‘Man of the Century’ Takes Trip Back in Time

The biggest sleeper of the year, this summer’s “Blair Witch Project,” may look as if it was cobbled together from raw footage found in the woods, but if it starts a trend toward faux amateurishness--as it already seems to be doing, naturally--don’t expect Adam Abraham to join in.

Abraham’s new movie, the charming “Man of the Century,” could be called the anti-”Witch.” Joyously retro in story and design, this black-and-white movie aspires to a kind of innocence and old-fashioned polish that were out of style before Abraham was born.

“In the ‘30s and ‘40s there was a craft to making movies and a caring that is in stark contrast to what we see in movies today,” said Abraham, sounding like a fogy even though he is only 28. When he started writing the movie in 1995 with his friend Gibson Frazier, another 28-year-old who also stars, “we were disappointed with what was coming out of both the major studios and the independents,” Abraham said. “I asked why can’t I make films that have that [old Hollywood] kind of quality and craft in it?”

“Century,” which won this year’s audience award at Slamdance, a satellite festival to the Sundance Film Festival in Utah, is about a modern-day newspaper reporter who dresses and acts as if he thinks he’s a character from the 1930s newspaper tale “The Front Page.” He speaks the snappy patter of early Howard Hawks movies as he saunters through Gotham enthusiastically pursuing stories about ribbon cuttings--until he gets embroiled in the story of the century, which just might get several people killed. (The movie opens today and was reviewed in Thursday’s Screening Room column by The Times’ Kevin Thomas.)

It sounds a bit like an extended “Saturday Night Live” skit, and it is similar to one. But Abraham achieves a persuasive 1930s movie look on a budget of less than $2 million, and he presents it without a shred of irony or condescension--audiences either get it or they don’t. And while the movie has been enthusiastically received at festivals (with viewers mimicking the fun, old-timey dialogue for days after seeing it), it leaves others cold. It took Abraham more than a year to find a distributor for it, although he blames this partly on his ignorance about what to do with the film once he finished it in 1998. “We really didn’t know what to do next,” he said. “Somehow we’d forgotten that part.”

Realizing that their movie plays better in theaters than on video, they resisted handing tapes to potential distributors. Unfortunately, head honchos usually would see it no other way. One after the other said no until New Line picked it up. Even studio execs who liked it passed because they didn’t know what demographic it would appeal to, Abraham said.

“Sweet” isn’t a term often applied to low-budget movies from first-time indie filmmakers. “Edgy” is more the norm. But “Century” is as far from edgy as it gets. It isn’t hip. It isn’t cynical. And it isn’t about navel-gazing twentysomethings coming of age and falling in love. Rather, it has Frazier as Johnny Twennies doing the jitterbug with his gal pal (Susan Egan). It has people saying things like, “Stick with me, kid, and everything’s gonna be jake.” And it has the likes of crooner Bobby Short fronting a big band. What was Abraham thinking?

Abraham doesn’t look like the kind of filmmaker you might expect to helm such a movie. With his long hair and dressed in black, he could be just another Hollywood hipster as he lunched at Musso & Frank’s the other day, sitting across the table from Frazier. Although they both are from Philadelphia, the director met the UCLA graduate in Los Angeles while working on an earlier short film that Abraham made. Quite by chance, they found that their sensibilities were in sync.

With his jutting Dudley Do-Right chin and a way of speaking that would not be out of place in an old Katharine Hepburn movie, Frazier makes a jaunty impression as the irrepressible Johnny Twennies. He’s so persuasive, in fact, that he says he’s found that some casting agents have already typecast him: He’s good, they say, but can he do anything else? This, even though he has good stage credentials and has played a variety of roles with the Buffalo Nights Theatre Company he founded in 1991.

While it’s questionable whether the duo’s first movie will launch a young fogy movement of retro filmmakers, they said they made “Century” the way they did in reaction to most contemporary films, mainstream and independent, which they find mean-spirited and “anti-human.”

Abraham gets worked up talking about this, as perhaps only the young and uncorrupted can. Most Hollywood pictures, he said, follow a simple formula: “You get talking heads--close-up after close-up after close-up of the movie stars, and then you get an explosion at the end.” As for independent movies, he says “99.9%” of them are “low-brow sociology,” primarily concerned with observing “lifelike” behavior in whatever milieu it happens to be set.