Auspicious beginnings for Focus

Miramax might be the Goliath of this year’s Academy Awards, with an astounding 40 nominations, but there is a David. Tiny Focus Features managed to pick up 11 nominations, seven for Roman Polanski’s Holocaust tale “The Pianist” plus four for Todd Haynes’ ode to Douglas Sirk, the ‘50s-style melodrama “Far From Heaven.”

Except for its artistic ambitions, everything about Focus is small compared with Miramax. It has a staff one-fifth the size and a commensurately modest Oscar marketing budget. Last year, Focus released eight films versus Miramax’s 26 (excluding Dimension genre movies).

Focus paid about $3 million for the North American rights to its best picture nominee, “The Pianist,” a fraction of Miramax’s share of the estimated $115-million production budget for “Gangs of New York.” “The Pianist” has so far grossed $9 million in the U.S.

Unlike what he calls Miramax’s “spaghetti-thrown-against-the-wall approach,” in which scores of movies are released but only a handful succeed, Focus Co-President James Schamus says, “We’re fundamentally a boutique, which means every single film is the most important film of our lives.”

Created last spring, Focus Features is Universal’s latest bid to create an art house division. It’s a combination of marketing and production staff from defunct USA Films plus co-presidents Schamus and David Linde, former partners in the indie production outfit Good Machine. Linde ran the firm’s profitable international sales operation, while Schamus is a prolific producer-screenwriter, having written such Ang Lee films as “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” and Universal’s upcoming “The Hulk.”

Days after signing on to Focus, the pair flew to the Cannes Film Festival to scoop up the $35-million, European-financed “The Pianist.” “Every distributor who could hold a drink at Cannes was after it,” says Schamus. “The one thing we knew we needed as the very first thing to define the company was to get that movie.”

Focus’ “Pianist” Oscar campaign has been primarily a grass-roots effort to foster word-of-mouth, screening the film -- which tells Jewish pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman’s struggle to survive in the Warsaw ghetto -- for Jewish groups and industry guilds.

One person who has given no interviews is director Roman Polanski, who as a 7-year-old escaped the Krakow ghetto by climbing through a hole in the barbed-wire fence. “Roman’s thinking,” says his agent at International Creative Management, Jeff Berg, was “there’s nothing he could add ... that isn’t on the screen.”

Polanski’s absence also kept journalists focused on the film rather than the 69-year-old’s complicated past. In 1978, Polanski, director of such classics as “Chinatown,” fled the U.S. after pleading guilty to having sex with a 13-year-old girl. Still facing imprisonment, he is unable to return.

While the Holocaust has long been a popular theme for academy voters, “Far From Heaven’s” four nominations are the first mainstream kudos for writer-director Todd Haynes, once a pioneer of Queer Cinema.

A decade ago, Hayne’s first feature, “Poison,” took the grand jury prize at Sundance but was denounced by the Christian right for its homoerotic content and the National Endowment of the Art’s $25,000 grant to Haynes to make the film.

“Far From Heaven” tells the story of a model housewife who discovers her husband is gay. Haynes is nominated for best original screenplay, often the category in which the academy rewards audacity.

For someone “who makes the kinds of films I make, it was just surreal,” Haynes says.

While the $13.5-million “Far From Heaven” emerged as a critics’ darling after last fall’s Venice and Toronto festivals, it did not win any Golden Globes, a Directors Guild of America nod or a best picture Oscar nomination.

While some say it peaked too early, others wonder whether “Far From Heaven” is more admired than loved.

Says one academy voter, “ ‘The Pianist,’ it grips you. ‘Far From Heaven’ is more detached. When you get deluged with all these movies on DVD, it’s what grips you emotionally” that counts. But Schamus avers, “We’re just thrilled with critical, commercial and academy success of the film.”