Life in an art film desert
Bill Muller
The Arizona Republic
Feb. 10, 2007 12:00 AM
As we try to pick out the next Oscar winners, local moviegoers are conducting their own search.
Where, they wonder, is Miss Potter?
The movie, starring Renée Zellweger as Peter Rabbit author Beatrix Potter, has swirled in limbo for weeks, unable to reach a Valley screen. This despite a fairly prominent studio (Weinstein), a big-name co-star (Ewan McGregor) and a competent director (Chris Noonan, who directed Babe).
Such is the fickle nature of the Valley art-movie market, which often delivers great movies but sometimes teases fans. In the case of Miss Potter, local exhibitors were told that the studio was retooling its marketing campaign after disappointing early screenings.
But what about such Oscar nominees as the Algerian war film Days of Glory, the documentary Iraq in Fragments and the German film The Lives of Others?
The good news: Those movies are on the way. And guess what? There's no conspiracy. Or at least not a well-organized one. The Valley has to stand in line behind New York, Los Angeles and other cities, and local film buyers go through a complex series of negotiations, wheedling and cajoling to make sure you can see such films as the upcoming God Grew Tired of Us, about the lost boys of the Sudan.
The credit and blame for the vagaries of the art-film system are laid at the doorstep of Dan Harkins, who operates the Harkins Camelview 5, a venerable Scottsdale art house that's among the most well-attended in the nation.
Inspired by foreign films from such directors as Federico Fellini, François Truffaut and Akira Kurosawa, Harkins converted Camelview, 7001 E. Highland Ave., Scottsdale, to an independent-film theater in 1974.
"These films were not getting their rightful screen time, and I felt it was a cause celebre to bring these films to Phoenix because it's culturally enriching," said Harkins, CEO of the Harkins Theatres chain. "For me, it's a superior sense of achievement.
"I would much rather have Sideways and Winged Migration and The Queen as hits in my theater chain than the automatic blockbuster business that a Spider-Man or a Harry Potter will bring."
What's an art film?So-called art movies are generally considered to be low-budget, independent, foreign, documentary or experimental films. They come in three classes: prestige movies with star power and box-office momentum (The Queen,
Brokeback Mountain), second-level films with recognizable stars or stories (Notes on a Scandal, A Scanner Darkly) and the obscure (Sweetland, Shortbus).
Although some art films are almost sure to play here (we weren't going to miss The Last King of Scotland) many such films play on only one screen and never gain the buzz to "go wide" on multiple theater screens.
Numerous factors, many out of local theater owners' control, contribute to when or if Valley art-movie lovers will be able to see certain films.
• I can't help you, Sundance: Many independent movies start their lives at film festivals, where producers hope to attract distributors. If a film fails on the festival circuit it may never be seen again, unless it's on home video.
• New York, New York: A movie that crosses the film-festival hurdle is released in a few theaters in New York and LA. The grosses determine whether it will be sent to a second tier of cities, which usually includes the Valley.
• You want that when? Sometimes local exhibitors have to wait in line for a movie to fade in another market before the print is moved to the Valley.
"They're only working X amount of prints," said Noel Kendall, Harkins' head film buyer. "They're not going to make a new print every time they open up a new market, especially the smaller distributors."
• No room at the (Camelview) inn: If Harkins has all five Camelview screens filled with moneymaking movies, he may delay a new art movie.
• It won't play in Peoria (Scottsdale, either): Some studios don't consider their movies a fit for Valley audiences. Kendall, who wanted to show Volver, starring Oscar-nominated Penélope Cruz, had to convince the studio that it would work.
"I kept punching them for it, and pushing them," he said, "and they did (release it), and it turned out to be very successful. It's a good movie."
These marketing techniques are necessary because art films aren't like major releases, which are shown on thousands of screens across the nation simultaneously and are backed by multimillion-dollar advertising campaigns on television, in print and on the Internet.
"With commercial films, it's a big flash, it's all front end, blitz, jillion-dollar campaign," Harkins said. "Where with art films, it's a slow nurturing, coddling of the moviegoing audience."
Controversial topics Harkins is quick to snap up such well-known art titles as the Oscar-nominated Little Miss Sunshine, but he's not afraid to book relatively unknown films or movies with touchy subject matter.
