The Man Behind Film Forum’s Classic Marquee
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
Bruce Goldstein, the longtime director of repertory programming at the downtown temple of sacred celluloid known as Film Forum (that is to say, the man who decides which great old flicks you get to see), has a copy of the art house’s quarterly fold-out calendar posted above his desk. Looking up at it, he begins to anatomize his choices for the cycle ending October 21.
A revival of “The Leopard,” Visconti’s lush 1963 pageant of Sicily during the Risorgimento? “I waited 15 years for a gorgeous print of ‘The Leopard.’ You have to jump on things when they’re ready, and you want to get them out before the DVD.”
The 11-day assessment of the work of early German cinematic master F.W. Murnau? “We have nine German archive prints. It was very hard to put together. In order to do it, I had to get together five other venues around the country to share the costs – shipping, customs, translations.”
A festival of Godzilla films? “That’s my counter-programming to the Republican convention.”
Okay. What about “Burn!,” the seldom seen 1969 Gillo Pontecorvo West Indies epic starring Marlon Brando? “‘Burn!’ was a coincidence,” he replied, a wry smile that informs his interviewer that he is well aware that Brando’s recent death will doubtless step up traffic at the box office. “They had just finished restoring the completed version. This has happened to me before, where we schedule something and then someone dies. I did the Fellini festival and then he died. Actually, to make it worse, I had both ‘Burn!’ and ‘On the Waterfront’ on this calendar. But then I moved ‘Waterfront’ to the next one – it’s the movie’s 50th anniversary.”
Might Marlon’s departure from this life soon sire a full-fledged Brando retrospective? Mr. Goldstein looks as though he’s suddenly swallowed a lemon. “I’m not an ambulance-chaser.”
If it sounds like Mr. Goldstein puts a lot of thought into the aesthetic crazy-quilt of Film Forum’s schedule, he does. Why shouldn’t he? Movies have been Topic A for him since his Long Island childhood, when he would haunt Manhattan revival houses such as the New Yorker and the Thalia and scrawl double feature ideas into notebooks. (“I would take titles that sounded good together, like ‘In the Heat of the Night’ and ‘In the Cool of the Day.’ But you can’t fit that on a marquee.”)
Since 1986, when Karen Cooper hired him to program the second screen at Film Forum, he has seen his dream pairings played out in a big way. His work shapes the cultural life of the city through influential series on film noir and pre-Code Hollywood flicks, as well as retrospectives of auteurs such as Preston Sturges, Francois Truffaut, and Ernst Lubitsch.
Mr. Goldstein, 52, still delights in scribbling down ideas. In his SoHo office, near the trio of theater seats that used to belong to Diane Keaton and the dusty WWII-era 16mm film projector he once employed to screen films on his apartment wall, is a dry-erase board on which he jots notions. On a recent day, the board testified to possible future screenings of Sergio Leone’s “Once Upon a Time in the West” and Jean Renoir’s “Grand Illusion.” Also on the board, the name of Italian actress and icon Anna Magnani. But Mr. Goldstein, not a great fan of actor-centric programming, is having second thoughts. “I don’t think I’ll do her. Only if it’s her centennial. I thought it was in 2005.” (It’s 2008.)
“I get ideas all the time,” said Mr. Goldstein, beginning to wax philosophic. “Each calendar is an organic whole. I think of it as a publication where we try to mix up a variety of films. A good diet’s very important. You don’t want to wear your audience out.”
The calendar is arguably as popular with the Film Forum audiences as the movies it advertises. A handsome and hectic riot of fonts, images, and pithy text (written by Mr. Goldstein, Michael Jeck, and Harris Dew), it’s a compact primer on random chapters of film history.
“People tell me they use it for their video guide,” he said. “I say, ‘Why don’t you go to the movies once in a while?'”
To get the brochure just so, Mr. Goldstein works with the design house, Gates Sisters Studio. “I choose the photos. I give them an idea of the way I want it to look. We go through a lot of drafts. I try not to make the film blurbs too weighty. We gather so much information on these films and then we have to cut half of it anyway. It’s the hardest part of this job for me, getting the text and the calendar exactly the way I want it.”
In his early years as programmer, Mr. Goldstein was far less likely to achieve scheduling satisfaction because many of masterpieces of the cinematic pantheon were either out of distribution or available in very poor form. To combat this sorry state of affairs and reclaim some of the hallowed titles of filmdom, he created, in 1996, Rialto Pictures. The company first claimed conspicuous victory with the 1997 re-release of the long-unseen Jean-Luc Godard masterwork “Contempt.” Acclaimed restorations of “The Third Man,” “Grand Illusion,” and “Rififi” followed.
Since then, said Mr. Goldstein, the Hollywood studios have all become hip to the benefits of film restoration, making it easier to get good prints of prized films. (The stature of a print – good, bad, or indifferent – is an undying subject of comment among art house cineastes, but particularly concerns the spoiled habitues of Film Forum.) This all means there are fewer Holy Grails left to pursue.
Still, Mr. Goldstein can always find something to dream about. “For 10 years, I’ve been bugging Harold Lloyd’s granddaughter about a version of Harold Lloyd’s first talkie,” he told me. “He had made it as a silent and then as a talkie called ‘Welcome Danger.’ He shelved the silent version. Finally, they’ve finished restoring it and we’re going to showcase it.” His eyes did a nervous dance. “To me, that’s like finding a lost da Vinci.”