A Theater Owner Who Doesn’t Pander to the Fattest Pocketbook

This is a story about the haves vs. the can’t-get-enoughs in the world. Because the death this week of KFAC-FM, the Southland’s only commercial classical music radio station, is bringing so much attention to those who have only a corporate sneer for the minority audience, this column offers a small reminder that unbridled greed has not taken over everywhere.

Not everyone is as nefarious as KFAC’s new owners, who dumped a 50-year-old classical format because demographic surveys indicated that they could make far more money with rock. The classical format already was operating in the black, but apparently it needed to be a deeper shade of black. Station officials made no attempt to mask their “appeal-to-the-largest-possible-audience-at-any-cost” mentality.

As one who loves classical music and rock, I felt the same way a few months ago when KEDG-FM “The Edge”--the only commercial rock station around here with any sense of intelligence, imagination and adventure--went belly up to make way for K-LITE, a station that is, at best, one-third less nutritious than your average Top 40 station. (And that ain’t saying much.)

But, as we said, there are people out there who don’t always put the almighty dollar ahead of everything else. Right here in Orange County are a couple of movie theaters where programming isn’t determined solely by the number of people who might pass through the turnstiles.

The Balboa Cinema in Newport Beach and the Port Theatre in Corona del Mar both are owned by Landmark Theatre Corp., a San Francisco-based string of 22 so-called “art-movie” houses whose management seems to understand the old Chinese aphorism: “He is happy who knows he has enough.”

Reports surfaced earlier this year that the family that built the Port 40 years ago and had operated it ever since was thinking about selling out to a chain. Waves of panic rippled among the theater’s regulars.

So it was with a sigh of relief when the news came down in May that the theater had been bought by Landmark, familiar to locals from having owned the Balboa for more than a decade. Like the Port, the Balboa had long been a champion of foreign and/or independent films whose titles never show up in Variety front-page headlines for doing “Boffo B.O.”

And more good news came just last week, when Landmark signed a deal to refurbish the great old Fox Theatre in Fullerton, which has been dormant for years. Co-owner Gary Meyer said it is scheduled to reopen by Christmas, 1990, as a triplex offering a diet of first-run foreign and specialized films, similar to the Balboa and the Port.

Epitomizing Landmark’s philosophy--one I can’t imagine ever flying with the ownership of KFAC or the late KEDG--is an incident I recall from a while back.

Meyer, had to hound a New York film distributor to get his hands on a print of “Shoah” for Orange County. A 9 1/2-hour film (shown in two parts) of interviews with World War II concentration camp survivors, their families and Nazi officers and guards, “Shoah” is not exactly the sort of thing that gets people flocking into theaters. The people who bankrolled “Batman” are not losing any sleep over where “Shoah” is playing.

But Meyer believed strongly that the film was important enough and that there were enough people in Orange County who didn’t get to see it when it played in Los Angeles, that he should book it into the Balboa. Trouble was, there were only six prints of “Shoah” available for the entire country, so Meyer had to do more than just call up and ask for one. He had to send off charts and demographic surveys about the population makeup to prove to the distributor that there was more to Orange County than the white-bread, John Bircher stereotype still floating around New York. It took him nearly four months.

Well, the week that the print finally became available to Meyer, the Balboa found itself in the midst of an unexpectedly successful run of “A Room With a View” that was breaking all the theater’s box office records.

If Landmark had been any other major theater chain (or radio or TV station, or fast-food chain--it’s so hard to tell the difference sometimes), Meyer would have looked at the numbers “A Room With a View” was attracting, thought about the comparatively small audiences he expected to draw with “Shoah,” and then he would have called that distributor back and said:

“Never mind.”

Instead, Meyer went with “Shoah,” explaining that “this is one of those instances where money be damned. We’re going to go ahead and do it because we believe in ‘Shoah.’ ”

Both the Balboa and the Port continue to screen offbeat films--this week the Port has Francois Truffaut’s “The Little Thief” and the Balboa is showing the romantic comedy “The Rachel Papers”--that otherwise would be relegated to the dark, dusty corners of video stores that we can’t find or cable services like Bravo that most of us can’t get.

Which is why it’s so reassuring, especially this week as KFAC bites the bottom-line dust, to know a company exists that can be satisfied appealing to one specific segment of the population, instead of opting to be the 2,261st theater in the country to book “Lethal Weapon 2” only because it might pump up their profit margin.

Maybe the good guys don’t always finish first. But without them, why even bother with the race?