Faith reborn amid a wasteland

Don’t get me wrong, I love show business. But there are days ... days when I’m not so sure, days when doubts are rampant. There may be an antidote to that despair, but before we get there let’s start with scenes from a marriage--a marriage between the dream factory and those who pull the levers to make it produce.

The head of a major studio called me from his car on Oscar nomination morning a few years back. As usual, Hollywood’s bread-and-butter pictures, the moronic cash cows of the moment, were not well represented. The executive chuckled derisively. “People work on these films every day all year long, and they won’t vote for them,” he said. “They have contempt for what they do.”

A friend recently talked to some of the most successful screenwriters, the A-list personnel who get films made and are well paid in the bargain. How often, each of them was asked, do you think of leaving the business? The answer that came back was always the same: every day.

In an interview that took place while he was chairman and chief executive officer of Columbia Pictures, David Puttnam spoke to me with horror of a fellow producer who’d told him he wouldn’t want to show his own films to his wife and children. “Why on Earth would you inflict something on civilization you didn’t feel you wanted your children to see? I mean, aren’t we part of civilization?”

Losing out to the bottom line

No one in Hollywood is averse to profit, nor should they be. But the best and smartest people, in and out of the studio system, were likely as not attracted to work in movies not because of the money, but because of what film can do to mold individual hearts and minds.

But to be in the movie business today is to be part of what seems to be a losing battle between film’s potential and its actuality. It is to make your way in a world where caring about anything besides box office grosses or profit margins is to risk being labeled naive, foolish or worse. We still love the movies, we are still all but desperate to be entertained, but people in the business are often horrified at what the pressures of the marketplace have forced pictures and their creators to become.

Given the dreams so many came in with, who can avoid asking, “Is this all there is?” It’s as if we have control of the most powerful energy source the world has ever known, and all we do with it is warm up after-school snacks.

Which is part of the reason why New York-based FilmAid (www.filmaidinter national.org) struck such a powerful chord, why hearing about it moved me so much.

An organization for an increasingly savage world, FilmAid has a motivating idea that, like many of the best ones, is beautifully simple: to show movies to refugees and displaced persons, to go to the pitiless camps where residents spend years of their lives, to bring cinema to those who desperately need its ability to lift spirits, inspire hearts and enlighten minds.

Showing movies to people in desperate circumstances may sound silly or frivolous, the last thing that’s needed, but those on the ground are the organization’s most enthusiastic supporters. “The worst thing is that the refugees have nothing to occupy their mind,” says Sarah Sheldon of the humanitarian group Doctors of the World. “Movies can provide a way to escape a narrow, painful daily existence.”

So it’s not surprising that FilmAid got the almost immediate backing of UNICEF and the International Rescue Committee. It’s also not surprising, given the frustrating ways the world sometimes functions, that FilmAid, despite all the good it’s done since it was founded in 1999, is, in the words of founder Caroline Baron, “desperately in need of money.”

Baron, most recently producer of Mira Nair’s “Monsoon Wedding,” is not some naive humanitarian but a savvy industry veteran. Her numerous credits include everything from Meg Ryan’s “Addicted to Love” to Norman Mailer’s “Tough Guys Don’t Dance” to Troma Entertainment’s schlocky “The Toxic Avenger.” FilmAid was born of Baron’s need to help when fighting in Kosovo forced a mass exodus to Macedonia. “I heard a report on NPR that said the biggest refugee problems were psychological trauma and idleness. I thought, ‘Maybe I can organize screenings.’ ”

Six weeks to the day from getting that idea, having “called everyone I could possibly think of” and having raised $60,000, Baron was flying into Macedonia with a projector and a screen. “Within a day,” she says, “we were showing films.”

In the nearly three years since, FilmAid has shown films not only in Macedonia, but also in Kenya and Tanzania, home to massive refugee camps on a continent where people regularly spend a decade or more living in them and where audiences as large as 13,000 (that’s not a misprint) gather on summer nights. And where films (everything from wildlife footage to Charlie Chaplin) are so popular that refugees have told Baron they would gladly give up a meal to watch a movie.

In Afghanistan, where Baron and FilmAid recently went to see if they’d be welcome (the answer is very much yes), a screening of “The Wizard of Oz” was set up for a group of street kids who, because of Taliban strictures, were unfamiliar with even the concept of singing. “The color, the music, Toto, they were completely overwhelmed,” Baron reports. “Watching them watch Dorothy singing ‘Over the Rainbow’ was heartbreaking.”

The screenings in Africa also revealed what Baron calls “the healing aspect of film. The Kakuma camp has a center for malnourished babies, but the mothers were so depressed and exhausted the babies were not gaining any weight. But they started showing cartoons in the feeding center, the mothers started laughing, and the babies gained weight. That’s what the power of film does.”

Seeing movies, but also violence

Because film can do so much, Baron wishes “the studios would stand up, look and understand the value of what we as filmmakers do. In almost every camp, there are local refugee entrepreneurs showing the most violent American films. When kids see that you’re an American, they run up and make machine-gun gestures; that’s what they think America is. That’s scary, and, with so much beauty that could be offered, that’s also sad and a shame.”

FilmAid needs equipment of all types, but mostly what is needed is money. The organization has been running on a nearly depleted seed grant from a branch of the State Department, but Baron says, “What I had hoped for from the very beginning is that we would not take money from organizations, that we, the entertainment industry, would give back this way.”

And the money involved is, by Hollywood standards, so small, from the $3,000 to pay one year’s salary for a refugee video operator to the $250,000 that underwrites a complete evening screening program for one year. “If the studios each gave us that much, we could sustain our overhead, be in Afghanistan and continue our work in Africa,” Baron says. “That’s not even the cost of a premiere.”

To hear what FilmAid has already accomplished, to watch videos of exhausted and debilitated refugee audiences of all ages soaking up films as if they were a necessity of life, is to regain a sorely tried faith. . Is it asking too much for the powers that be to get past short-term “What’s in it for me?” thinking and understand the value to everyone’s future in supporting FilmAid? For the sake of the world we all share, I hope not.