Look Homeward, AFI International Festival

An effusive man in a 10-gallon hat and expansive accent is looking right at the camera and waxing enthusiastic about a film festival he’s fallen in love with.

“Yes, sir, Film Tex, that sure sounds like my kind of event, yes, sir,” he grandly insists, trying his best to ignore his timid wife, glimpsed in the background pulling at his coat and quietly insisting, “Now, honey, honey, I don’t know if you’ve got that name quite right.”

His wife, of course, was quite correct, as wives tend to be. The event in question was Filmex, Los Angeles’ bright and lively film festival of the 1970s and early 1980s. And that theatrical spot advertising its approach typified the playfulness and sense of fun that made the event such a good fit for the city that hosted it.

As if putting on a festival wasn’t hard enough, the staff at the American Film Institute’s Los Angeles International Film Festival, Filmex’s successor, have had the ghosts of that inventive past to contend with. Whatever its theoretical virtues, the AFI Fest, with its dogged emphasis on the most obscure corners of world cinema, was for many years incapable of equaling its predecessor and exciting even a fraction of its potential audience.

Then, two years ago, a mailing arrived from the AFI Fest with Buster Keaton, of all people, on the cover, and a tribute program (including a question-and-answer session with Keaton’s widow, Eleanor) scheduled as the closing-night event. That brochure held out a bracing air of promise, a hope that the festival was philosophically loosening up and allowing old-fashioned enjoyment into its sacred precincts.

With the evidence of both that festival and the recently concluded 10th-anniversary edition now in, that promise is on its way to being fulfilled. The AFI Fest is not nearly the event the world’s movie capital deserves, but it is definitely on track to getting there. If the festival director, Gary McVey, can corral the necessary support to build on what has already been accomplished, there’s no telling where the AFI Fest may end up. (The next one is scheduled for Oct. 16 to 30.)

As to the improvements so far, they have been most telling in the two areas that needed the most significant work, sharpness of focus and recognition that Hollywood has to be a major player in the festival makeup.

Gone, one hopes forever, are the days of programming attractions numbering in the triple digits, when the festival refused on what almost felt like moral grounds to be more discriminating in its choices. Instead, it overwhelmed audiences with a bushel basket of undifferentiated films that only someone with unlimited time and patience could wade through.

Not only were the films down to 90 last year (a number that could profitably be cut even more), but as a result of the festival moving from the spring to the fall, more of them arrived in town with reputations gained in other venues, making it easier for moviegoers to pick and choose what to see.

Showing this time, for instance, were films like “Breaking the Waves,” the Grand Jury Prize winner at Cannes; “Underground,” a Palme d’Or honoree that has yet to gain domestic distribution; the much-talked-about Yugoslavian film “Pretty Village, Pretty Flame”; and such foreign-language Oscar submissions as “Hamsun,” “Prisoners of the Mountain” and “Between Pancho Villa and a Naked Woman.”

Hoping to build on an indigenous audience, the AFI Fest had both a Cine Latino section focused on Mexico and an Asian film sidebar event. And it still found time to screen obscure gems like Peter Jackson’s “Forgotten Silver,” a droll mock documentary about a supposedly rediscovered New Zealand silent film director, with deft, tongue-in-cheek performances by Harvey Weinstein and Leonard Maltin, among others.

Perhaps even more important than all this to the festival’s success was its long-overdue rapprochement with Hollywood. While in the past the AFI Fest has all but shouted “unclean” at any suggestion of connection with the mainstream, the more recent editions have understood the necessity of adding a touch of show business glamour to the mix.

Last fall’s event, for instance, staged sold-out, in-person tributes to Anjelica Huston and Gena Rowlands in Mann’s Chinese Theater, one of Hollywood’s original glitz palaces and now a key venue as the festival partially relocates itself on the Boulevard of Dreams. Even the opening-night film, “Looking for Richard,” Al Pacino’s misguided attempt to master Shakespeare, was a shrewd choice that brought an added whiff of star power to the proceedings.

As a result of this, and of smart moves like an all-night movie marathon at the Monica devoted to “hot themes, cool people . . . the movies your mother wouldn’t let you see,” the 1996 AFI Fest attracted more than 40,000 admissions, its best attendance figure yet.

Impressive as all this is, the AFI Fest is not in a position to rest on its accomplishments. Even that attendance figure loses grandeur in comparison with Montreal’s 400,000, London’s 100,000 and even the 34,000 that a niche event like San Francisco’s Jewish Film Festival can boast. Before the AFI festival can have the kind of presence in this city the New York Film Festival has in Manhattan, more needs to be done in several areas.

First of all, the tentative bridge to Hollywood that has been built in recent years needs to be strengthened and expanded. If Sony was willing to provide “The People vs. Larry Flynt” for the closing night at the New York festival, why shouldn’t similar films be made available to an event out here?

And with Tom Pollock, formerly of Universal Pictures, now chairman of the AFI’s board of trustees, perhaps the festival’s intimate proximity to Hollywood will be seen as an advantage to be exploited, not an embarrassment to be glossed over and hidden. What was said in this space several years ago still holds true: No matter what kind of nonsense Hollywood is in the habit of turning out, a festival that makes believe all that is happening in some other place will never capture L.A.’s imagination.

Speaking of the AFI, even in these times of massive cutbacks in government aid to cultural institutions, it wouldn’t hurt if the parent body gave its festival, which operates on a less-than-bare-bones budget, a bit more support. Building an audience for quality films is at least as valuable as the kind of training the AFI film school focuses on (the equivalent, filmmaker Ed Emshwiller once said, of teaching people to write bestsellers) and should be treated that way.

And, given the quirky nature of Los Angeles--a town that is addicted to whatever is high profile and, despite what it likes to think, is not a particularly good market for foreign films--a leaner festival that makes it clear that every film in it is a special event might yet prove to be the best approach here.

But even if the AFI Fest doesn’t see its way clear to taking a strict weight-loss approach to its hefty schedule, it is still heartening to see things headed in the right direction on a number of fronts. It’s about time.