Hadrian Belove is not one to rest on his laurels. After founding Cinefile Video, Los Angeles' temple of DVD, Hadrian began parlaying his unbelievably wide-ranging knowledge of and enthusiasm for movies into The Cinefamily at The Silent Movie Theater.
Once pretty much what it sounds like- a repertory theater showing silent movies- Cinefamily has transformed the Silent Movie Theater into an internationally renowned cinema destination that's known for its wildly eclectic programming, original content, crazy patio parties, and excellent in-depth Q&A s.
This weekend Cinefamily is mounting its most ambitious project yet: Cinefamily's Fantastic Elastic 24-Hour Holiday Telethon, a 24-hour star-studded event with guests like Benicio Del Toro, Spike Jonze, Doug Benson and even Robert Forster on hand to raise money for the theater. The Cinefamily is a nonprofit and depends on memberships for support, making the telethon both a celebration of their successes and a deciding factor of their future.
Hadrian truly has a vision for how to bring movie theaters into the internet age, one that includes both online events and expanding the Family into a national network of theaters. True to this spirit, Cinefamily will be live streaming the entire 24-hour telethon on its website, so even if you don't live in LA, you can still be part of the Family:
Skin Central: So Hadrian, how did the Cinefamily get started?
Hadrian Belove: So I was going to the Grindhouse Film Festival that Quentin Tarantino did at the New Beverly, where he showed like 60 movies in 2 monthsevery two days there was a double feature of, like, Jailbait Babysitter or something. I bumped into Sammy Harkham, who was a customer at my video store [Cinefile Video] several times at those screenings and he told me at one point that his family had bought this building The Silent Movie Theater.
I had coincidentally written a business plan for a movie theater that was going to have a video store attached to it.[by the time] Sammy told me about this, I had given up [on that], so I just kind of gave Sammy all of my best ideas, like ‘what the hell?’ And without knowing it I was pitching him Cinefamily. I remember I called him, I got really excited, then for 4-5 days I couldn’t get ahold of him because it was a Jewish holiday. So they were actually observing the holiday and not answering the phone for 4-5 days, [meanwhile] I’m thinking ‘oh fuck, I came on too strong,’ so anyway hepatronized me. They delegated me the job.
For the first year or two I worked for free and slowly we took over the rent, like training wheels coming off- there’s a lot of stages to becoming a nonprofit from fetal to fully grown. That’s why [this year] we felt like we finally had the internal structure to go public in a bigger way with the fundraising. So the telethon is kind of like our coming out party
SC: It’s bigger than anything you’ve ever done before. Two solid days
HB: Well, at Cinefamily everything we’ve done has been bigger than the thing we did before. [laughs] Once we’re comfortable in one area we just keep pushing. I don’t think we’ve taken our foot off the accelerator for a couple of years, there’s just so much to do and so far to go.
We’re trying to simultaneously celebrate and fundraise, because we don’t think that fundraising has to be a pain in the ass or a guilt trip. We considered doing a single event, but it seemed to be in the spirit of Cinefamily [to do a weekend]. It’s a big sprawling institution with a lot of different presences, everything from the very fringes of the found-footage comedy world to very serious in-person conversations and retrospectives and silent films and music, and it felt like if we did any one thing it would be like saying ‘this is what we care the most about’, and it wouldn’t be representative of what we are. Also, I love Jerry Lewis.
SC: Yeah, the programming at Cinefamily is crazy diverse, there really is something forwellpretty much everybody there.
HB: Yeah, and if you’ve never heard of Cinefamily, there’s two messages we’re trying to communicate. One, just that we’re a nonprofit that has all these events, how our membership works, and so on. And the second message is- why should you support us? It felt like, again, the best way to demonstrate what the Cinefamily is was something like this a big crazy, inclusive mess that hopefully includes a little bit of everything and a lot of people! It hopefully communicates a lot, and I am hoping it reaches more people this way.
SC: Speaking of- you’re live streaming it?
HB: As much as we can. We did try to pick events that were streamable. But some [movies] would be far too complicated [to secure streaming rights to] so we’ll show the intro, then when the movie starts we’ll probably just talk about stuff in another area and show other things until the movie’s done. So the schedule online isn’t going to exactly align with what’s going on at the theater, but it’s going to be pretty darn close, because in my mind, the people in the theater are like the live studio audience to what we’re doing on the Internet. I love to think that somebody in New York at six in the morning is watching Stephen Merritt, or somebody in Kansas goes on in the middle of the night and is like, ‘what is this thing?’.