In 2005, he showed The Aristocrats (a comedy about the world's dirtiest joke) and Paradise Now (which showed Middle East terrorism from the Palestinian perspective). Last year, he booked Shortbus (which had a startling amount of real sex).
Harkins' adventurous nature has paid off several times, as bookings of the Oscar-winning avian documentary Winged Migration (2001) and the similar March of the Penguins (2005) outperformed early estimates. He also scored big with What the Bleep Do We Know!?, a New Age film he found at the Sedona International Film Festival. In 2004-05, the movie set records and ran for 52 weeks at Harkins' other art venue, the single-screen Valley Art in downtown Tempe.
"That would have never happened if we hadn't just bumped into the right person in the lobby of the Sedona theater during the Sedona Film Festival," Harkins recalled.
And although Harkins knew that Brokeback Mountain was going to be a hit in 2005, he never imagined the extent of its popularity. On two screens at Camelview, Brokeback set a record for weekend attendance, outselling the previous title-holder, the Oscar-winning musical Chicago, by a wide margin. AMC an optionHarkins Camelview isn't the only place to see independent movies in the Valley. AMC Theatres is featuring such films in a new program, AMC Select. In the Valley, many movies have crossover appeal, such as Babel, Letters From Iwo Jima and Dreamgirls. Artier titles include Notes on a Scandal, The Good German and Volver.
But the dominance of Camelview makes it difficult for AMC to secure exclusive first-run engagements, though Harkins did share an opening date on Steven Soderbergh's The Good German, starring George Clooney as a beleaguered Army journalist in post-war Berlin.
AMC spokeswoman Melanie Bell says Select films can refer to any movie that's in limited release. She said AMC is committed to the program, which is at 75 locations in 39 markets.
"Even a lot of our theaters that aren't the AMC Select theaters, they occasionally are playing AMC Select films," she said.
Even so, Camelview remains the dominant art theater in town, as the owners of the now-defunct Madstone Theater found out. The national chain opened a Chandler location in 2002 but closed two years later, blaming, in part, Harkins' near monopoly on first-run art titles.
More outlets, pleaseAlthough fans still have Camelview, they want art films to spread to more screens.
"I would like to see far more foreign films be accessible to John Q. Public, like me . . . (where) I don't need to drive an hour to get to it," said Debbi Hoegler, a retired disc jockey who lives in east Mesa. "Because I really am attracted to that."
But she also understands why Scottsdale is the center of the Valley's art-house scene.
"They're appealing to a more sophisticated and probably a little better-educated set of people in that geographic area," Hoegler said. "I'll still continue to make the drive because it means that much to me; to have a really good source of entertainment like art films is worth it."
Sandi Burr, a former art teacher and lab tech at Glendale Community College, calls the West Valley art-movie scene "a desert."
"You have all of Sun City here, then you have retired people, and it's not exactly the boondocks," she said. "To drive to Scottsdale and drive to Tempe, we don't like to drive to that side of town."
She suggests that Harkins start an "art-movie day" in the West Valley, showing a Camelview movie once a week at his Arrowhead theater.
Harkins notes that he put art movies in the West Valley as recently as 2000 (after a letter-writing campaign) and they didn't fly.
"I said 'OK, here's the deal, we'll open something at Camelview, and then open it over there the next week,'" he said. "It just doesn't have longevity and the performance at the box office on the West side."
Camelview expansionThough Camelview remains a favorite, its age is showing. Newer Harkins and AMC theaters offer stadium seating and spacious lobbies, but the Camelview lobby is cramped and the auditoriums have old-fashioned, sloped floor seating. Any large engagement means lines around the theater.
Harkins has plans to expand Camelview to 11 screens, though he's still negotiating with the managers of the adjacent Scottsdale Fashion Square.
Even with a new, larger Camelview, the Valley won't go to the head of the line for art films.
"We don't want to be first," Harkins said. "We learned the hard way. We've done some world premieres, and we know that can flop. We want to come in later when the word-of-mouth is already transmitting through the community."
So art-film lovers will continue to search for good films.
"The art-film lovers should pat themselves on the back for being great moviegoers," Harkins said, "because they work harder to seek out the better films, whereas the average moviegoer goes to whatever is the blockbuster title of the week."
Reach Muller at
[email protected] or (602) 444-8651. Read his blog at mullerblog.azcentral.com.
http://www.azcentral.com/ent/movies/articles/0210artmovies0211.html
