On Being Mistaken For An Undocumented Immigrant, As Former F-1 Dutch Film Student
(& An Intro To The Essay THE ART OF ART HOUSE CINEMA EXHIBITION)
By Orlando G. (Gabriella) Bregman, June 28 2023
(They/He)
3 BOOKS AND A SHORT DOCUMENTARY
Coinciding with the 54th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots or Uprising on June 28, 1969, I decided to publish this note to let you know I’ll be back on Facebook soon, and on Medium with more essays and book excerpts.
(The above title encompasses the theme of some of those essays. The real theme of my writing revolves around the right to self-ownership however, which more or less makes me a constitutionalist. I’m also most definitely on the powers-that-be shit list, and things have been increasingly dangerous and volatile for me, and for my film producing partner as well.)
During the last 2-plus years off Social Media I lost my mother Gertrude “Truus” Bregman-Van Der Kloor (R.I.P.) to COVID-19 in the Netherlands, in the pre-vaccine times, on December 2 of 2020, (now buried next to my father Abraham “Bram” Bregman, who died of a heart attack in 2015).
And in the LGBTQ community we lost LGBTQ rights pioneer, and husband to the late Richard Frank Adams, my Hollywood neighbor and Australian friend Anthony Corbett Sullivan (R.I.P.) to a heart attack on November 10 of 2020.
Anthony Sullivan was, for lack of better wording, the only other Westerner I could find amongst a supposed “11 million undocumented immigrants”, who was also LGBTQ and excluded from citizenship in the US solely based on that LGBTQ identity.
Anthony Sullivan did eventually get his Green Card from his 1975 marriage to Richard Adams in 2016, along with a pardon from the Obama Administration, after DOMA was struck down as unconstitutional in 2015.
(Some of the essays that will follow, as well as my documentary, are dedicated to my parents and to Anthony Sullivan and Richard Adams, amongst a few others.)
My sincere condolences hereby to Allyson Newman and Tom Miller (Limited Partnership).
A special thank you to immigration lawyer Leon Wildes for John Lennon Vs The USA, which besides revealing how the powers-that-be ultimately tried to thwart his US citizenship process, (that is, Richard Nixon feared he would lose his reelection because Lennon had great influence over American youth culture, especially during the Vietnam war,) also explains a lot about US immigration law itself. And ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio and activist Bamby Salcedo of the TransLatina Coalition, for inspiration. Even Angelina Jolie for being instrumental in the re-authorization of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA 2022). And to a former friend, Zoe.
And always those who fought before me.
(During the Covid pandemic I discovered the story of Eve Adams, in Jonathan Ned Katz’ The Daring Life And Dangerous Times of Eve Adams, with the original text of Lesbian Love, and the videos of Nelson Sullivan, now preserved on YouTube by the 5NinthAvenueProject.)
And in early 2022 I put my stuff in storage and gave up my small film production office right off of Hollywood Blvd., where I’d stayed for over a decade, to go back “off the grid”/“van life” in a ’74 Chevy, from Silver Lake to Venice Beach.
(My sole proprietorship film production company Bregman Films, established in 2014, remains active, and a small non-profit literary organization The Auteur with film producing partner, musician Mario Luza, is in the works. And we are continuing the documentary, in terms of both storyline and the actual production of it, yes in the van.)
Over the course of the last 3 years I wrote a brief auto-ethnographic book of essays, or “memoir,” titled Trans-Masculine In Hollywood (30 Years Of Hardship And Exclusion).
It mostly chronicles, in essay form, my journey as a former academic international film student (F-1), from the Netherlands, and ending up being excluded from lawful US employment and so any chance of succeeding in the independent film industry, ultimately because of being both a foreigner and trans-masculine in the US, but remaining an artist throughout and becoming an LGBTQ activist by necessity in the process. (One is never truly a foreigner as a Westerner in the US, and certainly not “illegal”, even according to legal treaties between the Western countries but the US treats anyone not born in the US as “the other” regardless.)
It is also simply a study of an artist at work, artistic integrity clashing with the commercial approach to American filmmaking, with some of the essays directly addressing the problems and potential solutions to the current state of the US independent film industry.
