THE BIG PICTURE

I first got to know Robert Bucksbaum when I discovered that my favorite neighborhood theater, the Majestic Crest in Westwood, wasn’t owned by a corporate theater chain but by one man who was so crazy about movies that he’d bought his own movie theater, making him one of the few individual theater owners in America.

Our paths have continued to cross, since Bucksbaum -- who’s something of a baseball fanatic as well -- manages our local Little League’s summer All-Star team, which, thanks to some stellar play from a great bunch of kids, including his twin boys and my son, ended up winning the District 25 championship.

But it turns out that I spent so much time second-guessing his managing moves that I’d forgotten all about the most formative experience of Bucksbaum’s life. Having enlisted in the Army when he was 19, he spent four years in the military, two years at Ft. Bragg as an Airborne paratrooper, two years in Germany in military intelligence. He still has vivid memories of the experience, especially of his 56 jumps as a paratrooper -- “I never landed in a tree once, which was pretty good for Ft. Bragg.”

The most grueling part of the experience was when he signed up for a three-week course of condensed Army Ranger training at Ft. Bragg. “The idea was to learn search, escape and evasion training,” he recalls. “But it was unbelievably rough. We got no more than three hours of sleep a day, no one took a shower for three weeks, and you spent most of the night running through swamps. Most of us ended up on patrol for three days straight. The attrition rate was 75% because they were really trying to break you down as much as toughen you up.”

So when Bucksbaum saw “The Hurt Locker” at ShoWest this spring, he was smitten by the film, which focuses on a steely group of bomb disposal specialists whose job is to detect and dismantle bombs in Iraq. “When I was in Airborne school, I met guys who were bomb disposal and demolition specialists,” Bucksbaum says. “They were incredible people, because after what they’d gone through, they were prepared for anything. They looked at life as gravy. What I always remember is the incredible confidence they had -- they didn’t worry about the same things we worried about. They were just a different breed.”

After he saw the film, Bucksbaum had a chance to introduce himself to Kathryn Bigelow, the film’s director, who was especially excited to get such positive feedback from a theater owner who was actually a veteran. Bucksbaum started calling up Summit Entertainment, which is releasing the film, begging and cajoling the company to let him run the film at the Crest. At first, he got nowhere. When it comes to theater bookings on Los Angeles’ Westside, most major distributors prefer to play their pictures in Century City or at the Landmark theaters about 10 blocks south of the Crest on Westwood Boulevard. Bucksbaum usually has to wait until a picture has played out at one of those multiplexes before getting a run for his own theater.

But Bucksbaum’s persistence finally paid off. “I called them every Monday morning, begging and pleading, and finally . . . they said, ‘OK, you can have it this Friday.’ I guess everyone realized how passionate I was about it.”

Having performed strongly in its limited run over the last few weeks, “The Hurt Locker” expanded to 238 theaters on Friday. The Crest is apparently the only one whose owner is willing to make a special offer: Bucksbaum, who can often be found at the theater, changing projector bulbs, making popcorn and sweeping up after the show, is promising patrons that he’ll refund their money if they don’t find the movie a special experience.

Times haven’t been good for independent theater owners. Bucksbaum has been considering selling the Crest, although he wants to lease back the building and continue operating it as a theater. “It’s been a struggle,” he admits. “The slowdown in the indie film world has really hit us hard.” But he is excited about finally getting to play a movie that is close to his heart. “Kathryn’s film really captures the spirit of how soldiers interact with each other,” he says. “It felt totally real, so it’s the kind of movie that you want to share with the world, so other people can have a little understanding about what that special spirit and kinship is like.”

AFI should honor greatness again

Not that any of you actually watched, but the AFI Life Achievement Award had its TV airing July 19, where you could watch a schmoozy scrum of Hollywood insiders paying extravagant tribute to Michael Douglas, this year’s honoree. The Life Achievement is an award that began with great promise in 1973, going to one of our most gifted filmmakers, John Ford, who was soon followed by such cinema giants as James Cagney, Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock (you can see the roll call of greats here). But the event has been sliding steadily downhill ever since as the AFI has turned what was once a prestigious honor into a dreary TV celebrity event.

As my writer pal Bob Elis- berg pointed out in a thoughtful post on the Huffington Post, the AFI’s desperate quest for TV brand familiarity has resulted in 10 of the last 11 awards being given to actors (the one exception being George Lucas). In fact, in its 37 years, the award has gone only to an actor or a filmmaker. So beyond the obvious question -- why honor Michael Douglas when Gene Hackman and Robert Duvall, not to mention Francis Ford Coppola, have all gone wanting? -- you have to wonder why the award has never, not even once, been handed out to anyone best known as a writer, composer, producer or cinematographer.

