AFI’s declining ‘best of’ moments

I’ve never forgotten a maxim I first heard from the famously tenacious rock manager Irving Azoff: “The only thing worse than selling out is selling out and not being bought.” It applies all too well to the American Film Institute, which was established in 1967 as a nonprofit organization devoted to “advancing and preserving the art of the moving image.”

The AFI runs a conservatory for filmmakers, oversees an L.A.-based film festival, acquires films for preservation and gave its 31st annual Life Achievement Award to Robert De Niro in a ceremony Thursday that will air on the USA Network on Monday.

Unfortunately, these days the AFI is best known to moviegoers as the purveyor of 100-greatest-movies lists and TV shows that promote the history of film -- and the AFI -- in almost equal measure. It’s also still licking its wounds from a disastrous attempt last year to elbow into the Oscar season with “The AFI Awards.” The program, which placed near the bottom of the Nielsen ratings, did so poorly that CBS scrapped plans for a repeat this year.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with a show called “100 Years ... 100 Heroes and Villains,” the AFI’s most recent TV special. The media landscape is littered with cheesy “greatest films” lists and TV shows. Entertainment Weekly can scarcely get through a month without having a “100 Greatest Videogames” or “The Top 50 Cult Movies” issue. What makes the AFI’s parade of 100 best shows and lists so depressing is that an institution devoted to celebrating history is creating programming that is so disposable. “100 Years ... 100 Heroes” is the kind of show Dick Clark could do in his sleep. Once you put the AFI’s name on it, we’re entitled to have higher expectations for a show whose critical analysis of film history is about as profound as the lyrics to a song by Avril Lavigne.

“The AFI was supposed to honor greatness and educate people in film history,” says Wall Street Journal film critic Joe Morgenstern. “But they’ve morphed into another organization that simply markets celebrity culture. They’ve become a national version of KCET, pandering to the middlebrow tastes of their subscribers. These bogus polls and lists and 100-best shows contribute nothing to film culture or the culture at large.”

In fairness, the AFI is in a harsh financial bind. In its early years, the organization received generous funding from the National Endowment for the Arts. But federal funding has since dwindled to a trickle, forcing the AFI to rely on contributions from private and corporate entities to cover its annual $14-million-or-so operating budget that pays for running a conservatory for filmmakers, movie preservation and various film events. Insiders say the organization ran a deficit last year, though it expects to break even this year. The AFI has been especially hurt by media consolidation. Where in the past it would get a donation from both CBS and Paramount or Disney and ABC, it now simply gets one corporate payment.

This scramble for money spawned the “100 Best” TV specials, which today bring in roughly $1 million per show. The initial shows were ratings hits, but the recent “100 Heroes” show finished a mediocre No. 40 amid a pack of summer network reruns.

AFI supporters say I’m being a cinema snob. “After we did the first ‘100 Years’ of cinema show, the top-rented video at Blockbuster was ‘Citizen Kane,’ ” explains producer Tom Pollock, a former AFI board chairman. “If for one moment people are watching ‘Citizen Kane’ instead of ‘Dumb and Dumber,’ I have to think this is a good thing in terms of celebrating America’s film history.”

When lions roared

Still, nothing symbolizes the AFI’s pursuit of bland, inoffensive TV programming more than the annual Life Achievement Award, its best known and longest running TV event. The show debuted in 1973, honoring the fabled film director John Ford, who, frail and near death, was wheeled up to the podium by John Wayne.

The early years found awards going to cinema’s old masters, including James Cagney, Alfred Hitchcock, Sir David Lean and Frank Capra. What made the show special was having a pride of white-haired lions in the room. When John Huston was feted in 1983, he was surrounded by the likes of Ava Gardner, Sam Spiegel and Orson Welles, who sonorously intoned: “We’ve been friends since the world was young and we’ve heard the chimes of midnight. We’ve turned the moon to blood. I come before you as an expert witness.”

