Second sights

Impresario David Kleiler rebounds from the Coolidge

Even those of us with a great affection for David Kleiler realized that it was time for him to go last July from the Coolidge Corner, the Brookline arthouse that he had programmed as its imaginative artistic director since saving it from extinction in 1989.

In the ensuing years, he had run afoul of key film distributors like Miramax, which cut off the Coolidge from exhibiting their pictures after not receiving revenues owed them under Kleiler's less-than-organized management. In his last Coolidge months, he was reduced to showing mostly second-rate art films, often box-office failures, because those were all that remained available to him.

"The board of directors asked me to resign." Kleiler explains over lunch. "I did. But part of the terms of the Coolidge settlement was that I could take `Local Sightings' with me."

Lucky for area filmgoers.

Introduced by Kleiler at the Coolidge and curated by Boston filmmaker Lisa Faircloth, the "Local Sightings" series developed into a highly regarded showcase for community filmmakers. Now, after a mere half-year hiatus, Kleiler's signature program is back in business in a revitalized version, and it has spread to a half-dozen Boston-area screening sites.

"What I'm doing is what I wanted to do at the Coolidge, but now I'm liberated from the Coolidge's financial problems and from being responsible to their board." As the director of "Local Sightings," Kleiler is showing the kind of films he especially likes -- regional independents and offbeat documentaries, anthologies of shorts, low-budget "cult" features.

Among Kleiler's venues: the Institute of Contemporary Art, the Blacksmith House (Cambridge), the Bookcellar Café (Cambridge), the Woodward School for Girls (Boston), Emerson Umbrella (Concord), and the Revolving Museum (Boston). Among upcoming showings: the fine music documentary Blues Women Jazz Men, March 20 at Emerson Umbrella and March 21 at the Bookcellar Café; and Roger Corman's delicious rendition of Poe, The Masque of the Red Death, March 21 at the Bookcellar Café and April 1 at the ICA.

Kleiler's first priority is to bring worthy new independent features into the public eye. He struck gold with his recent "Local Sightings" project, Brad Anderson's The Darien Gap. For the end of February, he arranged an unusual three-day limited run at the Kendall Square Theatre. The Darien Gap did excellent business, buoyed by a perceptive, extremely favorable review by the Boston Globe's Jay Carr.

"Maybe it will encourage the Landmark Corporation, which operates the Kendall Square, to do more work with me," Kleiler says. He hopes to premiere other New England-made indies at the Kendall in the near future. Meanwhile, he's moving The Darien Gap to the Bookcellar Café on March 14 and to the Woodward School on March 16.

Before his Coolidge days, Kleiler was a mainstay on the Boston scene with his kamikaze, on-the-road film operation, Rear Window Films (1981-'89), which, sporting 16mm prints and Kleiler's own projectors, showed movies practically anywhere. In some ways, "Local Sightings" is Rear Window déjà vu -- back to Kleiler's peripatetic screening roots.

"The sensibility remains the same," he acknowledges," but Rear Window was exotic and masochistic. I was doing nine shows a week. I won't do that. Actually, I get a shudder thinking of the Rear Window days. I'm really beyond setting up auditoriums, running projectors myself. It's not a good use of my time."

So Kleiler is training interns, volunteers, to help, and he's establishing a formal board of directors that includes his programmer, Lisa Faircloth, because "I can't imagine running `Local Sightings' without her." He's also seeking corporate sponsors and, most important, searching for a movie theater to be his center of operations -- a place to show 35mm films.

For now, he admits, "I wish I had a financial base the way I did at the Coolidge. I'm living more on the edge than anyone should. `Local Sightings' is not yet at a point to pay my salary; and my unemployment benefits, and medical coverage as well, run out next month."

But Kleiler has had enough time away from the Coolidge to stop obsessing about losing his position there. "I often say it was one of the finest experiences of my life. It's a great theater, but I've done it. It's time to move on to a permanent home for `Local Sightings.' That's my goal."

HAWKS'S EYE. Howard Hawks's 1948 overrated Western, Red River, shows in 35mm at the Harvard Film Archive on March 17 and 19. I try to like it, but Hawks's male-bonding machismo story (gruff John Wayne, understandably closeted Monty Clift) leaves me icy. And what a corny, fatuous conclusion! The best part of this frontier saga is the epic cattle drive from Texas to Kansas. There's an Eisensteinian stampede: a montage of 1800 bulls and cows running loco. And three "moos" for when the herd, at its destination, swaggers down the main street of Kansas City. From Hawks, that's 19th-century Americana at its John Ford finest.