out of running the story, an attempt that he said flies in the face of Wlashin’s exploitation charge. Todd McCarthy, the Variety critic at the screening, said he talked to Nowrasteh after the incident that day and told him he was planning to write about it. He said the director did not try to talk him about of it.

Unrelated to the AFI bomb threat, but seemingly relevant to the media’s heightened interest, was the March 10 pipe bombing in La Jolla of a car driven by the wife of the Navy officer who ordered the gunning down of an Iranian airbus last July. Wlashin said that after the bomb threat incident, management at the Cineplex Odeon, which is hosting all screenings in the AFI festival, told him they would only allow “Veiled Threat’s” two April 19 screenings to go on if the AFI arranged the same sort of security that the theater had for “The Last Temptation of Christ.”

That security would have cost AFI $20,000, according to Wlashin, so he began looking around for another venue. “Ultimately, we found that the only cinema willing to show the film was our cinema,” he said.

Wlashin said he told the film makers they were acting irresponsibly by drawing attention to past death threats and warned them twice that he would pull the film if they continued. Afrakhan said that he and Graham stopped talking, even though they were unhappy with the change in theater venue, until early April when word came that their British distributor was backing out of their deal.

“Our (foreign sales agent) said they were putting fires out all over the world,” Afrakhan said. “The AFI was telling us not to talk; (the sales agent) was saying, ‘You guys have to speak out.’ ”

Caught in that dilemma, the producers said they hired veteran Hollywood publicist Dick Brooks to help them with the publicity. On April 3, Brooks sent out a press release saying that because of death threats, Afrakhan and Graham had been placed under police and FBI protection and had been issued a portable alarm system that, when triggered, would bypass the 911 emergency and immediately alert a police anti-terrorist squad.

The next day, stories about the protection appeared in both The Times and the Herald-Examiner and that afternoon, news crews from KTTV and KABC went to Afrakhan’s home to interview him and to show their viewers the “black box” anti-terrorist alarm system at his side.

Wlashin responded by pulling the film from the festival.

“We told them, ‘We don’t want to work with you any more, you are not behaving in a responsible manner,’ ” Wlashin said.

“Look, all I can do is reflect what’s happening here,” Brooks said, in defending the press release that inspired the black box coverage. “There had been a number of threats against the film makers, they were concerned for their safety.”

Afrakhan said he agreed with the public revelation of police protection because he wanted to discourage whoever was making the threats not to act on them. He said he was also concerned for Behrouz Vessoughi, whom he called “the Marlon Brando of Iran,” who had not played an Iranian character for 10 years because of fear for his personal safety.

Nowrasteh said he has been caught in the middle, between his instincts to counterattack the intimidation from those making threats and wanting to have his film seen in a prestigious festival, unfettered by extraneous issues.

“I just want the film seen and judged for itself,” he said. “I certainly didn’t want any of this other publicity.”

Charles Solomon, a free-lance writer who had been assigned to review “Veiled Threat” for The Times, said a lot of attention has been focused on “a very badly done film.”

“It contains essentially every cliche of the hard-drinking detective genre, revisited and not revitalized,” said Solomon.

Does the film have an audience in the U.S.? Afrakhan says there are more Iranians living in the Los Angeles area than any city other than Tehran and that even though “Veiled Threat” is an American English-language film, the Iranian community will respond. To test that market, Afrakhan said he rented a theater in the AMC Century 14 complex in Century City March 13 and invited about 300 members of the Iranian community. Afrakhan said there were undercover officers at the screening and there were no incidents. He said he was told not to discuss how many officers were there, or who sent them, but said he did not pay for them.

Mohammad Tehrani, who works for the Persian-language paper Javanan, said he was at that screening and that the audience seemed to like the film. He said it has a strong anti-terrorism message and he thinks Iranians living in the U.S. would want to see it. However, it isn’t the message or the publicity that will attract them, Tehrani said, but the same thing that attracts American audiences to movies: the star.

“Voussoughi is a very big star in Iran,” he said. “People want to see him in everything.”

RELATED STORY: A new London play defends “Satanic Verses” author Salman Rushdie. Page 20.