By Susan Stahl
Landmark’s opening night featured the U.S. premiere of High Fidelity, which shared the space with Election, Onegin, Restaurant, The Terrorist, and Winter Sleepers. Elevators, escalators, ramps, steps, and concession areas were packed and chaotic, with crisscrossing lines and people standing as many as five abreast to chat or check out the movie posters. The staff experimented with different methods of directing traffic in the unusual space, many of them using walkie-talkies like production assistants on a film set. When a customer reported losing his girlfriend’s ticket, general manager Brian Ross paused to have a calm chat with the guy about the importance of hanging on to such things. “What if someone else found it?” he asked, a reasonable question given the hordes hoping to see High Fidelity. He then issued a replacement ticket, and they were both happy–despite the stress and frustration his job clearly entails, Ross seems to enjoy helping people enjoy their evening.
Landmark acquires its films from many sources: it has strong relationships with all the major independent distributors, who are more than happy to funnel product with narrower appeal through Landmark’s successful chain; Landmark representatives attend festivals (the company’s theaters also host them in many cities); and the LA office has a screening room for work that gets sent to them on spec. Douglas Freed, who programs all the Landmark theaters except for those in the western U.S., describes its fare as “character driven, with a unique vision.” Some filmmakers do approach Landmark directly, though it’s rare that a film with no distributor gets picked up by the chain. Freed offers the example of comedian Margaret Cho, who’s making a concert movie she’d like to distribute through her own company. “Landmark is working closely with her manager to roll out a national release,” he says. But few unknown filmmakers or films without known personalities find a niche in the company’s programming.
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John Sloss, a New York-based entertainment lawyer who’s found success making distribution deals for films inside Landmark’s programming parameters (Boys Don’t Cry, American Movie, and Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr., among others) has reservations about art-house chains in general. “This kind of consolidation limits the ability of really marginal films–and I don’t mean that in a negative sense–to find an audience. Because like any other chain, Landmark is about making money, so they will end up showing more commercially oriented art-house films. And I hope I’m wrong about this, but looking at the current trend among moviegoers in this country, eventually there may not be enough demand for more marginal films to keep the mom-and-pop places in business. The blitz marketing that studios and other major distributors use to plug their product has taken its toll over time; people are overwhelmed by the saturation of mainstream film and have become progressively more passive–they don’t want to see challenging films. I mean, as a college student, I was a person who went to see a lot of foreign films, and I was part of the whole independent film movement. And now I find myself looking at and being drawn to blockbusters. It’s gotten to a point that something like the Landmark comes along, maybe mimicking that on a highbrow level. Their opening roster for this weekend is promising in terms of taking chances…but whether they’ll be able to maintain that level of risk remains to be seen.”
While High Fidelity wasn’t produced independently by any stretch of the imagination–Touchstone Pictures is a subsidiary of Disney–its story is a tangle of meditations on independence, both in business and in the lives of individuals. Besides being a music aficionado, Rob Gordon owns a struggling independent record store whose sales are undermined by his and his employees’ superior attitudes. “You guys think you’re these unappreciated scholars,” says a friend hanging out in their store, “and then you shit on people you think are less than you.”
As Alvin Lu wrote in the San Francisco Bay Guardian, The Matrix uses many ideas also explored in the work of renegade filmmaker Craig Baldwin. Yet when Baldwin’s latest effort, Spectres of the Spectrum, premiered in Chicago, it was shown exactly twice–and one screening took place in a private home.
