Making Foreign Films More Familiar in L.A.

It was bound to happen . . . a movie house bearing a designer label.

A cinema . . . not necessarily paradiso . . . by Armani.

Right there on Wilshire Boulevard west of La Cienega with an authentic Beverly Hills ZIP code.

Earlier this year, the Laemmle theater chain’s Fine Arts theater, a single-screen bastion of art-house ( specialty house is the new term) offerings, was quietly purchased by the Italian media conglomerate Penta, whose American operations are centered in West Los Angeles where it has three major-studio films ready for release. Laemmle remains on Wilshire on a month-to-month basis while waiting to open its new Sunset 5 multiplex a couple of miles north at Sunset and Crescent Heights.

The Fine Arts will be turned into a showplace primarily for Italian motion pictures. It will be completely renovated when plans are ready.

Once designer Giorgio Armani, who has moved through women’s and men’s fashions and then on to eyeglasses, has applied his ideas to the Fine Arts, there may never be another movie house like it.

What’s ahead for the Fine Arts: a new, if-ever-a-theater-needed-it exterior, an expanded, redesigned lobby, an espresso bar, a “cultural center” featuring Italian movie memorabilia and Italian cucina.

All this is just one sign, but a certain sign, that Italian filmmakers, backed by the nation’s two main television/film organizations--the state-owned RAI network and the privately owned Fininvest and Penta groups--are getting ready to rediscover America.

Are we ready for la dolce vita all over again?

Except for a couple of Academy Award winners, “Mediterraneo” this year and “Cinema Paradiso” two years ago, the Italian film business hasn’t had much of a following in its own country or anywhere else in the 30 years since such filmmakers as De Sica, Rossellini, Visconti, Zeffirelli, Leone, Wertmuller, Fellini and others showed the rest of the world how to make movies.

Their way of attracting audiences was to tell human-dimension stories through their strong, compelling, inventive films.

But now you have to do more in a marketplace that has turned over several times in the last 30 years. American action and youth-oriented movies dominate the markets overseas as well as at home. European audiences have significantly altered their cinema-going in favor of TV and home video. The once-exclusive adult themes of European films have been co-opted by Americans bearing NC-17 and X.

Still, there are ways to find audiences. One way, apparently, is to buy your own Wilshire Boulevard showcase and make movie-going more than just an al dente popcorn experience.

Or you can do what the Italian government through RAI, its television and film production operation, and some foreign film distributors are doing, and that is to get into the American public eye as often as it can.

As in sponsoring special-interest film festivals.

As in, for example, this week’s American Cinematheque’s “Italian Cinema Now” three-day mini-festival running Friday through Sunday at the Directors Guild Theater in West Hollywood. Nine relatively new Italian films will be shown, all except one made in the ‘90s, none by surviving Italian “golden age” directors, most by relatively young Italian filmmakers. It is an attempt to find audiences again--ticket-buying audiences. But in Hollywood it’s also a way to find distributors and exhibitors.

Guido Corso, the Los Angeles representative for RAI and its film distribution wing, SACIS, talks optimistically about finding beachheads for Italian films in this country.

Four years ago, the two Italian government-run companies, RAI and SACIS, took over the Carnegie screening room in New York--almost like Penta is doing on Wilshire Boulevard--to run only Italian, English-subtitled movies, four shows a day, seven days a week.

That lasted about eight months. “We sold a lot of tickets to Italo-Americans in New York,” Corso says. “But we suffered for lack of sales to other Americans. But we also learned something from that and that is to interest an American audience, you have to establish certain meeting points with those people who would be interested in good films that are well made.”

Since then RAI and SACIS have concentrated its attempt to prove that there is a vital, on-going filmmaking business in Italy by getting involved with festivals. Last December, they helped put on an Italian showcase with the Lincoln Center Film Society, with somewhat better ticket sales and something more pleasing to the business side. The exhibited film “The Station” found a distributor and will go forth this year in American movie houses.

Now the Italian government representatives are ready to try Hollywood, bearing with them this weekend among their treasures Marco Ferreri’s “House of Smiles,” which won the Berlin Film Festival’s Golden Bear award, and several other new-to-the-U.S. films, including Francesca Archibugi’s “By Nightfall” with Marcello Mastroianni.

Next month, the Italian government will try something different back at New York’s Lincoln Center, this time a festival that will feature new and old filmmakers, back-to-back. On the same bill, say, a veteran like Fellini and a newcomer such as one of those being shown in Los Angeles. “We have in effect,” says Corso, “put together a retrospective of such people as De Sica and Antonioni but at the same time we will be creating an awareness in America of our new directors.”

The French, more recently, have been trying to crack the American market it once had along with the Italians. Through its film export operation, Unifrance, the government has helped sponsor the Sarasota French Film Festival and this year it co-sponsored with the Loew’s theater chain a five-city promotion of French films. A French film company reportedly has also invested in a New York theater to create a showcase there.

The local American Cinematheque, too, will have an annual French festival starting next month in Los Angeles. And a German festival.

The ticket to American acceptance may very well be through such special showings. You have to start somewhere, especially when foreign films only produce about 2% of all box-office revenues in the United States, down from the 9% it once claimed.

But there is a market here, even at 2%, as “Cinema Paradiso” and “Mediterraneo” have shown. “Paradiso” has grossed $12 million so far, while “Mediterraneo” in less than three months has done $2 million at the box office.

And now Italian and French filmmakers are experimenting with new dubbing techniques, thinking this would overcome audience reluctance to see foreign films.

Dubbed or not, can the Italians or the French find new life in America?

“What we see here is only what is exported,” says exhibitor Bob Laemmle. “There are far more films made in Italy, especially for television, than what we get here. But it’s very expensive for most distributors to release a film here, at least $200,000 to start.”

“Most things, even film-going, run in phases,” says Gary Essert of the American Cinematheque. “A few years ago the Italian films were popular, but they became so much similar of each other. Not much new was being said. But now new blood has forced its way in.”

Harvey Weinstein of Miramax Films, perhaps the most successful American distributor of foreign films, says there is a definite resurgence of interest by Americans.

Trouble is, he says, the American press and media don’t do much about helping the imports. “Newspapers don’t always get on board when there are good films. They won’t write about them or foster them except give them reviews so it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy when the films don’t get an audience because people haven’t been given a chance to know about them or the actors or the directors.

“There are a lot of good films available. The public deserves to be exposed more to them.”