It sums up my thoughts and experiences around gender identity and sexual orientation, and art and politics and philosophy, and love, sex, drugs, etc., and follows my personal and creative life in cramped apartments, shitty creative offices and on the streets of Los Angeles.
And in a way it’s even a full circle return of sorts to the Beat writers influences from my early days in the US, taking film classes at Los Angeles City College in Hollywood while living in a European youth hostel in Venice Beach, just blocks away from the Small World Bookstore where they carried all the Beats, and before that discovering them in High School back in the Netherlands and traveling all over Europe because of them.
I’ve been editing a short version of my feature documentary The Queer Case For Individual Rights. The 20-minute short documentary is titled F-1 Dutch Film Student. A feature documentary is still planned.
The 20 minute version of the documentary focuses less on LGBTQ immigration exclusion policy and more on my personal situation as a former film student from the Netherlands and my life as an artist in LA, and is more non-linear and loose compared to the feature version.
And a new essay on film exhibition The Art Of Art House Cinema Exhibition will be online shortly. In the essay I basically argue that if the US took film serious as an art form, and as many other countries in the world actually do, instead of just vacant entertainment or worse, propaganda for mainly American exceptionalism, we wouldn’t be in half the mess we’re currently in in Hollywood.
In the essay I actually argue for somewhat of a return to actual independent filmmaking and film viewing. And in this essay I particularly argue for film exhibition to do its’ proper part in the creative ecosystem, and realize the extreme importance of catering to the authentic viewing needs of niche audiences through curation of its film programming, and through actual film education and media literacy.
This essay about film exhibition in particular will be dedicated to two awesome people who are not with us anymore, avant garde, experimental filmmaker, film critic and film exhibitor at the Paris Theater in New York, Jonas Mekas, and revival house film exhibitor and founder of the New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles, Sherman Torgan, who truly cared about his little one-screen theater on Beverly Blvd, who cared about his programming and could be seen dragging film prints up the stairs to the projection booth or changing the marquee or lightbulbs himself at all hours of the day, and who cared about his audiences whom he made feel truly at home at his business, and who refused to ever charge me a single dollar for the 15 or so years I was a regular there, including for food, because he knew I was an underpaid worker and a real film lover and artist myself.
The 3 slim volumes of mostly auto-ethnographical essays The Queer Case For Individual Rights, Notes For A New Independent Film Movement, and Trans-Masculine In Hollywood will be independently published in 2023.
THE LAEMMLE THEATRES (1993–2001)
During the Covid pandemic I incidentally figured out the reason behind The Laemmle Theatres firing me at the end of a successful 3-months John Cassavetes Film Retrospective Gena and John: A Cassavetes Retrospective in the Fall of 2001, (specifically a K. Gallagher, formerly at the Laemmle’s Home Office, and inadvertently his wife, from the Payroll Dept., who now run a bowling alley somewhere in the Midwest.)
And why people in the US in general have assumed my lawfully acquired Social Security Number isn’t real, which of course it is. Or else I’m not Dutch and a European Union citizen, nor a former (F-1) academic international Film Student, all of which I most definitely am.
My getting fired from The Laemmle Theatres back in 2001 had everything to do with US Benefits, which I am absolutely eligible for, (along with my Dutch Benefits under US-Netherlands Tax Treaties and the F-1 International Student Program).
In 1992 at age 19 I received all of my initial paperwork in the Netherlands, through Film School acceptance, through the F-1 academic International Student Program, and was fully sponsored through an Affidavit-Of-Support by my parents and subsidized by the Dutch Child Tax Credit, besides having worked to save up for full-time Out-Of-State school tuition myself, before Erik Bergquist, future co-screenwriter of the original The Fast And The Furious, essentially rerouted my merit-based application to family-based immigration through his coerced marriage in the first semester of Los Angeles City College.
(My father had worked at the Dutch Social Security Administration, or Sociale Verzekeringen Bank, Leiden, for decades and my mother initially at the Dutch Royal Navy’s Dept. of Defense and Dept. of Finances in The Hague, where she met my father at work in the 1960s and they married in 1966. They are also related to some very famous people in the Dutch entertainment industry and literary scene.
