Danish Maker of Little Films Has Big Hopes for the Oscars

Come Sunday night, most of the Academy Awards audience will be transfixed by whether Steven Spielberg accepts one or two Oscars, whether Gwyneth Paltrow finally joins the ranks of the elite and whether Hollywood, generous enough to open its bosom to Elia Kazan, will do likewise for William Shakespeare.

But among the filmmakers sitting on the edge of their seats, watching nervously as the lighthearted “presenters” taunt the serious passion of their endeavors, there will be only one who has been nominated three straight years for an Oscar in the same category.

Meet Kim Magnusson, a 33-year-old Danish film producer who has a proven gift for making fine, if short, films. His “Election Night,” nominated for this year’s best-short-subject Oscar, is 10 minutes long. His struggle to make the third time the charm is a symbol for thousands of filmmakers who are embittered by the Hollywood machinery that has elevated lawyers and accountants at the expense of pure art.

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“I like the challenge of a short film,” says Magnusson during a chat at the Sunset Marquis Hotel and Villas in West Hollywood, where he is staying with his wife, Charlotte, and father, Tivi. “You have to tell a good story in a short amount of time.”

“Election Night,” produced by Magnusson and

directed by Anders Thomas Jensen, who directed Magnusson’s two other nominated shorts, is a parable on racism involving a man who has 20 minutes to vote before the polls close.

Two years ago, Magnusson’s “Ernst & Lyset”--a story in which Jesus Christ returns to Earth, gets into a discussion with a salesman and decides to leave--lost out to the mighty arm of Steven Spielberg’s DreamWorks when that company entered the abandoned ABC TV pilot “Dear Diary” as a short film. The entry of “Dear Diary,” with its budget upward of $2 million, 44 sets and a crew of 75, caused a stir among academy members and a fair share of criticism by the other short-subject nominees.

Of the five short candidates that year, Times movie critic Kevin Thomas called “Ernst & Lyset,” which was shot in two days at a total budget of $100,000, “the most original and rigorous.”

The next year, Magnusson’s film “Wolfgang,” a comic discourse between a middle-aged conductor and a tuba player that results in their realization that there is just no getting away from mother, was beaten by “Visas and Virtue,” a film co-produced by Chris Donahue, a friend of Magnusson’s since they attended Los Angeles’ American Film Institute together in 1991.

Magnusson saw it coming. Donahue’s film about a Japanese diplomat in Lithuania who granted transit visas to thousands of Jews so they could escape the Nazis was “ ‘Schindler’s List’ in 25 minutes,” he said. “I knew it would win.”

Magnusson grew up in a suburb of Copenhagen, worked a few years in the local film industry, then came to Los Angeles in 1991 to attend AFI’s producing program. There, he says, he got a broader lesson in the art and business of filmmaking.

He spent the next year and a half pushing projects around town, and working as a key set production assistant on Mike Nichols’ “Wolf.” “It was terrible,” Magnusson recalls. “Nichols wondered why he was making an action film, Jack [Nicholson] wasn’t talking to Michelle [Pfeiffer]. It’s no wonder it came out as it did.”

Then in 1994 Magnusson went back to Denmark, teamed up with his father and became a partner in M&M; Productions. The company has produced three features, including “The Island on Bird Street,” which was shot in English and aired last year on Showtime. Last week the film received four Emmy nominations.

Magnusson proudly notes that another of his company’s features, “Albert,” was the second-highest-

grossing local film in Denmark last year behind the internationally acclaimed “Celebration.” But short films are the company’s bread and butter.

“The government provides a certain amount of funding, and they are already presold to the TV stations,” he says. “So it keeps the flow going. We’re always in production. And it’s a great way for us to try people out.”

The prestige of the three Oscar nominations hasn’t yet opened a lot of doors in Hollywood. Several studios have asked to see tapes of his films, but so far there has been no talk of the mega-million-dollar, multi-picture deals so frequently associated with American hotshots. Press attention has been almost exclusively Danish.

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Ask Magnusson about Sunday and he predicts that “Saving Private Ryan” will win for best picture and best director, that Gwyneth Paltrow will win best actress and that Roberto Benigni will win best actor “just because of the politics.”

His own chances? He thinks he’ll win. “I was superstitious the other years and wouldn’t dare say it. Now, what do I have to lose?” He says he hasn’t prepared a speech. But press him and he’ll smile and admit he’s thought about it.

What would he say?

“You can hear it on Sunday.”