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Berkeley’s Back with Worldclass Cinema by Lorenzo Estébanez
After taking over Fantasy Studios, in the old Fantasy (now Saul Zaentz) building, Jeffrey Wood began rebuilding it into a worldclass institution. photo: L. Estébanez
Berkeley, the notorious college town and bastion of radical activism, is often overshadowed by scenic, world-famous San Francisco and increasingly hip, post-industrial Oakland. Considering this, it makes sense that Berkeley's Zaentz Media Center sometimes flies under the radar compared to Francis Ford Coppola’s American Zoetrope, in San Francisco, or George Lucas’s Lucasfilm, in Marin County.
Its bone-white walls and glass windows give it the look of “a seventies insurance company,” one employee joked to me, but the complex is home to a host of premier cinema institutions and filmmakers: the Saul Zaentz Company, Fantasy Studios, Berkeley Sound Artists, the Berkeley Digital Film Institute (BDFI), several media companies and a community of documentarians.
It was the brainchild of Saul Zaentz, a producer of first jazz, then rock and finally film, including three Academy Award winners: "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," 1975, "Amadeus," 1984, and "The English Patient," 1996. But when you walk in, there’s little indication of the hundreds of stellar artists, producers, engineers and sound designers who have strode its hallowed halls.
Like Lucas or Coppola, producer Saul Zaentz possessed some essentially “Northern Californian” qualities as a producer, a certain unconventional, “lone wolf” sensibility. Maybe it’s because Hollywood North is spread across the Bay Area, which is bigger than Los Angeles, or because its filmmakers are competing for scarcer resources, but you don’t see any local corollary to brunch at the Château Marmont, the famed Hollywood hotel and eatery.
One also doesn’t see producers becoming mentors to great numbers of future filmmakers. Unless you count Coppola giving everyone in his extended family a shot at the brass ring, there’s nothing in Bay Area film culture like Roger Corman, who took in talent as disparate as Martin Scorsese, James Cameron and Ron Howard as well as Coppola himself and taught—or allowed—them to become adept filmmakers.
What one is more likely to see, however, are studios with robust production and post-production facilities, due as much to our region’s role as a center of technological innovation as to the self-reliance on which Northern California’s studios insist. That's true at Lucas' Skywalker studios and it is true at Fantasy. Chalk it up to that Northern California “lone-wolf” quality.
When Wareham Properties purchased the Fantasy building three years ago, they were assailed as carpetbaggers and worse but they put in a nice garden and some other amenities and even enabled some of the old documentarians to stay on. photo: L. Estébanez
Saul Zaentz and his partners purchased the current property in 1969 to house Fantasy Studios, which saw massive success in the late sixties with Creedence Clearwater Revival. With his uncanny acumen for recognizing talent, Zaentz gave artists a great deal of autonomy. Although that came back to bite him when he got embroiled in a long dispute with Creedence leader John Fogerty, the ethos paid off in 1975 when the Miloš Forman-directed and Zaentz-produced “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” won eight Academy Awards, infusing Zaentz’s enterprises with a great deal of cash and prestige. The success of “Cuckoo’s Nest” also marked the beginning of Fantasy Records’s shift towards film work.
Zaentz’s shrewd eye for intellectual property went on to net him the rights to J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Hobbit” and “The Lord of the Rings” in 1976. Under the name Tolkien Enterprises, his stake in the franchises took decades to pay off (1978’s animated “Lord of the Rings” notwithstanding), but pay off they did and handsomely. Zaentz’s stake in the “Rings” took decades to fructify but today that’s a $3 billion-plus franchise. By the time “The Hobbit” is done next year, it will be a $5 billion franchise. "If Saul had done nothing else,” notes a filmmaker who worked with him, “he’d still be a one-man billion dollar franchise,” not unlike Lucas to the north.
Zaentz assiduously built up his personal empire, expanding his recording facilities for the film “Amadeus.” Suddenly in 1984, after “Amadeus” won eight Academy Awards and was a big commercial hit, Zaentz found that he “had this facility that was built for the mixing and editing of ‘Amadeus’ that was basically doing nothing,” explains Patrick Kriwanek, dean of the BDFI. “Saul only made a movie once every three years, and he had all this staff, so they switched gears and started offering it to other filmmakers.”
Hence Berkeley’s feature film boom. Directors like David Lynch, Frank Oz and Philip Kaufman came for Zaentz's premier post-production facilities and stayed for years. But feature filmmakers are a flightly bunch, dependent on big dollars as well as hot talent and tech. After the feature golden age of the 80s and early 90s, the story of Berkeley film reverted to documentaries.
Patrick Kriwanek, head of the Berkeley Digital Film Institute, cracks wise while working the school's monster board. photo: L. Estébanez
“Berkeley probably has the highest concentration of documentary filmmakers in the world,” Kriwanek told me. "This is Mecca for documentary filmmaking, the real story in Berkeley is the documentary film community."
There has always been a robust doc tradition due to Berkeley's history as a center for social justice, the Free Speech Movement of the 1960s and the presence of the journalism school at UC Berkeley, “probably the best school for documentary in the country,” according to Kriwanek. This is due to Jon Else, who currently heads the department and is a kind of godfather of documentary journalism. In fact, nine of the last 13 winners of the Student Academy Awards for Documentary hail from Berkeley or Stanford’s documentary programs. At the same time, the movie-going public has voted with their wallets to make documentaries a lot more viable and the 2000s have been called the doc decade.
