10 Years Of Rialto Pictures: A chat with Bruce Goldstein

Where would we cinephiles be without Rialto Pictures? More to the point, where wouldn't we be? It's through this distribution company's work that we're able to see gorgeous new prints of stone classics such as Reed's The Third Man, Godard's Contempt, and Bresson's Au Hasard Balthazar, not to mention timeless entertainments such as Dassin's Rififi and Honda's Godzilla. Without Rialto Jean-Pierre Melville's monumental Army of Shadows would have never gotten its belated American premiere. And so on.

To commemorate the company's first ten years, DVD house The Criterion Collection, which handles the home video releases of most of Rialto's pictures, releases next Tuesday a handsome ten-disc box, "10 Years of Rialto Pictures." I recently spoke with Bruce Goldstein, the repertory programmer for New York's FIlm Forum and a co-founder of Rialto, about the company's beginnings, high points, and why the box contains the titles it does. 

"I wasn’t thinking of video when we started," Goldstein insists. "My background has always been as a programmer, and programmers are always encountering films they’d love to show, but can’t, because they’re not available. Films aren’t in distribution, license holders want a lot of money, and even if you find a print there are no subtitles…I started Rialto because, basically there were films I couldn’t show. And some of them were Holy Grails. And one of them was Contempt, which was only around in a print that was completely faded, which defeats its whole purpose. Another impetus for the company was the copyright laws changed. There was an international trade agreement that restored copyrights to European producers; prior to that there was a loophole in U.S. copyright law that put a lot of European-produced titles in the public domain.  Hence, a lot of European classics were around in really shitty versions, such as The Third Man, Nights of Cabiria…a lot of the films that we were to acquire fell under this new agreement. You see, as long as the films were in public domain, nobody was going to spend the money to make gorgeous new prints of them. Once copyright was restored there's a financial impetus for the producers to do just that. So that really helped us. It’s been a boon, not only for us but movie fans. You remember when certain films were in the public domain, they came out in 20 different versions, each worse than the other.

"Part of my mission here [at Film Forum] for 21 years has been to upgrade things. People accepted bad materials more in the old rep theater days, because it was all there was. So we’ve been upgrading the quality of the prints, working with studios, and now there are a few other distributors doing the same, so I think we’re almost in a golden age. In both DVDs and cinema. The quality is so much better than it was."

The mix of films in the box is pretty wide-ranging, with a few surprising omissions. The big Rialto hit Army of Shadows made the cut, but another such blockbuster, The Battle of Algiers, did not. Goldstein explains: "There were so many different criteria. One was, of course, do we still have an ongoing license for that film...and there were films that were absolute blockbusters that we were strongly identified with, films that you might have expected in the box, such as The Battle of Algiers, one of our biggest successes. But our licensor with that title is [fellow distributor] Janus films. We release films two ways. We’re partnered with Janus, who have the rights to give us…or we acquire the rights to a film and give permission to Janus. The films in the box are all films that we have licensed ourselves. Had it been the history of Rialto without regard to what we licensed from Janus, I would have included Battle, certainly. But Army of Shadows had to be in there. Third Man had to be in there. Murderous Maids is our only first run film, I have a lot affection for that film, and also for Sophie Testud."

Given that many cinephically-inclined distribs and/or DVD labels can barely make it through their first two years let alone make it to a tenth birthday, I asked Goldstein if he could share any secrets of Rialto's success. " You have to remember that you're in a niche market, so you need to rein in what you spend, marketing-wise. On the other hand, if you’re faced with something like Army of Shadows that just takes off, you need to be able to loosen up accordingly. You really have to know the business. A lot of these smaller labels are labors of love, I don’t think anyone’s expecting to get rich out of it. Reining in the costs of marketing is very important. You also have to remember that one hit doesn’t follow another, necessarily. Some people get a hit, and after that, they often over-expand."

His cautiousness notwithstanding, Goldstein has more than a few interesting ambitions for the company. Noting that there's a strong crime slant in Rialto's slate (four out of ten of the box's films could be called crime pictures, a full five if you want to stretch Godard's Bande a part into that category), he envisions a subset of the company devoted solely to such material—a "serie noire" line, if you will. "Another thing I’m really interested in finding a way of getting out...not just the super classics, but also the, well, you wouldn't quite call them run of the mill, pictures from around the world. With Turner Classic Movies, for example, their programming is so wide-ranging, you get such a fascinating picture of what Hollywood was doing. And you get to know the actors, and some of the hack directors, and you take the good with the bad, and it’s all enjoyable. I’d like to develop this sort of thing with European and Asian films. So many films that don’t get shown in this country. And some don’t even warrant theatrical reissue; some might even only sell 100 DVDs! But I want to be able to figure a way to market smaller films, expose people to the “ordinary,” in a sense…"

In the meantime, there's this box, in which every picture is extraordinary.

(Photo courtesy of The Criterion Collection)

Comments

[Dan]

Memo to Mr. Goldstein, if he's reading:

I don't want to say "bandwidth is cheap" and I know there are region issues, but for films aimed at very specific niches, what about working out a print-on-demand/streaming deal with Amazon or Netflix?

Netflix is always looking for new streaming content, and something like this is probably A) cheap and B) of enough appeal to film nerds like me (and for marketing purposes, I'll mention I'm 26) that it would probably be successful. I'm always looking to explore new avenues of film, like Mexican cinema from the '50s, Japanese gangster films, etc., and I know I'm not alone. Having access to these movies would definitely make me consider purchasing a Netflix streaming box.

[Paul Adair]

WRONG ! The dupers of foreign p.d.s did a ton better than the
labs Janus and all used. Specifically MOVIELAB, makers of the
muddiest and cruddiest. RIGHT ? THAT'S where the sloppy junk
came from. Public domainers only had that junk to copy from.
I set up a lab briefly and got my own controlled quality. Shut
it down because of your applauded "restored copyrights". I could
control processor speed, density, contrast, etc beautifully and was
about to do "Meet John Doe" from a nice nitrate, perhaps a Krellberg
but don't remember.
Remember Janus' "King Kong" with the bouncing reels ? MOVIELAB !
"Citizen Kane" looked like the worse of bathtub dupes ! I know
how bad Movielab was as a projectionist, friend of Audio-Brandon
when they had a branch here ---. Give the credit for junky dupes
to the folks who knowingly and willingly went the cheaper-is-better
lab route. AND I was about to pull preservation 35mm negatives and
prints of some nice trailers, too. Spent $3,000 on a DePue blow-up
or reduction printer, too. Could have done the "Santa Fe Trail"
trailer to 35mm. Guess who provided Universal with that I.B trail-
er for "Vertigo" and didn't get the promised preservation credit.
Guess who has the Realart nitrate trailer for "My Man Godfrey" ?
So hooray for paying for what once was free and not putting the
blame for dupey quality where it belongs; Movielab's customers.
Years ago, from a long-gone tv station, I borrowed some studio-
provided trailers and made negatives and "dupes". Then, put on matching reels with blue plastic strips between them, the reels
looked alike. Following screening of both reels, they thought the
originals looked like dupes and vice-versa. It's called CARING.
Or maybe it WAS called caring. How many films can endure 95 years of storage ? Google opposing copyright extension and visit
www.petitiononline.com/eldred. Sincere best wishes, Paul