Their, and my, plan to send me to Film School in the US in 1992 was pretty well planned and by my knowledge no mistakes were made with any paperwork. Yet US Immigration separated us for 3 decades against our will and has actually held me hostage throughout, knowing that my parents would keep paying for my survival here and I would also continue to produce more IP all throughout. I’m starting to believe hostage is the proper term to describe what is actually going on.)
So to be clear, I got hired legally at The Laemmle Theatres sometime in February of 1993, on my lawfully acquired work permit, or EAD (Employment Authorization Document) and Social Security Number, along with my CA ID, by then hiring manager T. Fisher, while attending my second semester of Film School and married to Erik Bergquist from Palos Verdes, with a pending Green Card application (I-485 and I-130).
While only 2 documents are apparently required for the hiring process I showed the theater manager everything I had, including my Dutch passport with F-1 student visa and B-1 B-2 business visa, and was honest throughout my employment about where I was from, my parents even visiting my work when on vacation in the US from the Netherlands.
I worked full-time, at mostly the Santa Monica location, the Monica 4-Plex, now the Laemmle’s Monica Film Center, from February 1993 to November 2001, and got fired right after 9/11 without ever being given a reason. And I know now they tried to keep me from being eligible for pension since I was close to reaching the required 10 years or 40 work credits.
I was never even promoted during my decade there, unlike many others hired after me, with some of them foreigners with dubious immigration statuses, nor was my lawful, overpriced film education and its’ usefulness on the job ever acknowledged in any way by management, and even if the job itself was suggested to me by film school, or at least my Los Angeles City College screenwriting teacher who was friends with the Monica’s racist, sexist union-projectionist L. Honeycutt, who actually called my mother “an import” when she was on vacation here with my father.
Then there was a partly fictitious, and completely distorted, book written by an ex-theater manager by the name of D. Hunter in 2012, in which he called me “an illegal” and portrayed me as having moved to the US without proper immigration papers.
Needless to say the job, in a drug-fueled and toxic environment throughout the 1990s, was pretty demeaning and in no way a real opportunity to actually break into the industry but I knew as a film student it was a way to watch free films, and watching films is of course some requirement to becoming a filmmaker and what I did anyway, so I might as well get paid for it. And especially since Erik Bergquist was controlling my school tuition money through a joint bank account he opened for immigration purposes.
(BTW, I highly suggest any remaining arthouses left in the US hire extensively out of film schools, at least junior film students, if they care about the theatrical film exhibition industry at all.)
And to be perfectly clear, my 1-year work permit expired during my marriage, and the divorce was finalized while I worked at the art house theater in Santa Monica, and literally signed in a rush in the theater lobby.
I’m suspecting that either Erik Bergquist has been holding on to my Green Card for 30 years, or at least any immigration mail about it, (and maybe the Dutch government didn’t even initially acknowledge the marriage as real when it was found out while I received Dutch Child Tax Credit, since “child”/Minor marriages are illegal or at least very unusual in the Netherlands, and compared to the US.)
Then in Sept. of 2017, during the Trump Administration and a whole 16 years after I got fired, I received a letter on behalf of The Laemmle Theatres, requiring my Social Security Number verification or risk forced enrollment into another IRA account.
I did not respond and my 401K plan rolled over to another IRA account, and I’m actually glad The Laemmle Theatres are not in control of my money any longer, and that this is how I got my reason for being fired.
Two months later I was subjected to a very aggressive visit by the LAPD, who threatened me with arrest if I didn’t give them my full Social Security Number. And my race and ethnicity.
(More on all of this in later essays.)
MY RACE AND ETHNICITY, OR RACIAL AMBIGUITY AND GENDER IDENTITY
Americans having been suspicious about the legitimacy of my paperwork throughout my 30 years in the US also had everything to do with me looking racially ambiguous as well androgynous, as a trans-masculine person.
