New Film Society Goes Hollywood

If midterms, papers and fall-foliage trips don't keep you busy enough on Sunday afternoons, the Harvard-Radcliffe Film Society hopes to fill this void.

The newly-formed organization plans to screen movies in the Science Center every Sunday afternoon at 2 p.m., in order to "generate income for the production of a student film next year," according to Brian N. Backus, '87, the club's president.

Backus says that the club will also sponsor speakers.

Adding a new twist to the Harvard tradition of faculty sponsorship of clubs, the new Film Society has enlisted motion picture studio heads and the Arts Editor of the Los Angeles Times as advisors.

"I'm happy to play any role that I'm asked to," says Vice-President of Production at ABC Motion Pictures Joshua Donen, one of the club's advisors.

While in California this summer, Backus contacted various entertainment industry officials to ask for their advice and assistance with his new organization; several of them agreed to help.

"I've done some career advising and I will function in that particular vein," says another advisor, Salvatore J. Iannucci, the Chief Executive Officer of Aaron Spelling Productions.

Backus expects that these advisors will suggest good movies to show and will help arrange for guest speakers to appear.

In addition to entertaining the community, Backus says that the club will endeavor to make movies of its own. Since the cost of making an hour-long 16mm sound film is close to $15,000, Backus says that the film society has applied for money from the Undergraduate Council and the Office of the Arts to defray the costs. He adds that the club hopes for "pure profit" from the screenings in the Science Center.

Backus says, "Film-making here is excellent but primarily documentaries." He adds that he would like to "give students access to the narrative film making process" and wants his club's product to be about a "Harvard-related topic."

Although current club enrollment totals only 27, Backus says that up to 50 people will be involved in the production of the movie. "We really want to get as many students involved as possible," he adds.

This spring, club members say, the society will ask for students to submit original screenplays--and will then choose which one to produce. Auditions for actors will be held during common casting next fall.

Club members say that their organization is not the first of its type at Harvard; two clubs similar to the new film society were very active in the late '60's. According to the Office of the Arts, both Ivy Films and the Harvard Film Studies Club showed movies and used the money made to produce movies of their own.

Backus says that the former president of these two defunct clubs, Tim M. Hunter '68, will be at Harvard this November as the Peter Ivers Visiting Artist of the year. The visit of the current director and screenwriter ("Tex," "Sylvester")--who currently has an office at Warner Brothers Studios--will be hosted in part by the new Film Society.

While at Harvard, Hunter made "mostly lurid, romantic melodramas," he recalls.

Hunter expresses pleasure that a moviemaking club has reappeared at Harvard; he blames the abundance of individual House film societies for the lack of campus-wide film societies.

"I've always found that running movies is an honest way to raise money to make movies," says Hunter.

The Harvard-Radcliffe Film Society's first movie of the year will be an exclusive Halloween screening of Polanski's "The Fearless Vampire Killers," which will be shown twice this Sunday.