Cinema Verite

 

SEARCHING FOR MR. RUGOFF (2021) (B+) - Donald Rugoff is the subject of this deep dive into the heady days of the American new wave of the 1960s and '70s, tracking the machinations of the film distributor and theater owner who became a legend in New York's film world.

By all accounts a real prick of a boss, Rugoff was a dogged progenitor of the independent film scene, opening cinemas that would set the template for the art houses that would proliferate in the '70s, known for their mix of indie releases, foreign films and revivals (and splashy events, like "The Rocky Horror Picture Show"). Director Ira Deutchman -- in his first foray behind the camera but a longtime player in marketing and distribution himself (Cinecom, Fine Line Features) -- sifts through newspaper clips and tracks down key players in Rugoff's story.

We hear from a host of Rugoff's former employees (to a person recalling an unpleasant man who expected them to be workaholics like he was), a former wife (who eventually gave up playing second fiddle to the movie industry), and some of the filmmakers who owed a debt to the man, such as Costa-Gavras ("Z"), Robert Downey Sr. ("Putney Swope") and Lena Wertmueller ("The Seduction of Mimi"), in one of her final interviews.

Beyond Rugoff's personality and accomplishments, Deutchman reanimates a golden era of film-going. Rugoff was a showman; he built lavishly designed theaters and lobbies, and he was an imaginative marketer -- as responsible as anyone for the success of Monty Python's "Holy Grail," in part by dressing up local actors in knight's costumes and having them gambol about Manhattan, for example. Not content with mere movie posters, Rugoff hired an artist to create elaborate window dioramas for new releases at his main theater.

Deutchman, as documentarians like to do these days, injects himself into the story (he was one of the former employees), but he makes it work, and his playfulness with the narrative makes for captivating viewing. Take a trip back to a great era of American filmmaking.

DAVID HOLZMAN'S DIARY (1968) (A) - We revisited this foundational outsider film, a micro-budget experiment from journeyman Jim McBride about an obsessive filmmaker who documents his life falling apart during one summer week in New York. As we put it after discovering it in 2006:

It's perhaps the first-ever mockumentary, about a guy dealing with a breakup. It was shot in summer 1967 in New York, and 98 percent of it is legit -- the sounds and the images of the city are not made up. The film is a jarring immersion in that place and time. More real than real, it seems.

David (L.M. Kit Carson) -- in a persona that would eventually be familiar to modern influencers and vloggers, albeit in condensed iPhone/internet form -- lugs a 16mm Eclair film camera, Lavalier microphone and reel-to-reel recording deck with him wherever he goes, capturing not just Manhattan in a particular moment of time, but also the minutiae of his life through confessional diary entries spoken directly into the camera. His antics include hounding his model girlfriend, Penny (Eileen Dietz), at all hours of the day and night; when he secretly films her sleeping in the nude, she finally flees him for good. Depressed, he films his TV habit during one evening, and we get a hyper-speed montage of fleeting images from an actual night of network TV: "Batman," "Star Trek" and shows by Dean Martin and Joey Bishop, commercials and all.

McBride scripts a few monologues for side characters, including Sandra (Louise Levine), a sexed-up potty-mouth who playfully harangues David from her car while paused in traffic. Another character, in Godardian fashion, offers meta-commentary on the impossibility of pointing a camera at something or someone and expecting to capture true reality; the presence of the camera alters reality as soon as the 24-frames-per-second start rolling.

"David Holzman's Diary" created quite a stir when it traversed the festival circuit during the summer of love. It isn't revealed until the end credits that it's a work of fiction, and the crowd reportedly booed in San Francisco at the deception. McBride and Carson started out just goofing around with the equipment and turned a germ of an idea into a feature. McBride borrows not just from the French New Wave but also the groundbreaking documentary techniques of the Maysles brothers and D.A. Pennebaker. It truly is fascinating to be immersed in a specific moment and place in time -- AM radio provides a vague running commentary throughout, and we hear news reports out of Vietnam and snippets of Top 40 songs.

Carson is an engaging figure. (He didn't have much of an acting career, but he would go on to write "Breathless" and "Paris, Texas" in the '80s.) David is flustered by the turn of events -- just as he starts documenting his life it begins unraveling, leaving him bereft by the time the powerful ending rolls around. This is not just a mesmerizing time capsule, but also a clever, moving character study.