I have the same racial background as Alex and Eddie Van Halen (R.I.P.), that is Dutch (father’s side) and Indonesian-Dutch (mother’s side), born in the Netherlands, and so legally Dutch Citizen, and also meaning of Protestant origins, or Western as that’s simply called, but mixed with Asian heritage through the Dutch colonization of the then Dutch-Indies, from 1602–1949. Apparently Eurasian is one technical term for my, and my mother’s, heritage. I’ve heard the word Indo in my youth but mostly as a slur. Either way, people of Indonesian-Dutch heritage have Dutch and European citizenships, are not culturally Asian, do not speak Asian languages and have no Asian names, much like Black Americans, including those of mixed-race, have full US citizenship, do not generally speak African languages and are mostly born with white names, which stem from slavery.
(My mother was born in the Dutch-Indies during the tail end of the Dutch colonial period, and so with Dutch citizenship, and I was born in the Netherlands, like my Dutch father, and so we all have Dutch and European Union citizenship by birth.)
Many Eurasians, especially in the entertainment industry, are simply seen as white, or Western, or white-passing, (like for instance Keanu Reeves, and Van Halen.) While I’ve frequently passed myself, and definitely in Europe, in the US, and specifically in Los Angeles, I personally have routinely been mistaken for Latinx, or probably rather Latina, and presumably mostly Mexican, with some people arguing even that I’m altogether not Dutch. (While in New York, as well as in Amsterdam, people would routinely accept me as white but mostly wrongly assume Italian heritage.)
And in hindsight certain employees at The Laemmle Theatres in Santa Monica throughout the 1990s may have preferred to view me as coming from a destitute, immigrant background as opposed to simply being a struggling, queer artist in LA. They therefore assumed I didn’t deserve to produce a John Cassavetes Film Retrospective either, and fired me.
I identify as Trans-Masculine and Gender Nonconforming, and since not medically transitioning still consider myself Lesbian or at least Queer. I go by Orlando G. Bregman and my pronouns are They and He. (The G. stays, now as middle initial, just to honor my parents who named me Gabriella.) I’m mostly white and from the Netherlands and internally identify as such truly but since having Indonesian-Dutch heritage as well and being subjected to racism all the same, even if mistaken for the wrong race, I’m practically forced consider myself or identify as bi-racial, white and Asian.
So, as an LGBTQ bi-racial foreigner from Western Europe, I have actually been racially, and sexually, profiled by the US government as well as ignorant or racist individuals alike, practically since day one, (and I got accepted into the Film Program at Los Angeles City College, a community college, at Out-Of-State tuition rates, and during the LA Uprising in the aftermath of the Rodney King beating/LAPD non-verdict in 1992).
US immigration, through extensive vetting, saw in my Dutch passport photo and the contents of my luggage in 1992 that I was “doing drag” all along. (I’ve known I was trans-masculine since probably the mid-70s but never had any language for it and could only express it through my clothes and tastes and general behavior.)
My online Social Security Administration account obviously confirms my entire work history and eligibility for US Benefits.
SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBERS VS. INDIVIDUAL TAX IDENTIFICATION NUMBERS
Undocumented immigrants, that is “illegal entry migrants” and “tourist visa overstays, on purpose”, apparently work on ITIN numbers (Individual Tax Identification Number) but are not eligible for US Benefits, and are in reality mostly economic migrants from poor backgrounds and so-called Third World, Second World, and non-NATO countries, (basically past colonized countries) as I finally found out.
(In the media they’ve routinely been lumped together with asylum-seekers and the few I got to know actually mostly misled me and so I had mistaken them for actual asylum-seekers.
Every time I brought up Social Security Numbers I was met with initial silence and the question redirected at me as if I was being elitist for bringing up legal matters altogether. In reality I was trying to understand the actual laws and was not looking down on their experiences, whether as potential asylum seekers or migrant workers.
In hindsight I can understand their defensive attitudes but in reality my life does also depend on knowing and understanding these laws. And most immigration lawyers do not handle cases of Westerners who become undocumented either, as I also found out.)
About 7 million of the supposed total “11 million undocumented immigrants” (a frequently used media term) were renamed “Undocumented Essential Workers” during the pandemic under President Biden’s Build Back Better plan, and were finally given work permits, sometime in 2021.
(In reality there are still economically-challenged people moving to the US unlawfully and so that number, 11 million, is a media lie. As it turns out, the supposed 11 million undocumented immigrants are people who have been in the US for at least a decade, or rather since 2011.)