But what bugs me the most is that the AFI has sold its soul without even being bought, in the sense that its TV credibility has continued to decline even as it has honored ever-younger actors (Tom Hanks got his award when he was 46) as the AFI repeatedly stooped to conquer, trying to chase a younger audience that clearly has little interest in stuffy awards fests.

In its early days, the AFI Life Achievement Award was broadcast exclusively on CBS, then, from the mid-1980s to 2000, on a rotating basis among the three original networks. After a one-year stop on Fox, it has dropped farther and farther down the TV hierarchy, playing for a number of years on the USA cable network. This year it reached a new nadir, airing on TV Land Prime, home of ‘60s and ‘70s sitcoms and such lofty fare as Joan Rivers’ “How’d You Get So Rich” and the reality show “The Cougar.” Talk about how low can you go. Could the AFI end up on E! next year?

Since the show clearly has zero commercial potential, at least the AFI board could regain a small shred of credibility by deciding that because its star-search strategy has failed so miserably, it would actually start honoring industry titans and visionaries who didn’t happen to be high-profile actors or directors. Imagine the possibilities! The AFI could honor a great writer -- obvious candidates being Neil Simon, Robert Towne or Larry Gelbart. It could laud a gifted cinematographer, starting with Haskell Wexler, Gordon Willis or Roger Deakins. Or single out a brilliant composer, beginning with John Williams, Ennio Morricone or Randy Newman.

God forbid, the AFI could even recognize one of the industry’s top producers and studio executives, the men and women who’ve often single-handedly willed many of our most wonderful films into existence. I’d be happy to offer a host of names, with the likes of John Calley, Harvey Weinstein, Scott Rudin and Larry Gordon providing a starting point. The AFI has never seemed a less engaged or relevant institution than it does today. But at least if it regained its self-respect by honoring our truly great film artists and craftsmen, instead of simply trotting out another familiar celebrity, it might someday regain the respect of its peers in the Hollywood community.

An Israeli porn film milestone

I doubt that Michael Lucas is in line to get a cabinet position in the Israeli government, but the New York-based entrepreneur is doing everything he can to -- as he puts it -- “promote Israeli culture and tourism.” It’s how he’s doing it that is unusual. See, Lucas is a former porn actor who now runs Lucas Entertainment, a top gay porn production company, whose new film, “Men of Israel,” available now in video stores, is being billed as a landmark production, being the first gay porn film to feature an all-Israeli cast.

But according to this report from Tablet magazine, which offers smart, iconoclastic coverage of Jewish arts, politics and culture, the real breakthrough for the film is that it’s the first gay porn movie to feature an all-Jewish cast. (Obviously a fine distinction, but a distinction nonetheless.)

As Tablet’s Wayne Hoffman points out, until now most Jewish porn stars have used deracinated porn monikers -- the legendary Harry Reems (“Deep Throat”), for example, was born Herbert Streicher.

In gay porn, Hoffman writes: “Openly Jewish men have been virtually absent or invisible. In fact, the only one in recent memory is, well, Michael Lucas. That’s not to say that there haven’t been Jewish guys in gay films. Just two years ago, for instance, Dror Barak made it big as a hirsute hunk making movies for Raging Stallion Studios, but Barak -- who worked for the Israeli consulate in New York until news of his other career broke -- performed under the name Roman Ragazzi.”

In “Men of Israel,” all the guys are openly Israeli and Jewish, with even plausibly Israeli names: Matan Shalev, Avi Dar and Naor Tal. I’m no expert on pornography, having seen more documentaries about porn than actual porn films in the past 20 years. But whenever Jews are more open about their Jewish identity -- as the Adam Sandler, Judd Apatow and Sarah Silverman generation of comedians has been in recent years -- it sounds like a healthy development, as it would be for any minority culture.

Hoffman sounds like he’s still on the fence. He’s hopeful that the success of “Men of Israel” could become a “signifier” for a certain type of sexual prowess or desirability, saying “will Italian guys start wearing mezuzahs and telling people they’re Jewish -- and will that make them seem more virile, better endowed, hotter? I’ll believe it when I see it.”

He concludes that he’ll be convinced that Jewish studs have finally arrived when he sees a new magazine called Jewish Inches or “a blond, blue-eyed Midwestern performer who adopts a name like Lance Bornstein or Rod Horowitz.”

--

patrick.goldstein@latimes.com