I am referring to a lot of our guests as guest programmers, we’re talking programming and if you give us ideas over Facebook and twitter during the telethon, we’ll try our best to respond to your programming ideas. I was jokingly calling it “We Program in Public”- people could call and be like 'you should do this', and we would say 'well, these prints are in this archive, you've got to fly them in, you've got to get these grants' People will see it’s not as easy as making a Netflix queue.
SC: People think it’s just picking a movie and that’s it.
HB: It’s actually a pretty complicated task. A lot of people work hard to make it happen. If you go to the movies, you forget that that whole experience has been carefully manufactured and controlled for you so you can turn your brain off and just enjoy it.
One thing we’ve been circling, if our budget would fund it, would be to have a permanent live stream solution so people around the country could watch any events that it would make sense for them to watch. Right now, every time we have a live stream it’s on donated equipment and donated labor, and that limits the quality and consistency of it. For a very little amount of money we could have Cinefamily TV, and that would I think be a major step forward for us.
SC: That’s really cool. It’s like a whole new model of what a movie theater can be.
HB: Well, so many of the events we do are live on some level or another [Like their Disco Dracula Halloween party, right- SC], like in the past year we’ve had so many great discussions, like with Bruce Dern or Ben Gazzara, which is real high quality stuff that doesn’t get a lot of attention, yeah we might not be able to stream the movie- or at least not yet- but I think a lot of people would be interested in watching a 60-minute QA with Ben Gazzara.
SC: And that’s not something you’re going to get everywhere either.
HB: Yeah, and we love producing those events. Also, it’s just like, it’s just insane to work as hard as we do sometimes to carefully curate a show, lots and lots of hours, raise the money to fly somebody in, and then 150 people get to see it. That’s one of the things that makes [events we’ve streamed] so much better, we’ve gone through all the effort to make that moment happen and then it would have been weird if only the people in the theater saw it and then it went away. So we want to expand our reach a little bit. That’s why we didn’t make it a marathon of events but a telethon of events.
SC: Plus, everybody gets a little crazy at the end.
HB: Yeah, I am kinda looking forward to the bleary-eyed close. I’ll have a thermometer hanging out of my mouth, some five o clock shadow...I just want to make sure people know that it’s free online but just like NPR during the pledge drive, we’ll be bugging you a lot. The goal is to make 2012 really great, so we are asking people to join. Join the family.
The people who join the Cinefamily and actually get a membership, they as a group are paying for 20% of what goes on here. Just these 500 people. To me, they are the owners, [if we weren’t a nonprofit] it’d be like they were the stockholders. They are the buying block- they form a buying block that allows us to do our unique style, which requires more money than the average 150-seat theater that maybe has one manager or something.
All the extra work we put into it, to get our own posters made, to cut our own trailers, to be there every night to introduce-[the things] that eventually make a movie like Dogtooth a hit, I think that is what those [members] together are doing. And if we could take that 500 and make it an army 1,000 strong- those people would have a huge impact on the film industry and how films are exhibited in Los Angeles and, arguably, the country. It’s creating a lobby. A lobby for awesomeness.
SC: I like that, ‘a lobby for awesomeness’. And it gives medium-sized films that otherwise don’t get a chance a home, you know?
HB: You’re not only supporting the theater, you’re supporting the artist [by supporting a place like Cinefamily]. My fantasy would be is if we had something like National Public Radio, we had affiliates across the country [laugh]. Those are the long-term dreams, and I do think it could go there eventually.
SC: Is that where you see Cinefamily developing in the future?
HB: I can see it developing both online and in theaters, you know? The ridiculous amount of research we do on things like Mormon film- it would be nice to be able to share that with more people, so I can see the website being more of a presence. I’d like to see a national network of theaters. I’ve been talking with other theaters about doing inter-membership loanslike if you had a membership at the Roxy in San Francisco, it would be good at the Cinefamily and vice-versa. I’d like to see us get into releasing, I’d like to see more runs, and I’d like to see more screens just within Los Angeles. There are so many movies that I would love to show but I can’t the way it is now.
SC: Because you only have one screen?
HB: I only have one screen. So there are a lot of movies I like, but I just can’t [show]. I want to help something out, but there isn’t enough space [to show them]. I would love to give contemporary indie films more of a forum, but [now] if you want to give it the run it deserves you have to shut down all the other programming , and the whole point is that those two things should be under the same roof. So ideally, there would be a theater that we would curate that would have 2 or 3 screens. Hopefully one in East LA, where there’s a really underserved community. Those are some of the big goals.
SC: So we always do this thing when we skinterview people, it’s like a lightning round
HB: Ok. Should I take my pants off for this?
SC:Just undo your fly, that’ll be fine.
HB: Ok.
