Building a Home for Short Films : Venue: Doug Piburn unveils what he hopes to be the forerunner to the Fellini Theater with a four-day program, ‘The Great North American Short Film Festival.’

One of the oddest aspects of the so-called film capital of the world is how few venues exist for independent short films no studio would touch. Most of the well-regarded venues are long gone, including Theatre Vanguard on Melrose and the Film Oasis co-op group, which screened at various sites around Los Angeles.

Venice’s Beyond Baroque occasionally screens old and new experimental work, and Filmforum continues to thrive, temporarily based in a theater at Hollywood Moguls until its permanent base--Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions--opens in Hollywood in 1994. But not since 1975, when Filmforum began, has a haven for short films opened locally.

Until today, that is, when filmmaker Doug Piburn unveils what he hopes to be the forerunner of the Fellini Theater, at 6543 Santa Monica Blvd. on Theatre Row Hollywood, with a four-day program cheekily titled “The Great North American Short Film Festival.” The 18 films screening on three separate programs through Tuesday range from Maxene Vener’s giddy experiment “Under the Daisies” to Bart Mallard’s documentary “Burn Heads” to narrative films by actor Steve Buscemi (“What Happened to Pete?”) and writer Terry Southern with director Charles Zigman (“Heavy Put-Away”).

All the indicators suggest that Piburn is walking the razor’s edge opening an untraditional cinema. In this recession? With the current shrinkage of venues for foreign and independent features? What possessed him to launch such a foolhardy venture?

Piburn’s best reason: “I didn’t have a place to get my own films shown, and neither did the film artists I lived with. We wanted a place of our own.”

Piburn, who turns 27 today, migrated to Los Angeles less than two years ago after graduating from the University of Colorado at Boulder, where his studies included a film class with the granddaddy of American experimental film, Stan Brakhage. “Stan showed us that we could go out and make any film at all,” says Piburn, tucked in a corner of the In-Between Cafe adjacent to the Fellini and looking bone tired after a nonstop schedule organizing the festival.

Adopting Brakhage’s philosophy, Piburn and fellow downtown filmmakers such as Ricardo Mendoza plotted last year to open an underground outdoor cinema on a downtown back street (“I called it a box canyon of building walls, but that’s the Colorado kid in me talking”), where films would be projected out of an upstairs window against a wall across the street.

“That got too complicated,” Piburn says, but the notion of starting up a renegade cinema didn’t go away. He peppered coffeehouses and film hangouts with flyers asking independent filmmakers to contact him and forge a film co-op.

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Instead of calls from filmmakers, Piburn received one in late July from a property manager named Jerry Schniederman, whose interests include properties ranging from galleries to theaters along Santa Monica Boulevard, where Theatre Row Hollywood is located. In fact, the locale Schniederman urged Piburn to convert to a cinema (but which Piburn at the time deemed too costly to convert)--the former Benson Hardware Store is the place Piburn wants as the Fellini’s permanent home. Piburn expects that a complete conversion of the Benson space into a fully equipped cinema will cost $50,000-$100,000. “It all depends on the interest and support we build from our first event,” he adds, warily.

And lest skeptics think that Piburn is somehow cashing in on the recent death of Italian film maestro Federico Fellini, Piburn’s actor brother Dan suggested the name shortly after the first contact with Schniederman. While the name stuck, the initial organizational model of a democratically run and owned film co-op has not. Instead, revenue at the nonprofit Fellini will be built on membership dues and ticket sales.

“To be honest,” Piburn says, “I don’t know if it will work that way, but we’ll try.”

Albert Kilchesty, former Filmforum artistic director and current administrative manager of the San Francisco Cinematheque, isn’t sure it will work either, but notes during a telephone conversation from San Francisco that “I think what Doug is doing is great and encouraging. It’s surprising and rare to hear of someone who has the energy and interest to start a place devoted to short films of all types.”

Piburn admits he’s optimistic by nature, but “looking at it rationally, I see how we received nearly 50 submitted films for the festival, how we put together a six-person jury to winnow it down to 18 films, and how we’re opening on schedule. I’m in shock that things have gotten this far.”