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April 26, 1998
NEW YORK ONLINE / By ANTHONY RAMIREZ
Reaching Out to Film Buffs on the Web
hen Karen Cooper became director of the two-year-old Film Forum in 1972, the theater was a showcase for independent films but not for old movies. It didn't need to be. The Thalia, the New Yorker, the Bleecker Street and the Regency movie theaters did that. Today, those theaters are dark and the nonprofit Film Forum, which has managed to thrive in a difficult film market, is one of the last revival houses and one of the few theaters regularly to feature independent movies in New York.
Now Film Forum has turned to the Web to reach New York film buffs and to highlight non-Hollywood films, like "The Farm," opening June 10, a documentary about the country's largest maximum-security prison, and classics. (A 50- retrospective called "Madcap Manhattan" begins this Friday and includes comedies like Mel Brooks's "The Producers.")
"Movies should be chunks of reality that I would not normally experience living below 14th Street," said Ms. Cooper, 49, who chooses features and documentaries for Film Forum.
Bruce Goldstein, 45, who selects the old movies, looks for classic flicks with "good prints that the audience won't boo."
WHAT YOU SEE Every year, Film Forum offers more than 40 feature films and documentaries and more than 350 old movies. Until September 1995, when its Web site went up, it relied mainly on printed calendars, scant advertising and word-of-mouth. For technical reasons, Film Forum is not part of the popular 777-FILM telephone and Web page service.
FILM FORUM
(http://www.filmforum.org)
(Image of the OLD homepage)
But with more than 3,300 dues-paying members, Film Forum can take advantage of the niche marketing that is a specialty of the Web. The Web site gets up to 5,000 page views per month and provides more information than Film Forum's printed calendars, which get scotch-taped refrigerator doors and quickly become outdated.
The site gives movie schedules as well as information about film distributors. That helps nonprofits like schools and museums obtain acclaimed documentaries, like the recent "A Paralyzing Fear: The Story of Polio in America," which is distributed by the Center for History in the Media at George Washington University.
The site also notes special events, like the live musical accompaniment on May 4 by a pianist, Steve Sterner, to the 1928 silent movie "Speedy." The movie stars Harold Lloyd as a baseball-crazy cabdriver who picks up Babe Ruth (the real Yankee, not an actor), and has a climactic chase scene in which the cabbie races New York's last horse-drawn trolley through the Washington Square Arch, which was then a thoroughfare.
LINKS Thirty-seven, including such sites as Indiewire, a news service about and for independent filmmakers.
WHAT YOU GET A work in progress. Film Forum's Web master, Richard Hutchins, plans to reformat the schedule as an actual calendar, so a viewer can click on a date to find out what's playing then (NOTE: This is now available: see Monthly Schedule) Also under consideration: chat rooms for film buffs.