Filmmaker Jon Jost Finally Comes In From the Fringe : Movies: After 30 years out of the mainstream, he has a film receive a regular U.S. release.

No filmmaker is more in the American grain than Jon Jost, who has been making films for 30 years. Yet not one of his 11 features has had a regular U.S. theatrical release--until now.

When Jost’s “All the Vermeers in New York” was named the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn.’s best independent/experimental film for 1991, the Landmark Theater chain decided to book it at its theaters around the country.

Although the Chicago-born Jost, a stocky, prematurely white-haired man of 48, is pleased that at last he has the possibility of reaching audiences beyond the alternative cinema circuit, he has been too ruggedly independent for too long to crave recognition. “I know what I do is good. If other people reading their tea leaves don’t see it now in one of my films, they’ll come back 10 years later and they’ll get it. I can and do live extremely poorly, and it doesn’t bother me.”

As he spoke, Jost, currently based in San Francisco, was sitting in the elegant, art-filled living room of the Beverly Hills home of his producer’s mother--behind him hung a real Jackson Pollack. He was not in the least fazed by his surroundings, but then it’s easy to believe that this one-time Army brat who served two years in prison for resisting the draft could take just about anything in stride.

A self-taught filmmaker, he first thought he might want to be an architect, but with the growing anti-war sentiment of the ‘60s he instead became instrumental in the founding of the Chicago branch of Newsreel, the dynamic activist filmmaking collective. He has progressed from early experimental features that were all but unwatchable in their obscurantism to films that are impressive for their fresh, simple straight-as-an-arrow directness that is the primary characteristic of their maker. Among them are “Chameleon” (1978), in which Bob Glaudini played a sophisticated drug dealer to L.A.’s rich and trendy; “Slow Moves” (1983); “Bell Diamond,” and “Sure Fire” (1990), in which Tom Blair is nothing less than astonishing as a dreamy but intense go-getter who fervently believes that his remote Utah town is a potential gold mine in providing homes for vacationers and retirees. All of these films and others played at UCLA last year.

Even though Jost’s films have received so little circulation, he has nevertheless been able to remain a full-time filmmaker. “I’ve never had any other job,” he said proudly. “I’ve never worked for pay. I have shot films for somebody else for free. In effect, I’ve made my own living off my movies. I don’t mind because I do what I want to do.”

Last year’s UCLA retrospective made clear that his main concern has been with defining the American character (especially male). He himself has said of a number of his 11 features that his intent was “to capture the spirit of a time and place.” His style, now stripped to the essentials----he would argue that it hasn’t changed at all--is marked by long takes, which once provoked tedium but now are suffused with meaning and emotion.

“I tend to make films about losers, people not normally considered attractive intellectually or psychologically, because I think these characters deserve to be given space to express themselves,” he said. “I don’t romanticize them. My films are a sort of reaction against movies about beautiful, clever people, although my characters may be from total poverty or from great wealth.”

Jost is preparing to shoot his next movie, “The Bed You Sleep In,” in Oregon on a $100,000 budget and starring Tom Blair, who starred in his 1977 “Last Chants for a Slow Dance” as an unemployed Montana mine worker turned increasingly rootless--and dangerous drifter. . And he’s looking ahead to the project after that, to be shot in Rome and in Arizona on his biggest budget to date: $750,000.

“All the Vermeers in New York,” essentially a vignette which Jost made in 1990 in association with American Playhouse, is beautifully articulated and sustained, underlined by a moody jazz score composed by Jon A. English and also by luminous cinematography. Invariably his own cameraman (and editor), Jost shot the film in 35mm with available light, using a new Kodak fine-grain, high-speed stock. Described by Jost as “an elegy for the ‘80s,” the film centers on a hotshot Wall Street broker (Stephen Lack) of unassailable confidence and impeccable taste who is transfixed by the similarity of appearance between a beautiful French actress (Emmanuelle Chaulet) and a young woman in a Vermeer painting they both happen to be admiring at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. What develops is a poignant, romantic fable about the eternal and painful discrepancy between art and life--and of the values and instabilities of the ‘80s.

Right now Jost would like to get his hands on enough money to open a regular run of ‘Vermeers” in New York. “We don’t have money for ads,” he said. “I can take $25,000 and add a zero on and make it work. The best thing for my next movie is to promote ‘All the Vermeers in New York.’ I never want more money than I need, it would only get in the way.

“More money than you need always leads to more problems. A crew of two for me is perfect, thanks. And I don’t have audience problems--’All the Vermeers in New York’ is not a weird movie; it’s just the business people in between me and my films.”