SC: So “holyfuckingshit" [Movies so outrageous, all you can say after seeing them is "Holy fucking shit"-SC] is one of your signature genres at Cinefamily. What’s the holyfuckingshit of nudie movies?
HB: We’ve actually done a whole show of holyfuckingshit porn, I think it was called “That’s Fuckertainment” [laughs] Very classy, I wrote a little song for it actually, and in that seriesdoes porn count as “nudie”?
SC: Sure.
HB: Well my favorite porn is Le sexe qui parle, aka Pussy Talk (1975), which is a French porn from the ‘70s which actually ran at one theater for 20 years it was so popular [there], based on a respected novel, in which a woman’s vagina begins to speak. [This movie] has vagina-cam
SC: Wait, like looking out from within?
HB:Yeah, like you can see lips on either side of the camera- vagina POV. It’s an incredible film, and we actually played that to an audience of...I’d call it an atypical porn crowd. Like you didn’t have to go down with a flashlight to make sure nothing bad was happening. We also showed Once Upon a Time, which was the X-rated cartoon in which some Hanna-Barbera animators took that incredibly cheap, immobile style, took classic fairy tales and, uh pornographitized them, in the ‘70s. That’s a pretty good one. Oh and Chatterboxthere’s actually a whole genre of talking genitalia movies.
SC: What? I didn’t know about this!
HB:Pussy Talk’s the best, and Chatterbox is the cheap Joan Rivers-y one, and then there’s Me and Him, which is a talking penis movie with Griffin Dunne.
Oh, and Dr. Rumpenstein was also a big hit here- [it’s] some sort of gay club animation where they just put big CGI phalluses on, like pigeons. We also did Let My Puppets Come, the pornographic puppet movie, which is actually pretty entertaining, though I’d go with Rumpenstein over that. It was hilarious because we were editing a found footage mondo mix of this stuff, and I remember we’d have these heated discussions about this at three in the morning, some employee would be walking by and we’re sitting there going ‘No, no no! Two less frames of the gigantic vagina!’
SC: Is that the dirtiest thing you’ve ever shown at Cinefamily, you think?
HB: Oh yeah, by far. I remember we had this new woman [working here] who was very excited we were showing archival Eastman House prints, avant-garde restorationstrying to take us in a certain direction, you know? And I remember she came down to me, I am sitting in the theater, and Rumpenstein was on the screen. I don’t think she ever really recovered from that.
SC: What’s your favorite genre for nudity?
HB: I like those "Schoolgirl" smut movies from the ‘70s. I don’t like contemporary stuff, because the women in them look weird [to me]. They’re the kind of girls I would never date, too much makeup, too much surgery. In the 70’s you sometimes get anemic junkie-type girls, like they just pulled her off the street, but in the European ones, they’re so free. You get these really gorgeous women who are young and healthy and vibrant and seem to be actually enjoying themselves. It’s like [fake German accent] ‘there was a party happening, and someone turned on the camera.’ [laugh]
SC: Any actresses you’re particularly fond of?
HB:Brigitte Lahaie is the Marilyn Monroe of French porn, incredibly gorgeous and intelligent and charismatic. Lina Romay, Jess Franco’s girlfriend/wife, is an incredible creature. Actually, all of the women of Andrzej Zulawski, his wives or girlfriends that he would cast, were amazing. We’re doing a Zulawski retrospective actually. I like it with CLASS.
SC: Who would be your ideal guest to bring to Cinefamily?
HB: Jerry Lewis. I would LOVE to be ripped to pieces on stage by Jerry Lewis, who is notoriously difficult to interview. I don’t even care if it went badly, just to have the man in the buildingI think he’s one of the living legends, and one of the great revelations when we opened the theater was researching the Jerry Lewis 
series. This sounds insane, but it’s kinda like diving into James Joyce or something, you could devote your entire life to being a scholar of that. There’s good, bad, ugly, fascinating, brilliant, insane- it’s all in there- and I would love to talk to the man.
SC: And maybe get to seeThe Day the Clown Cried.
HB: You know, I don’t need to show [that]. I don’t really care that much. I think one of the reasons he doesn’t like to be asked about it anymore is that in some ways, everything’s come down to this one thing because it’s unseen, but in reality it’s just one moment in a very long career. I’ve seen a documentary about him where you see his archive, and it’s acres and acres of [film prints]. There’s other unseen material. I would rather see the '50s home movies he shot with his movie-star friends and would screen in his backyard. That’s what I would ask Jerry Lewis to show. Wouldn’t that be rad?
Keep up with all the latest events at Cinefamily over at their website or on their Facebook and Twitter, and don't forget to support this totally awesome cause this weekend with Cinefamily's Fantastic Elastic 24-Hour Holiday Telethon!
