Want to go indie? Good luck

If you live in North Pinellas and want to check out the new James Bond movie this weekend, you're in luck: it starts virtually every hour on a screen somewhere in Oldsmar, Palm Harbor or Largo.

But if you want to see Bowling for Columbine, Michael Moore's edgy documentary about America's gun culture, you'd better gas up the car for a trip to Tampa.

On most weekends, North Pinellas is a cinematic desert for fans of foreign films or art-house movies. The nearest places that consistently show those flicks are the independently owned Beach Theater on St. Pete Beach and the Tampa Theatre, owned by the city of Tampa and managed by the Arts Council of Hillsborough County.

So why isn't there anything closer? The main reason is that the sliver of the audience that wants to see Sunshine State or The Importance of Being Earnest isn't big enough to move the market. Serious fans of specialty movies make up just 2 percent of the moviegoing public, said Dick Morris, managing director of the Sarasota Film Society and a specialty film programmer for independent and chain theaters around the country.

That's down from 5 percent of the market 30 to 40 years ago, Morris said.

"Let's make it perfectly clear: these movies are not better or worse than the average Hollywood movie," Morris said. "They're different, as different as Chinese food is from French or Italian."

Still, you might think that companies with 10- and 20-screen multiplexes could set aside a screen or two for independent movies, foreign films and just plain weird stuff.

Not necessarily, say those in the business.

Depending on the time of year and what's coming out, the audience demand for Harry Potter or James Bond means that those movies will crowd out the competition, even from big theaters.

"Everybody wants to see that movie the opening day, so the modern megaplex has to take that into account and has to have enough screens to accommodate the demand," said Jim Lee, director of marketing for Muvico Theaters.

And the competition for screens only gets worse in the early summer and around the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays, when the biggest movies of the year come out.

"You look at the list of what opened today," Lee said Friday. "Today you had Die Another Day, The Emperor's Club, Friday After Next. This doesn't include whatever opened last week, which we all know is Harry Potter."

And coming up next week are big budget movies with Adam Sandler and George Clooney.

"You've got eight films opening in the space of five days here," Lee said. "A 10-plex is going to be jammed."

AMC is showing Bowling for Columbine at some theaters nationwide, but those generally have more than 20 screens, AMC spokesman Rick King said.

Other factors also play a role in the availability of specialty movies. For example, Far from Heaven, a new Julianne Moore movie about forbidden love and sexual repression in the 1950s, opens this weekend in just one theater each in Pinellas and Hillsborough.

Why? Because after gauging the probable market for the movie, the distributor is only sending one print of the movie to each those counties, Morris said.

"These are not the 4,000-print Hollywood runouts," he said. "The theater that's the primary art house in that county is going to get that movie."

Nor are Tampa Bay moviegoers being written off as a bunch of rubes. Downtown Philadelphia gets one print of Far from Heaven, Morris said. Manhattan gets two.

"It's not as though what we're doing here is that unusual," he said.

Marketing a specialty film also is harder than a big Hollywood blockbuster. Studios handle much of the publicity for the biggest movies. Lesser-known films rely more on word of mouth and fliers distributed in the community. Movie reviews have to come out at the right time, and the reviews play a big role in the film's success. Unlike consumers of major Hollywood releases, art-house patrons pay close attention to what is written about movies, Morris said.

Still, for the determined and alert consumer, there are occasional opportunities to catch specialty films closer to home. One key is to pay attention to the time of year. Knowing they would get clobbered at Christmas, independent distributors release more of their movies in the spring and fall, King said.

Locally, the Sol Peska Film Festival in Tarpon Springs every February usually offers a mix of highbrow cinema and celluloid arcana. Last year's festival promised everything from Bizet's classic opera Carmen to a campy Mexican sci-fi flick, Neutron vs. The Death Robots, whose hero was a hooded professional wrestler. The Leepa-Rattner Museum of Art also has begun showing occasional films tied into its exhibitions or its program, The Decades, which looks at each decade of the last century.

Beyond that, is it possible for North Pinellas to sustain a movie house like the Beach Theater? Perhaps, says Morris. Once an area's population reaches 100,000 -- a benchmark North Pinellas cleared years ago -- the critical mass may be there to support such a theater.

But much depends on the makeup of the population, he said. The Beach Theater, which Morris used to work with, draws from a community with many transplants from places with lots of cinematic choices. An alternative theater theoretically might work in Countryside, Morris said, but it would require a theater chain or an independent owner willing to make a go of it.

Raza Chouls is an example of that kind of owner. Chouls, 55, is a commodity broker specializing in the paper industry, but he's also a movie buff. So when he had the chance to buy the Beach Theater in 1998, he took it.

Since then, Chouls' daughter and son-in-law have run the theater, installing a new sound system and improving the seats. It has just one screen, but "we're happy with the returns that we're getting," he said.

Chouls sees tremendous growth in the independent segment of the movie industry because new technology makes it cheaper to make some movies. And as more of those movies get made, distributors will need venues to show them, he said.

"I think if we had two screens we would be able to keep them busy with fare that the multiplexes don't show," he said.

-- Richard Danielson can be reached at 445-4194 or danielson@sptimes.com .

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