They say you have to be at least a little bit crazy to go into showbiz, and that's just for the people who appear on camera or on the stage. The background business of producers, agents, dealers and executives has its own special flavor of loony. But as with the talent, sometimes there is genius in extreme personalities and odd-thinkers, as explored in the terrific new documentary, "Searching for Mr. Rugoff."
No doubt you haven't heard of Donald Rugoff; I certainly hadn't. He was the son of movie theater chain owner who inherited the biz when he was just 26, including a bunch of prime spots on Manhattan's Upper East Side. He got into the distribution side so he could fill his screens with movies nobody could see anywhere else, especially foreign films, edgy indie flicks and documentaries.
Rugoff traveled the globe, meeting with directors like Ingmar Bergman, Francois Truffaut and Lina Wertmüller, championing their work and helping usher in the mainstreaming of non-Hollywood fare in the 1960s and '70s. It's fair to say he changed the course of cinema, or at least the way it is experienced in America.
Today he's virtually anonymous, without even a Wikipedia entry to his name. One of his employees, Ira Deutchman, who worked in the marketing and distributing of movies himself before becoming a producer, directs his first film at age 68 to tell the story of his former boss, with the search for Rugoff's forgotten grave as his root quest.
The documentary is part paean, part indictment of the man himself, but mostly an appreciation of eclectic filmmaking and the behind-the-scenes people like Don Rugoff who made it viable.
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