In general most undocumented immigrants, and their children, were upon their arrival in the US not actually given Social Security Numbers by the Social Security Administration but received Individual Taxpayer Identification Numbers from the Internal Revenue Service instead.
Those amongst the “11 million” who became eligible for the 2013 Deferred Action Childhood Arrival program (DACA) ended up receiving Social Security Numbers along with temporary work permits.
Undocumented immigrants who use ITIN’s, or Individual Tax Identification Numbers, instead of SSN’s, Social Security Numbers, are not entitled to receive US Benefits, such as unemployment and pension, and so actually inadvertently do compete with many (lower wage) US employees that way, since greedy employers would rather not pay pension premiums over their employees at all. American employers therefore routinely hire undocumented immigrants on ITIN’s.
ITIN’s are normally reserved for short-term legal foreign workers, who are ineligible for SSN’s, to pay taxes in the US under Independent Contractor status, and so are exempt from US Benefits.
(This rule even counts for American citizens who claim Independent Contractor status, despite having an SSN.)
Apparently most undocumented immigrants use ITINs to pay federal taxes as employees, which is legal, although the ITIN is not itself work permission. And they use these ITINs even to own businesses or be independent contractors, in which case they do not need work authorization at all.
So again, undocumented immigrants with ITINs, even though not being legally allowed to be present in the US, do not actually have to have work permission to own businesses or be independent contractors in the US, and do pay federal taxes but do not collect US benefits.
Legally however, that is for US immigration purposes, all foreigners who apply for work in the US as employees have to show the potential employer immigration-authorized work permission, (as in a work permit or work visa, or Green Card/LPR status) or else lie, often by omission, about their foreign nationality to be able to get hired.
Note that by law an employer in the US is not allowed to directly ask a prospective employee about their nationality in the job interview, so as to avoid potential discrimination claims, yet must make sure the employee is lawfully authorized to work in the US at the time of hiring.
And so this creates the tricky situation, or legal loophole, for a US employer that a foreigner who lies by omission would take advantage of.
This loophole exists between the Social Security Administration, which oversees benefits for US citizens and lawful residents, and the Internal Revenue System, which allows for undocumented immigrants to pay taxes on ITINs, instead of SSNs, and not receive US benefits, thereby creating and allowing the existence of an exploitable cheap labor workforce in America, and one greedy US employers then gladly set up in competition with economically struggling US workers.
And this discrepancy or loophole in the law allows for immigration raids and deportations to occur as well.
The US media, left- and right-wing alike, routinely mix up terminology to serve their own agendas and actually keep US audiences in the dark as to how immigration really works. Terms like illegal, undocumented, asylum-seekers, refugees, migrants, immigrants, foreign workers and visa-overstays are freely mixed up to confuse the general population and keep the political parties’ opinions on immigration polarized.
Certain immigration nonprofits themselves are misleading the American public on immigration matters such as Define American by Jose Antonio Vargas, who routinely tricks the media into believing that there are foreigners from all socio-economic statuses and all countries amongst the undocumented, and including Westerners.
He also makes no distinctions between the terms white and Westerner, which for a Pulitzer Price winning journalist like Vargas couldn’t possibly be out of sheer ignorance.
So for clarification here, there are in fact People of Color born in Western countries, or even their former colonies, who are just as their white counterparts technically full and equal citizens, just like Black people born in the US are technically US citizens.
And there are white, as well as Jewish, populations who are from countries that are considered non-Western, and whose experience of white privilege is severely hampered by their non-Western citizenships, like for instance Ukrainians today.
Jose Antonio Vargas avoids acknowledging the existence of Westerners of Color altogether. Actual Westerners, of any race or ethnicity, that is those holding citizenship to a Western country, by definition move to the US with legal immigration documents and initial sufficient funds in place, and this is of course also what Western privilege or right is, under the right to ‘freedom of movement’ the right and ability to immigrate legally.
So the main reason Westerners generally do not immigrate illegally, or even overstay our visas, is that we would lose our benefits, including in our own countries, besides all of our other rights or Western privileges altogether. It would mean social and financial ruin.
