Ira Deutchman’s Searching for Mr. Rugoff is a modest
but cherishable piece of cinema history, packed with juicy anecdote and memoir.
The now seldom-mentioned Don Rugoff was an exhibitor and distributor, his
holdings including a group of upper East Side Manhattan theaters that embodied the
“arthouse” of the 60’s and 70’s (Rugoff was as responsible as anyone, for
example, for Lina Wertmuller’s short-lived preeminence). An emblematically
colourful and turbulent character, he habitually slept through screenings (which
didn’t prevent him forming strong opinions on what he’d missed) and had lousy
personal habits, possibly exacerbated by an untreatable tumor in his brain;
still, for a while he made a lot of things happen, with a flair for imaginative
publicity ideas (such as pumping up the prospects of Pumping Iron with
bodybuilding demonstrations in the theaters). The documentary’s title
references the somewhat extraneous Searching for Sugarman-type strand in
which Deutchman tries to track down a small-town cinema club which Rugoff ran
at the end of his life, the details of which have fallen into obscurity; while this
material illustrates the depth of Rugoff’s fall from visibility, that part of
the narrative would be amply clear regardless. Among the film’s notable
omissions is any detailed account of Rugoff’s distribution business, and its
impact on cinema culture outside New York, an absence that seemingly underlines
the narrowness of Rugoff’s core achievement. Even growing up around that time
on the other side of the Atlantic, I recall how largely that strand of Manhattan
cinemagoing loomed in one’s perception of various films, of what it was to be a
cineaste; as wondrous a moment in time as that was, it may seem in
hindsight that a culture rooted in such a geographically and sociologically
specific, and to most of us distant piece of the world, and bolstered by an
unsustainable amount of spending on stunts and overhead, might not have been
optimally built to last…
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