A new documentary tells the story of film distributor Don Rugoff, whose brilliant marketing campaigns and eccentric taste changed the course of movie history.
A new documentary tells the story of film distributor Don Rugoff, whose brilliant marketing campaigns and eccentric taste changed the course of movie history.
O n April 27, 1975, shoppers on Fifth Avenue in New York City were confronted by the sight of two actors in Arthurian robes, clip-clopping up and down the street to promote a movie opening in a theater nearby. The actors promised free coconuts to the first ticket buyers. Later that day, there were lines around the block for the movie, Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
Holy Grail, which no other film distributor wanted, turned out to be a huge hit for Cinema 5, the scrappy and ingenious company that introduced Americans to a trove of great documentary, arthouse, and European films. Critical to these movies’ success were the newspaper-ad campaigns and marketing gimmicks dreamed up by Don Rugoff, who founded Cinema 5 and built it into the Miramax of the ’60s and ’70s.
Among the offerings Rugoff brought to America were Z, the Costa-Gavras film that won two Oscars and was nominated for Best Picture and Best Director in 1969, and works by François Truffaut, Ingmar Bergman, and Lina Wertmüller. Wertmüller, thanks in part to Rugoff’s promotion of her 1974 Italian sex comedy Swept Away, became the first woman ever to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director. Rugoff’s company started losing barrels of money around 1977, he was booted out in a hostile takeover, and his life ended in obscurity on Martha’s Vineyard, where he is buried. Today he is all but forgotten; he doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page. The engaging new documentary Searching for Mr. Rugoff — directed by one of his former employees, the indie film exec turned Columbia professor Ira Deutchman — aims to rectify that oversight.
Deutchman’s doc is targeted at an extremely specific audience of cineastes who care both about the early days of indie cinema and the state of New York City moviegoing, which Rugoff altered dramatically. As Times Square, for decades the moviegoing capital of the country, turned into a no-go zone in the 1960s, Rugoff built a chain of cinemas on the East Side of Manhattan that became premier launching pads for movies in the U.S. His houses included the Beekman, the Plaza, the Sutton, the Paris, the Gramercy, and the Cinema I and II, which was, the documentary tells us, the first movie house in the U.S. built to have two auditoriums. Most of these theaters no longer exist, though some live on in movies shot in New York City. (The late, lamented, art deco Beekman, for instance, appears in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, which later exhibited it.) From theater ownership, Rugoff segued into buying distribution rights to movies that he then made into cultural totems for highbrow filmgoers: the documentaries Gimme Shelter, Endless Summer, The Sorrow and the Pity, Harlan County USA, and Pumping Iron; Wertmüller’s Seven Beauties, Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage, and Andy Warhol’s Trash. Alas for Rugoff, his niche crumbled when Hollywood studios turned to gritty indie-style films, though the documentary blames the poor taste of his second wife, derided as “the Yoko Ono of Cinema 5,” for the string of late-’70s flops that destroyed him.
Searching for Mr. Rugoff makes a persuasive case that Rugoff was a sort of Charles Foster Kane of indie cinema, a mad, eccentric bully who built an empire and then lost it. Rugoff, who took heavy-duty medication for a pituitary tumor — he died at only 62 — was an amazing slob whose shirt would collect mustard stains as he wolfed down tongue sandwiches throughout the day. He would sometimes fall asleep in mid-sentence. He was also known to drift off while watching his own movies, only to wake up and offer a trenchant critique or an enthusiastic “I’ll buy it!” Tyrannically demanding of his employees, he kept two assistants working for him at all times: On any given day, he figured, one of them might quit after one of his tantrums, so it was wise to keep a spare handy.
Rugoff’s marketing genius proved more important than his rebarbative style, though. His ad campaign for Putney Swope, Robert Downey Sr.’s avant-garde satire, was a striking image of a fist with a woman sticking up in place of the middle finger, and the film (“I didn’t get it but I liked it,” Rugoff told Downey, who is interviewed here) became an unlikely sensation. Rugoff’s gimmick of hosting live bodybuilding displays at screenings of Pumping Iron helped that movie and its star Arnold Schwarzenegger become household names, even joked about by Johnny Carson in a Tonight Show monologue at the time. Rugoff’s films earned six Oscars and 25 nominations; a decade or so later, Harvey Weinstein would use the same playbook to move indie film to the center of the cultural conversation.
Rugoff’s thorny personality, though, seems to be a big part of the reason why he was instantly forgotten by his industry once he fell from power. Employees speak of being treated like slaves; his own sons, who are interviewed in the film, barely got any time with him. Wertmüller, who turns 93 this week, says in the movie, “There was an element of madness in him.” The moral of the story is clear enough: Be nice to the people who work for you, or they’ll kill off your memory before your body goes cold.