Some 30 countries have special tax treaties combining our countries’ benefits, and so how we file taxes in the US will affect us both here and back in our home countries.
The main reasons a Westerner could potentially “become undocumented” or rather ‘Out-Of-Status’ in the US, is by becoming a crime victim, as defined by the Violence Against Women Act, VAWA, or any Crime Visa act, or by being LGBTQ, specifically before the Defense Of Marriage Act (DOMA) was struck down, as that would exclude the LGBTQ Westerner from ‘Adjustment-Of-Status’ (Green Card process) through marriage to a US Citizen, or a Lawful Permanent Resident.
On top of this Jose Antonio Vargas from the Philippines has mixed up his own undocumented immigration case in the media by stating his sexual orientation, as if directly caused his immigration status, like for instance DOMA, that is being excluded for US citizenship sponsorship through same-sex marriage.
In actuality the rule of family law sponsorship requires a foreigner to have entered the US lawfully for Adjustment-Of-Status to take place, in which case a US Citizen can sponsor the foreigner without the foreigner having the leave the US first.
Or in the case of foreigners who entered the US illegally, that is without inspection or with fraudulent documents, the foreigner would have to leave the US for “Consular Processing” and their re-entry into the US would become dependent on the discretion of an immigration authority.
The latter scenario would apply to Vargas himself, and so he was not specifically excluded from same-sex marriage and immigration sponsorship because of being LGBTQ and a foreigner in the US under DOMA, such as for instance Anthony Sullivan from Australia or myself.
Another immigration outlet, as well as film resource, the Undocumented Filmmakers Collective, was founded in 2018 by Set Hernandez (like Vargas also from the Philippines), after we had a lengthy conversation over lunch once and with whom I had appeared in a short video for Jose Antonio Vargas’ Define American before.
He essentially took my lived experience as a real Me Too victim of Hollywood as a trans-masculine filmmaker and former lawful F-1 film student from the Netherlands, and made it into a nonprofit organization for himself and his undocumented friends instead, knowing for himself he could legally work as a nonprofit organization, whether on an Individual Tax Identification Number (ITIN) or, when becoming eligible for DACA, under a Social Security Number (SSN).
The Undocumented Filmmakers Collective published these contradictory and unfair US Immigration and IRS hiring practices and tax paying rules in an article for the IDA (International Documentary Association) Documentary Magazine, Spring 2021 Issue. I am glad that since then the International Documentary Association has been able to unionize, and I sincerely hope that IDA’s former executive director Simon Kilmurry and former IDA Documentary Magazine editor Tom White will keep working in the film industry.
I’ve had to figure out most of this stuff about US immigration law on my own though, after some of the lawyers associated with these young DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) Recipients tried to rip me off and one of them actually unfriended me on Facebook during my absence, leaving me really no choice but to unfriend that whole group of people in return.
Obviously I do stand with real asylum-seekers and refugees, and certainly accept anyone’s potential to be an artist regardless of social status, and I am also empathetic to economic migrants in general but if you have to throw sexual assault victims, transgender foreigners, and Europeans of any race or ethnicity, under the bus and let us be subjected to IRS audits and immigration raids that could ruin our livelihoods to advance your own ambitions in the US, then do expect to be met with criticism.
So, to just sum things up, ultimately the real issue with undocumented immigration is that greedy US employers can hire undocumented immigrants along with US workers but not put insurance money aside for unemployment, healthcare and pension benefits for the undocumented employees, making it significantly cheaper to hire them, even if they get paid the same wages.
If this wasn’t clear to some of my film industry acquaintances, no one has actually been held accountable for my “illegalization” still, no spouse nor school nor job in Hollywood, and I never actually received my film degree nor my Green Card, or any reply from immigration at all as to what happened to my original 1992 Adjustment-Of-Status application even, other than the original work permit I received 10 days after the marriage. My film school short films and script are not even in my possession, including the ones I transferred with to LACC from a video production course in Utrecht, the Netherlands. And it’s been hell having to clean up this mess.
