FILM COMMENT : What L.A. Needs Is a Real-Live Film Festival : Why do all those other cities get the kind of festival that the Entertainment Capital of the Universe so richly deserves? Hmm?

The American Film Institute Los Angeles International Film Festival has just ended, and it’s time for a show of hands.

If the festival thrilled you to pieces, raise your hand.

If you managed to get to any films at all, raise your hand.

If you even knew the festival was going on, raise your hand.

Hmmm . . .

It’s not that there aren’t any hands raised out there, but rather that compared to this city’s potential audience for a film festival(and despite the event’s centrally located new home at the Sunset 5 Theaters), both the number of hands and their level of enthusiasm are inarguably lacking.

Yes, the AFI Fest serves a certain audience quite well, and yes, many of its problems are neither of its own making nor within its control. But despite all that, the time has finally come to say that not only is this not as good a festival as Los Angeles deserves, it is in fact the wrong kind of festival altogether for this city.

If you are a hard-core film buff who lives only for the obscure and hard-to-see, those are fighting words. After all, the AFI Fest this year featured more than 100 films from 40 countries, many of whichwould not otherwise be available, as well as tributes to celebrated directors like Andrzej Wajda and Dusan Makavejev. And, as a recent interview with festival head Ken Wlaschin pointed out, with a budget of $400,000 (compared to $6 million for Berlin and $8 million for Tokyo) the AFI

Fest is one of the poorer relations on the festival circuit.

Yet it also seems the type of event the AFI Fest presents is part of the reason it has had so much difficulty getting funding. Just for openers, to those who do not want to devote every minute of their waking lives to film, the festival’s overwhelming size, its philosophical refusal to be more discriminating in its choices, is a major drawback. Even many critics, if truth be told, do not particularly want to take the time to wade through all those films, trying to decide which are worthy of time spent and which are not.

More than that, the films that are selected (as typified by a festival ad promoting new works by, among others, Vera Chytilova, Juraj Jakubisko, Eliseo Subiela and Mitsuo Yanagimachi) seem to thumb their noses at those whose knowledge of current trends in world cinema is less than encyclopedic.

If you knew what was good for you, the AFI Fest seems to be saying, if you had a brain in your head and weren’t a slave to the grotesqueries of Hollywood, you would be grateful for all these obscure treasures, a cultural castor oil approach that can’t help but alienate the city at large as well as the movie-making community that should be the festival’s largest supporter.

Yet, at first glance, it can be argued that precisely this kind of unwieldy, oversized festival works quite well in several other places, San Francisco and Toronto coming readily to mind. So the question becomes, why do those festivals excite and captivate their cities while the AFI Fest is barely a blip on L.A.’s cultural horizon?

Two key factors differentiate both San Francisco and Toronto from Los Angeles, one that is simple to remedy locally and one that is not. Easiest to duplicate is those festivals’ willingness to mix high-profile, popular films with its more recondite programs. So the recently completed San Francisco festival featured the local premieres of “Much Ado About Nothing,” “Dave” and even “Posse.” And last year’s Festival of Festivals in Toronto glitzed it up with everything from “A River Runs Through It” to Billy Crystal’s “Mr. Saturday Night.”

Films of that sort can be used as bait--they can make a festival feel accessible to people who are not washed in the blood of arcane cinema. And once people try a festival film of any sort and find the atmosphere non-intimidating, they are more likely to pick up a program and try one of the event’s more obscure offerings. Toronto especially has mastered this particular game, and those who visit at festival time find the city swelling with a kind of across-the-board cultural excitement that hasn’t characterized Los Angeles since the Olympic Arts Festival came to town almost a decade back.

While adding this kind of excitement should be relatively simple, dealing with the kind of city Los Angeles is will take considerably more doing. For despite their size and sophistication, neither San Francisco nor Toronto nor in fact almost any place you can name is the kind of movie capital Los Angeles is.

Just having a flotilla of unseen films, however deserving, arriving on our doorstep doesn’t have the kind of impact in this town it does elsewhere, and the AFI Fest’s insistent air of non-commercial purity inevitably mocks the ethos of studio-driven cinema that, right or wrong, helps define the city to itself and the world. No matter what kind of nonsense Hollywood is in the habit of turning out, a festival that makes believe all that is happening in some other place will never capture L.A.’s imagination.

Moreover, Los Angeles’ rise to coequality with New York as an international metropolis has intensified its aura of being an event-driven place used to being courted, a locale that likes to feel it doesn’t get excited about any old affair that happens to fall off the turnip truck. A festival that ignores this civic need to be romanced and made to believe it’s getting something special, as the AFI Fest routinely does, is asking for the kind of indifference it gets.

There is a solution to all this, but it will be a bitter pill for everyone involved, requiring as it does looking to the despised East Coast for inspiration. For just as New York is, for better or worse, the city with a self-importance quotient closest to Los Angeles’, so the model of its Big Event film festival feels like the best one for this city to follow, as well as the one most likely to get the kind of corporate/Hollywood support that is badly lacking now.

In business for decades, the New York Film Festival features some two dozen films each year, each one carefully hand-picked by a tough-minded selection committee. While obstructionists will say there is no point in having a festival of films good enough to get eventual distribution anyway, in truth far from all of New York’s selections get to go out nationwide. And if the festival were shrewdly programmed, the kind of excellent but obscure films that often lie buried amid the also-rans of the AFI Fest would benefit by proximity to items ticket buyers are hungrier to see and end up being viewed by a wider audience than the current festival allows.

Ultimately, the point in all this is not whether it is morally superior to show one kind of film or another but rather what can be done to turn out a Los Angeles film festival that both excites the city and gets as wide an audience cross section as possible out of their ruts and into more interesting movies. Anyone who has experienced the rush of a city agog over its film festival will want that feeling for L.A. As noble, high-minded and underfunded as the current AFI Fest is, no one can seriously argue that it does that. We deserve a festival that lights up our skies, and if we’re insistent enough in our demands, perhaps we’ll even get one.