Go with Bo

How Mr. Smith came to Boston

The former film programmer for the Museum of Fine Arts had a booming voice, a jolly disposition, and what seemed the world's largest collection of film books. He was also a bit of a slacker, and nothing plagued him like having to phone the press about what the MFA was showing.

"When I arrived here, there were only a hundred screenings a year, and it shocked me," says Bo Smith, who took over as MFA programmer exactly 10 years ago. "The screenings were Thursday and Friday, and then there were breaks. I thought, 'Why breaks?' So I claimed every day in the year I could get the theater.

"Among the first things I did was put people on mailing lists. And I set up press screenings. The MFA was suddenly seeing this media coverage, and everyone was thrilled. To be honest, anyone could have done it."

Not really. Who doesn't agree that the MFA's director of the Division of Education and Public Programs, Bill Burback, made a felicitous move in luring Smith away from a job in St. Paul, Minnesota? And that Smith's decade at the MFA, 1987-1997, is a cause for celebration by serious area moviegoers?

"Bill Burback recently said in public that the wisest decision he's made was to hire me," Smith acknowledges when we talk at his MFA office. "That was very sweet of him to say that."

Smith grew up in Melrose, and he remembers that his first intense film experience was being brought in by train at age five to see Pinocchio on a Boston screen. "I kept looking at the ceiling, the film was so overwhelming." After that, movies played little importance in his life, even during the time he attended Dartmouth, in the late '60s.

"I was probably the only student who never went to the Dartmouth Film Society. I was into umpteen social-service activities and anti-war activities. I was your ace activist. I graduated from Dartmouth in 1971 and entered medical school. My father was taking great pride that I'd be the first MD in our family."

Instead Smith quit, turned off by the sons-of-doctors elitism. "I started immediately enjoying life, and taking in a million films. And I had a terrific time in New Hampshire teaching emotionally disturbed children."

Smith was then accepted into an experimental applied-psychology graduate program at the University of Kansas, Arriving in Lawrence in 1974, he discovered a cinema mecca at the university. He audited every movie course; he took over the university film society, projecting films each night of the week in a 400-seat hall.

"The programmer could run films multiple times, and take the prints home to watch. I was fanatical about seeing stuff. I started bringing in experimental directors like James Broughton, Chick Strand, Gunvor Nelson. And Wim Wenders also came through. Younger people today don't realize what a golden era of cinema the '70s were. Our social concerns were satisfied by showing films and reaching people."

Tuesday in Lawrence was Latin-American night, and Smith packed the hall for socially conscious films. He was so successful that in 1978 the Tricontinental Film Center, which specialized in leftist-activist cinema, hired him for its San Francisco office.

In 1981, Smith took over Film in the Cities, which was part of a flourishing media art center in St. Paul. "We had seven nights a week of arts programming, including performance and music, in a gorgeous 270-seat theater. I worked phenomenally hard. I brought lots of local work, and also programs such as a European feminist film series featuring directors Ulrike Ottinger, Helma Sanders, Chantal Akerman. What I developed there I continued in Boston, including showing films without a distributor that I have confidence can find an audience."

Film in the Cities was grant-dependent, and Smith felt envious when he collaborated on programs with Minneapolis's financially robust Walker Art Center. "I was there six years, and it was a good time to leave. I saw a lot more potential in an organization like the MFA and in being in Boston.

"I was right. With all these audiences now wanting to support their cultures -- Latin American, Asian, Iranian, Jewish, gay and lesbian -- Boston has become a programmer's dream. And the media have been respectful of what the MFA program offers because everyone writing about film here actually loves film. That's very refreshing after the Minnesota press."

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Cult directors fill their movies with references to the jarring close-ups and inventive editing of "B" director Sam Fuller. Yet Fuller, who died in October, went the same movie-quoting route in his 1972 Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street, which is getting a rare 35mm run at the Harvard Film Archive January 14 through 17. There are respectful steals from The Maltese Falcon and Breathless, and a mirthful scene in a Cologne movie theater shows a dubbed-in-German Rio Bravo.

Typically Fuller, the spectacular action sequences (and, here, inspired non-Berlin German locales) run in tandem with awkward writing and dubious acting. The story is about a cheap detective (sunbaked Glenn Corbett, a bologna-sandwich performer) searching Europe for tawdry photographs that can ruin his client, a Nixonian US senator played by Fuller himself in a Republican-baiting cameo.