FILM AS ART
Lastly, I’ve seen and rediscovered plenty of truly fantastic, inspirational films during the pandemic, (from Sam Feder’s Disclosure, Lee Daniels’ The United States vs. Billie Holiday, Rebecca Hall’s Passing, Dante Alencastre’s AIDS Diva: The Legend Of Connie Norman early on, to Christine Vachon’s Pride documentary, Andrew Rossi’s The Andy Warhol Diaries, Questlove’s Summer Of Soul, to Chase Joynt’s Framing Agnes, Andrea Pallaoro’s Monica, Ethan Hawke’s The Last Movie Stars, Allen Hughes’ Dear Mama, and Laura Poitras’ All The Beauty And The Bloodshed, amongst many others,) confirming once more that while the actual film industry in Hollywood is in shambles and has been for a very long time already, well before the WGA strike, true artists remain driven, are actually on top of our game currently, and have continued to find ways to get our truths out to the public.
And I will touch on some of those films and artists, as well as the horrific state of the industry itself, in future essays but I wanted to particularly thank Zachary Drucker and Kristen Lowell for making The Stroll (and putting on a Q&A at Outfest Fusion the way those really could be conducted.)
Outside of film festivals you unfortunately and ironically, but not incidentally, now have mostly museums left to attend quality independent, revival and arthouse films. Some of the more comprehensive and innovative film retrospectives in Los Angeles in recent years have been courtesy of film programmer KJ Reith-Miller, (and Bob Hawk for Pioneers Of Queer Cinema, and her Agnes Varda Retrospective Enter The Varda Verse, and more,) with many of the titles coming from the UCLA Film Archives.
The overall art house theater experience is in steep decline, and the industry itself is mainly at fault, and not the audiences.
(Much more on this in the essay The Art Of Art House Cinema Exhibition.)
But I will say this right now though, that it does ultimately and truly comes down to caring, caring for art, for film, love of film, as an art form, and not for the money first, the big money, the fame, the career first, and that if we are to create and sustain an environment in which we can “do what we love and get paid for it”, and remain at all authentic in any creative and artistic expression, we do have to actively contribute to nourishing the film industry itself, as a whole creative eco-system, and not just chase personal careers. The artists have for too long allowed and contributed to a watered down, commercialized industry, in which big money and popularity and opening weekend ratings have ruled, and even the current strike is to some extent also a result of it. The artist needs to take control of the industry, in every interview and Q&A and panel discussion and online platform and whatever else is available.
I’ll reiterate here, as I’ve said in previous essays, that when I decided to produce a John Cassavetes Film Retrospective in 2001 at The Laemmle Theatres, with my then roommate and former co-worker at the Santa Monica location throughout the 1990s, and current co-producer of my documentary, Mario Luza, we did this non-commissioned, without getting paid for it, and paying for certain costs out of our own small pockets, like seemingly simple but enormously helpful things at the time like flyers, which we distributed at just about every creative outlet in Los Angeles we could think of, that we did this, put together this 3-month long retrospective, as basically a gift to the entire creative and independent film community in Los Angeles, and because we felt it was necessary to introduce and reintroduce young and older audiences, and very much including artists, to the complete directing works and independent filmmaking “methods” of John Cassavetes. We invited cast and crew and they showed up weekend after weekend for Q&As, and we sold copies of the book Cassavetes On Cassavetes by Ray Carney in the lobby, and arranged in-print interviews, amongst many other things, and the cast and the crew actually appreciated it and rewarded us, unlike The Laemmle Theatres who fired me in the final week of the retrospective for unspecified reasons.
We did it because we cared, and we put it on right because of that exactly and despite a lot of resistance from certain Laemmle Theatres employees and home office itself. It was a critical and commercial success because Mario and myself truly cared about independent film and filmmakers.
That said, The Laemmle Theatres were enormously successful throughout the 1990s, often dubbed “the golden age of independent filmmaking”, but not because they cared so much. Rather, the independent film industry was just at a peak, with small, independent, high quality films saturating the market, and financed and marketed because plenty of small distribution companies existed who supported those films and filmmakers financially. And The Laemmle Theatres were simply a theatrical exhibition opportunity for many of these films, prior to the internet and streaming threatening to take its place.
