Nationwide PBS Telecast of Film Marks End of Era for Movie Makers : History: Coronado couple spent eight years working on “Break of Dawn,” a film based on a historical case of injustice.

When the PBS series “American Playhouse” presents “Break of Dawn” to a national television audience Wednesday night, it will mark the end of an era for the San Diego film-making team of Jude Pauline Eberhard and Isaac Artenstein.

For eight years, the film, produced by Eberhard and written and directed by Artenstein, has been the focus of their lives. In the truest sense of independent producers, they developed the story, scraped together financing, produced the film and then spent two years distributing it worldwide.

And now, with it being delivered into the homes of millions of Americans in one night, they feel as if they have reached the end of a road.

“Jude and I said after it airs (on PBS) that’s the end of our involvement,” said Artenstein. “The baby will have to walk on its own.”

“Break of Dawn” is the true story of Pedro Gonzalez, the first Spanish-language radio star in Los Angeles, who was falsely charged with rape in 1934. It will air at 9 p.m. on KPBS (Channel 15), followed at 11 p.m. by an encore presentation of “Ballad of an Unsung Hero,” a documentary produced by Eberhard, Artenstein and KPBS before the making of “Break of Dawn.”

Since the film, the first for Eberhard and Artenstein’s Cinewest Productions, made its debut in San Diego in August, 1988, the pair has been on a whirlwind tour, distributing the film throughout the world, screening it at festivals, promoting it and doing interviews with whomever will listen. They often acted as their own publicists, spending months at a time in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago and a half-dozen other cities.

They distributed the film through their own company, Platform Releasing.

“We’d go to a distributor and they’d say, ‘Let us distribute it for you and we’ll give you something like 29 cents for it,’ ” Eberhard said. “We were unable, having spent six years of our lives with it, to accept their offers.”

After 20 months of barnstorming from Tokyo to Berlin and points in between, they are finally starting to let go of “Break of Dawn,” but they are hardly resting.

Artenstein is just back from a film festival in Guadalajara, where “Break of Dawn” was screened. In addition to a slate of film projects, he and Eberhard have been negotiating for downtown warehouse space, where they hope to build a combination screening room and coffeehouse.

They conduct business out of their Coronado home, usually wearing nothing more formal than T-shirts, yet hip Hollywood terms like “vertical integration,” “packages” and “taking meetings” sometimes creep into their conversation. “Break of Dawn” may not have vaulted them into a three-picture-a-year deal with Paramount, but it opened doors and taught them volumes about the movie industry, the type of behind-the-scenes education most filmmakers never get.

“Experience is what you get when you don’t get what you want,” said the 36-year-old Eberhard. “I really feel that it is the best thing that could have happened in that sense. Now I feel empowered with a tremendous awareness of the marketplace.”

The film, which eventually cost $1.2 million to produce, still hasn’t broken even, Eberhard said. But investors are being paid off and it was not a financial failure, thanks to generally positive reviews and their own persistence. In addition to markets in the United States, it has screened in Tokyo, Canada, Sweden and on the BBC.

Having a feature film as their calling card, not to mention a track record as a distributor, has helped them integrate into the film community. They’ve met some of the top names in the business and traveled to film festivals throughout the world, including Chicano ’90 in Mexico City, where they were on the same panel with some of the top Latino filmmakers from the United States. On May 7, Luis Valdez, Eberhard and others will participate in a panel discussion as part of the Festival La Raza in Tijuana, where “Break of Dawn” will be screened.

The couple is finding Hollywood far more receptive to their projects. Nevertheless, they realize their next project will still require the type of dedication they needed for “Break of Dawn.”

“After you make your first feature, you always think the second feature will be easier, but it’s not necessarily true,” Eberhard said. “It makes you realize first of all that if you’re a serious filmmaker, you’re a serious filmmaker for life and that commitment has to be strong.”

They are developing a variety of projects. Eberhard has optioned the rights for several scripts and novels, dealing with various subjects. She has a group of Japanese investors interested in one project. Artenstein, 35, is working on a “package” with Cheech Marin, of “Cheech and Chong” fame, in addition to his own script focusing on a turn of the century incident, when Mexican and American revolutionaries took over Tijuana.

In the last eight years they have been constantly looking for projects and developing their own ideas, but “Break of Dawn” was always at the forefront. The experience taught them to “have a lot of different irons in the fire,” Artenstein said.

Each current project has different possible scenarios--Artenstein may or may not direct, or Eberhard may produce it with or without the help of a studio, for example. But there is one common denominator in each project--a desire to mix socially relevant themes with the entertainment medium. They have no desire to begin careers as “hired guns,” working on other people’s projects.

“One of the things Jude and I decided was that the (process) is really a pain and it takes a lot out of you,” Artenstein said. “What Cinewest is really about is it should really serve to channel projects that we really believe in.”

Eberhard added, “The other thing we learned is it’s really important to have an appreciation of the process . . . to enjoy the process.”

On this day, the project utmost on their minds is the possibility of developing a screening room in San Diego, modeled after similar projects in others cities, which could bring a range of films to San Diego, including those without distributors.

“A very small percentage of films are being shown in the United States, (much less in) San Diego,” Artenstein said.

“Break of Dawn” has given them new appreciation for the problems of exposing films not connected to a major studio to an audience, such as getting publicity or finding movie houses to screen the film. Plus, they like the idea of being involved in all aspects of film-making, from production to exhibition, just like the studios.

“The difference is they have many helpers and we just change hats constantly,” Eberhard said with a laugh.

They are thinking of hiring a secretary now, which would bring Cinewest’s staff to three, including Eberhard and Artenstein.

In some ways, things have changed little for the pair. Artenstein points to a 1984 article that describes Artenstein on the phone to Los Angeles and Eberhard working on distributing 15,000 brochures for Cinewest’s educational videos. Six years later, Artenstein says with a laugh, he communicates by FAX with Los Angeles and Eberhard is preparing to send out 15,000 brochures for the video of “Break of Dawn.”

“No matter how we evolve we seem to be going back to our roots,” Artenstein said.