That’s just the sort of mad poetry that’s missing from the Life Achievement gala these days. In its quest to reach a broader audience, the AFI revamped the award criteria in 1993, opening the doors for “individuals with active careers and work of significance yet to come.” Out went the old lions, in came the stars of today, including De Niro, Harrison Ford and Tom Hanks, who was 45 when he got the award last year. Luminaries who’ve been neglected include Marlon Brando, Elia Kazan, Katharine Hepburn, Paul Newman, Warren Beatty, Sidney Lumet, Peter O’Toole, Gene Hackman, Michael Caine, Robert Altman, Sophia Loren and Woody Allen, to name a few.

AFI Director Jean Picker Firstenberg says some icons haven’t agreed to accept: “A lot of this is about timing....It’s hard to give an award to someone who’s not there.”

Many of the recent galas have been unbearably mawkish. Reviewing a 1999 salute to Dustin Hoffman, Variety’s Michael Speier described the event as “back-patting for the rich and famous ... not as embarrassing as ‘Ishtar,’ but pretty darn close.” This year’s event was better, even though it lasted longer than the director’s cut of “Casino,” propelled by rambling speeches by Joe Pesci and James Woods, who seemed to think they were at De Niro’s bachelor party. Some of the most meaningful remarks came from young actors Edward Norton and Leonardo DiCaprio, who praised De Niro’s generosity and work ethic, with Norton saying, “After encountering Bob you could never be casual about being an actor again.”

Alas, the need for celebrity wattage was always in evidence. Even though she’s never worked with De Niro, Destiny’s Child’s Beyonce Knowles showed up to sing the all-too-familiar “New York, New York.” During her speech, Juliette Lewis said the most valuable lesson she learned from De Niro was to respect writers and directors -- they were the ones who made films work. But guess how many writers or directors, besides Scorsese, were given a chance to speak from the stage? Zip. No Francis Ford Coppola (“Godfather 2”), no Bernardo Bertolucci (“1900”), no Michael Cimino (“The Deer Hunter”), no David Mamet (“The Untouchables”), not even Irwin Winkler, who’s made innumerable films with De Niro as a producer and director.

Symptoms and cures

The made-for-TV-ization of the Achievement Award is symptomatic of a more systemic problem. In an era marked by tumultuous change, the AFI is not only a brand without a vision but an organization largely closed off from new ideas. The AFI has a host of enviable industry titans on its board, but the ones I spoke to said they had little input into AFI affairs. “They tell us what they’re doing,” said one disgruntled chieftain. “They never look at all the great brainpower in the room and say, ‘Well, what do you think would be a good idea?’ ”

A bid several years ago to attract younger members through a Third Decade Council fizzled. “Our efforts are still in an evolutionary state,” Firstenberg says.

This is not to let the media conglomerates off the hook. Although flush with DVD-generated profits from mining the movies’ past, they’re more involved with boosting their bottom line than paying their debt to cinema history. If Viacom’s profit-obsessed Mel Karmazin saw the AFI burning to the ground as he drove to work one morning, he wouldn’t take his foot off the accelerator. The studios say they’ve been put off by the AFI’s aloof leadership, but even if Firstenberg had more charm, the AFI would still struggle for funding.

We need an AFI. In an industry that routinely ignores its past, it has a mission -- honoring film as an art form -- that’s worth embracing. What the AFI needs is a robust new advocate, an indefatigable industry icon who has a passion for movies, a huge Rolodex and the ability to get people to open their wallets. The obvious candidates would be Sherry Lansing, if she were ever willing to relinquish the reins at Paramount, or DreamWorks co-founder Jeffrey Katzenberg, who with only an occasional animation film release to worry about, has a lot of time on his hands and has quietly done a phenomenal job of fundraising for the Motion Picture Home.

The emphasis should be on the AFI’s original mandate -- class, not crass, more like the Baseball Hall of Fame, less like the People’s Choice Awards.

With their TV shows fading in the ratings, the AFI needs to do something bold to re-energize itself. At the ceremony the other night, AFI board chairman Sir Howard Stringer joked that he expected everyone back for the 50th anniversary show, “when we’ll be giving this award to Eminem.” If the AFI doesn’t do some soul searching about its role as custodian to our shared film past, it will be lucky to be around long enough for Eminem to show up.

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The Big Picture runs every Tuesday in Calendar. If you have questions, ideas or criticism, e-mail them to patrick.goldstein@latimes.com.