So The Laemmle Theatres got handed this overflow of high quality but low cost product, these great little gems of independent filmmaking in the 90s, essentially on a silver platter, and because they had inherited the already successful company from their own family. I am simply speaking from my own experience working there for nearly a decade, in the 1990s, and interacting with the owners, Bob Laemmle and his son Greg Laemmle, and observing how they ran their Los Angeles art house theater chain.
They promoted the independent and international films showing at their theaters truly minimally, with cheap looking and boring one-sheet flyers only available in their own theater lobbies, and with the Los Angeles Times and KRCW as their sole sponsors, all while in the film capital of the world, and with the Santa Monica location particularly conveniently located literally one block away from Santa Monica Beach, as well as Third Street Promenade, and just short drives away from some of the top film schools in the country. I personally saw many wasted opportunities to put the art house theaters themselves, as well as the films they were playing, properly on the map.
I’ve learned many things about independent film exhibition, including from The Laemmle Theatres directly, about what to do, and what not to do in terms of film exhibition, and ever since then also from observing and researching in general what works and doesn’t for audiences today. And today’s younger audiences, for years already accustomed to the internet and to steaming options to satisfy their viewing needs and their need for social connection, and more savvy and aware and interconnected than any other previous generation, are for the most part no longer just going to sit still in a dark theater for several hours, after driving in LA traffic and paying for parking and overpriced candy, with their cellphones off and all of that for which many older generations would call “the theatrical experience” but which is not everybody’s actual idea of a great time at the movies nowadays.
Los Angeles audiences in particular and of any age have other sophisticated viewing options as well like museums, film schools and film festivals. And thank goodness for a proliferation in local outdoors screenings in recent years, and unfortunately also exacerbated by the Covid pandemic, but there finally might be a growing awareness that many people actually enjoy watching films in the perfect weather that Los Angeles affords us, at outdoor communal spaces like public parks, with outdoor food trucks to serve us, etc.
I have so more much to say about independent film exhibition, regarding programming, moderation, education, nonprofit run spaces and events, and truly nurturing niche audiences, as local community building as well as building loyal online audiences of filmmakers and film lovers, and I touch on all of this and more in the essay The Art Of Art House Cinema Exhibition, on Medium shortly.
Meanwhile the true artists left in Los Angeles are practically starving to death. The best LGBTQ writers today are on the writing platform Medium, publishing mostly long-form personal stories, cultural essays, political commentary, film criticism and narrative content for very little money but doing it anyway, out of absolute creative and political necessity. Their names are mostly unknown outside of the online essay writing circles but some of them write with an urgency, clarity and purpose, and are so contemporary and progressive in their content they can easily keep up with the greats of the past. Whereas the film industry is failing miserably in the US I could see a literary resurgence on the horizon, and I am there for it.
And speaking of the state of the film industry, veteran producer Ted Hope is doing an excellent job ranting on Substack about all that’s wrong in the industry and brainstorming on what can be changed to make things better. To answer his question about naming one thing that could be done that would significantly improve the film business, here’s one answer, treat film as an art form and make films accordingly, including for significantly less money than the budgets we’ve become accustomed to in Hollywood. Get rid of the whole film as entertainment concept.
Anyone who’s ever paid money to watch a Marvel movie, or worked on one, has been lining the pockets of Trump-backer Ike Perlmutter. Marvel, and any other superhero, fantasy or big action-based franchises, are rightwing infiltrations of an inherently left-leaning art form like cinema, and ultimately fascists, or any other greedy, needy idiots, cannot be true artists as true art is inextricably linked to the ability to be vulnerable.
The film world lost 2 major voices during the pandemic in Jean-Luc Godard (R.I.P.) and Peter Bogdanovich (R.I.P.) And the transgender film community gained 2 major voices with Daniel Sea and Elliot Page, who also just published his memoir Pageboy on June 6.
Rest In Power Rasheeda Williams, AKA Koko Da Doll or Hollywood Koko, of D. Smith’s Kokomo City.
Be well, and I of course stand in solidarity with the Writers Guild Strike.
I’ll be in touch with some of you. Happy Pride. Outfest is next.
Orlando G. Bregman
(They/He)
