Small-Scale ‘Move’ Getting Big-Time Notice

In an industry that measures success by a number of variables, Carl Franklin’s low-budget feature “One False Move” has met one criterion rarely matched by others. It is coming back for a second theatrical release in Los Angeles just weeks after closing a first run.

Who to thank? Movie critics and New Yorkers--in that order, the filmmakers say.

“There’s been this avalanche of support: the film festivals, the critics. Everything that has happened to us has come as a surprise,” said director Franklin, 43, who is now happily deluged with offers to make his next movie. “Seeing lines around the block was a dream. I just never thought it would happen so soon.”

For distributor IRS Media, reopening “One False Move” at the Crest Theater in Westwood on Aug. 21 is akin “to coming home,” said Seth Willenson, the picture’s marketing executive.

“There’s a certain amount of New York chauvinism when pictures catch on there,” he said. “But L.A. is where it first played and this is where our real audience is.”

Meaning, of course, the industry audience.

Even if a movie hasn’t broken any house records or grossed impressive numbers--”One False Move” has just passed the $1-million ticket sales mark--Hollywood powerbrokers are impressed when new talent garners the kind of critical praise Franklin has received. The kind of press, as it’s said, that no amount of money can buy.

The picture’s not easily classified in any one genre. Described as a contemporary film noir, the movie tells the story of an interracial couple and their felonious passenger who conduct a violent rampage while running drugs from L.A. to Arkansas. The film stars Bill Paxton, Cynda Williams and Billy Bob Thornton.

Co-financed by IRS and Columbia TriStar video, the movie at one time seemed destined to go straight to video. But after seeing what Franklin did with a budget of $2.5 million and a no-star cast, the executives thought again.

One of the film’s producers, Jesse Beaton, thought the movie might have a chance if it went the film festival route--and she was right.

An early champion of the picture was former Los Angeles Times film critic Sheila Benson, who had seen it in Los Angeles and brought it to this year’s Floating Film Festival, where it caught the fancy of Chicago Sun Times critic Roger Ebert. He gave it a rave there--and later on his syndicated television show with critic Gene Siskel.

After being in limbo for nearly a year (“One False Move” actually was finished in May, 1991), it appeared the film would have a life on the big screen after all. It opened in Los Angeles, Chicago and Seattle on May 8. Los Angeles Times reviewer Peter Rainer called the movie “taut and sure-footed” but said it suffered from “a few too many cornball motifs.”

Since then, it has been released in 25 cities in a rollout pattern that fits a small picture. In some cities it plays in only one house; in Manhattan, it recently expanded to its third location at the Loews Village Sevenplex.

Considering the small advertising campaign budget (limited print, no television), tickets are being sold almost solely on critical word-of-mouth, which snowballed once “the buzz” on the film generated by film festivals and other, West-of-the-Hudson critics caught up with the New York media.

Glowing reviews appeared in succession in Newsday, the New York Times and New York magazine, not to mention profiles on Franklin, whose previous credits include directing three forgettable Roger Corman movies.

And no one was more surprised than Franklin himself.

“It’s hard to know as the filmmaker what it is that other people are seeing,” he said in a telephone interview from Berkeley, where he is taking a break from his current project, the HBO series “Shelton Avenue,” about the lives of an extended black family in St. Paul, Minn. “We thought the film was good, but we never anticipated an avalanche.”

Or the avalanche of offers. The former actor (“The A-Team”) has had meetings with every major Hollywood studio, solicitations to change agents and offers for several development and directing deals. The pitch ideas range from “sci-fi fantasy” to “ ‘Chinatown’-type mysteries,” and he says he was forced to leave Los Angeles so he could sort through them all.

What he finds notable about many of the offers is that “half the people that are calling me don’t know I’m not white.” Not, he said, that that should make a difference.

“If I did work in black-oriented materials, they would occupy me for the rest of my life and that would be fine. But I’m starting to respond to projects that are not--and I don’t want to limit myself. I want to broaden my ethnic experience to things more universal.” No matter what his next Hollywood project is, he hopes, one day, to film a semi-autobiographical story about spirituality.

So it seems “One False Move” hasn’t made many.