Arts
Depression in the cinema
Clancy Sigall
Welcome to LA (Screen on tt.e Hill, Haverstock Hill) As a chronic filmgoer I am constantly confronted by the ugly face of capitalism in the form of the large distributors' stranglehold on the declining number of cinemas in this country. Through block booking, emphasis on profitable sex and horror films and a fear of experimenting with their audiences' imaginations, the monopoly distributors — Rank (Odeon) and EMI (ABC) — have helped keep people away from films rather than lure them in. I know there are honourable exceptions, but in general the EMI-Rank exhibition network tends to function like many insensitive bureaucracies (or nationalised industries), with its own laws and accountable to heaven only knows whom. The very idea of providing movies as a 'social service' would cause most big-time exhibitors to fall over laughing. They're in business to make money, aren't they?
The fact is that any profits squeezed out of the present film exhibition structure derive mainly from an unstable base of dwindling audiences paying higher (sometimes insupportably high) admission prices for a few not always that entertaining blockbusters. My own biases matter here. But is seems to me that for every Jaws or Rocky there are five lacklustre A Bridge Too Fars, for every The Spy Who Loved Me ten unendurable Voyage of the Damneds. The British film industry, potentially one of the world's finest, is notoriously starved of cash by the big distribution set-ups which refuse to finance productions that aren't sure successes. But, in an industry so dependent on artistic licence and audience whim, there is no such animal. Your guess probably is as good as mine, or Lord Grade's about what will or won't be very seccessful at the box . office. (One of my fantasies is to administer a truth serum to his chief accountant and then sit back and listen to him talk frankly about the investment-return ratio on some of his employer's recent dodos like March or Die .) It is probably libelous to suggest that the large chains run their cinema houses in a way calculated to ruin them, so that they can be turned into bingo halls or demolished for development sites. So I won't suggest it. But any student of the money end of the film business must ask questions about the acumen of those who presently control what films we see. If capitalism is defined as a system powered by the freedom of con sumers genuinely to choose, then cinema exhibition in this country, far from being a truly free enterprise, smacks more of how the Soviets reputedly run their retail businesses — restrictively, from top down and damn the consumer. I don't know how Freddie Laker will make out with his SkyTrain, but we certainly need a few like\ him in the film industry.
I should say a few 'more' like him since over the past few years, the London area has witnessed, in the growth of such independent 'specialist' cinemas as the Gate and Electric in Notting Hill, the Essential, Camden Town Plaza and The Other Cinema, a kind of triumph of small capitalist enterprise. Against what seemed the odds, the owner-managers of these highrisk ventures have prospered because they rediscovered the knack of shrewdly choosing programmes, though often of a 'minority' nature, aimed at a particular audience whose tastes they had learned to respect. Eight years ago Romaine Hart rescued the nearly derelict Roxy, renamed it Islington Screen on the Green, and has run it profitably ever since — at first in the teeth of fierce opposition by the large distributors. Business must be good, because she has just opened her second cinema: the Screen on the Hill in Belsize Park NW3 (opposite the Belsize Park tube station).
As I recall, Hart inaugurated her Islington premises by resurrecting a neglected work, Michael Ritchie's Downhill Racer, an unpretentious and absorbing study of competitiveness in American sports. This time she has chosen a more affected and 'atmospheric' film. I hope this does not mean that, because Screen on the Hill is in Hampstead, the tastes of the highbrow 'film culture' crowd must be served at all costs.
Welcome to LA is a collaboration between Alan Rudolph, a young Robert Altman protege who was his assistant on Nashville and California Split, and Richard Baskin who wrote the witty country western music for Nashville. Altman, a creatively generous man, likes giving young people room to try in his films and then lets them fly alone. Sometimes it works, sometimes not. The problem is, Altman has lived longer and more largely than most of his proteges and is able to give to even his bad films Three Women a quality lacking in theirs.
Behind all its visual introspective mists and a modish pop-music suite sung lovingly (mainly to himself, I thought) by the composer Baskin. Welcome to LA is nothing more complicated than an old-fashioned outburst of self-pity felt by some men because their women have gone haywire and become unpredictable in these liberated times. When it stocks to this theme it can be occasionally funny. Harvey Keitel is icily effective as the workholic company executive who has little patience for his wife Geraldine Chaplin's cry for more affection which she expresses in an obsessive identification with Garbo playing Camille. And there is an equally juicy portrayal of male befuddlement by an actor named John Considine as a furniture dealer married to Sally Kellerman but who also has a thing for Keith Carradine's topless maid SissY Spacek who is carrying on with Keitel who . . . well, I did sometimes get lost plotwise. Carradine, as a coldly sombre and pouting stud, is (literally) the rod who connects the actresses by sleeping with them all. The point of all this bedhopping, to the accompaniment of an endless song called 'City of One Night Stands' is to say, yet again, that Los Angeles is an emotional wasteland where people too easily fracture and love is deceived by appearances.
But there are good moments and nicelY ironic lines. One of Keitel's associates walks over to him at a Christmas office party and appeals solemnly: 'Ken, I need some reasonable help. I don't know what I feel' And Keitel is forever earnestly telling nevi girlfriends: 'We can go beyond the man woman relationship.' Either Welcome to LA was conceived as comedy and somehow got stuck in callow self-importance, or originated as a serious film (somewhere I've read that it reflects a 'European consciousness', whatever that is) and toppled over into unintended comedy. In fairness must report that while I remained fairlY glum and pained throughout, my COI' panion laughed a lot and thought Welcome to LA very funny. Only afterwards, when I suggested that the picture was'nt meant to be funny, did she panic. Anyway, welcome if not to LA then to the Screen on the Hill. It has tremendously comfortable seats. I am only too aware that some of the ails I mention, especially the 'art' or independently distributed ones, never or rarelY reach the provinces. I would be most grateful if readers outside central London to01‘ the trouble to write me about what kinds ell film reach them, their opinion of these films, how their local cinema houses are run, and if so-called minority films ever ge' north of Luton or west of Ealing.
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