Nice piece in the Wall Street Journal profiling the director of NYC’s Film Forum, currently the focus of a series at the Museum of Modern Art.
Through Feb. 20, the Museum of Modern Art is marking the theater’s anniversary with “Karen Cooper Carte Blanche: 40 Years of Documentary Premieres at Film Forum.” MoMA senior curator Laurence Kardish invited Ms. Cooper to select films reflecting her passion for strong documentaries.
The article gives a nice sense of how rep cinema has changed over the years.
Film Forum was founded by two 20-something cineastes, Peter Feinstein and Sandy Miller. In 1972, Ms. Cooper, who had graduated from Smith College two years earlier, wrote about movies she saw at the theater for a now-defunct film magazine she was working for. One night not long afterward, Mr. Feinstein—who, she says, was tired of making $100 a week and wanted to leave town and get married—offered her the business over dinner. When she asked what that would entail, he produced a suitcase full of carbon copies of correspondence with filmmakers. “I read a spate of these letters over a weekend and thought, well, I was an English major, I can write letters like this,” Ms. Cooper recalls. “I can tell filmmakers why I liked their film or didn’t like their film. And I took it over, without really knowing what it means to run a business, and grew it from that $19,000-a-year budget over the next 38 years.” Film Forum’s original budget was the equivalent of about $100,000 in today’s dollars. Now it’s $4.4 million.