Though documentaries are more profitable now, Jeffrey Wood, current Studio Director for Fantasy explained to me, “Saul has been supportive of giving documentary makers spaces since the early days, Les Blank on." The creator of the famed "Burden of Dreams" about Werner Herzog shooting in the Amazon, as well as dozens of other docs, Blank now keeps his a studio upstairs from an old-timey music store in El Cerrito, a little north of Berkeley. Rick Goldsmith, co-director of the "The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers" (2009), another nationally famous documentarian, still has an office in the Zaentz Center.
A quintessentially Berkeley documentary, “The Most Dangerous Man" has at its core a radical political message; it venerates an anti-war icon and it resonates loudly with contemporary issues: Wikileaks, Afghanistan, the surveillance state. Though the film was not a blockbuster, it’s doing well on DVD, attesting to the new possibilities for documentaries. "There is a considerable amount of money for documentaries, the new trend is HBO/Showtime,” Kriwanek notes.
Market forces, then, have finally put Berkeley’s passion for docs in the black. The local documentary community possesses “a considerable amount of knowledge about how to get money for documentaries,” Kriwanek explains, and “there are a considerable number of people today willing to listen to a documentary proposal, because it CAN be a blockbuster.” There is now more money for documentaries than ever before, and a tremendous amount of these artists are based in Berkeley.
Rick Goldsmith, co-director of the "The Most Dangerous Man in America" that played theaters in 2010, was one of the docmakers who decided to remain at the Saul Zaentz Canter, despite the new management and raise in rent. photo: D. Blair
Filmmakers are also discovering viability of web-based episodic series. Web-based serials (think the Lonely Island gang of viral video fame) lack the sky-high production values of high-TV, but studios recognize that web shows that tell a story effectively are worth producing. “There are many instances in LA now of people with web-based series getting greenlit for a pilot in under thirty minutes in the first meeting,” according to Kriwanek.
The business is that instantaneous because the web enables a storyteller to prove that they have the goods before they ever meet with an executive. “This is what happened with [Comedy Central’s]‘Workaholics.’ They had traction on the web, they had metrics, they had numbers. They got their meeting, and they were given 50 grand for a pilot in under thirty minutes.”
Though the BDFI’s 16-month program remains focused on producing and directing low-budget features, Patrick Kriwanek has aimed his students towards increasingly viable storytelling modes like web based serials and high-level television like “Mad Men” or “Breaking Bad.” Teachers at the institute are typically under 40, largely to be generationally resonant and have a greater understanding of new filmmaking trends.
A typical of BDFI instructor is Mitch Altieri, half of the horror-directing duo the Butcher Brothers ("The Hamiltons," 2006). The institute recruits filmmakers who are usually graduates of the American Film Institute and who have been to festivals like Sundance multiple times. Class size is about a dozen students per year, to increase student interaction with instructors. Kriwanek proudly notes that BDFI was the first film school to talk to the RED Digital Camera company about incorporating that camera into a film school curriculum.
The institute bills their program as one for aspiring directors and producers who wish to work in the industry as soon as possible—“51% art and 49% business.” “There are very few tracks for teaching producing in the US. We feel that it’s urgent that our directors have people who are producing for them who have the exact same education, so our producers are in the same classroom, so they are each feeling each other’s pain,” Kriwanek told me.
The BDFI’s model reflects the Northern California way of getting films to final. “The film business is an independent contractor business, you need to create your own work. We’re not LA, it’s a much more entrepreneurial mindset in Northern California.” This affinity for this filmmaking worldview has means that the BDFI shares the ethos of Saul Zaentz and his studio. “The reality of our business is that you have to mutate, and that’s why I think Northern California filmmakers have stayed alive for so long—they’re more willing to embrace change.”
Fantasy Studios, formerly Fantasy Records, has undergone a great deal of change in its history, and has had to mutate in order to survive in the last decade. The studios at Fantasy “were originally built to service the labels,” Studio Director Jeffrey Wood explains. “As [Zaentz] started getting more into filmmaking, the studios started to shift their usage, getting more into doing film work.” The studio opened in 1982 to outside projects, and “the film center started taking on film projects, and the studios were mining music projects, but it was all crossing over, and it started to become a very active factory.”
Any production center outside of New York or LA will likely be hobbled to some degree by “secondary market syndrome,” the inclination to complete post-production work in either of the primary markets. The advent of the sound production and engineering software that was cheap and relatively easy to use by non-professionals—the “Pro Tools Revolution”—was additionally detrimental to many traditional studios, of which Fantasy was no exception. “Virtually every musician in the country thought, ‘I don’t need a big studio anymore,’” summarizes Kriwanek, “That wasn’t true, but it took people a while to figure that out.”
In 2004, Zaentz and his associates divested from Fantasy, selling it to Concord Media Group. At a time when Fantasy needed to adapt and grow more robust to stay competitive, the new owners allowed Fantasy to remain underdeveloped, operating at roughly half capacity at any given time. Fantasy was in decline for several years, until a coalition was assembled to purchase the studio and rejuvenate its equipment.
Four years ago, under the aegis of Wareham Development, the coalition purchased Fantasy Studios and made Wood Studio Director. The new management and direction were both committed to reinvigorating Fantasy by returning its big-studio value—the acoustics and engineering that are impossible to replicate outside of a big studio.
Wareham Development, the bankroller chiefly behind the resurrection of Fantasy, also invests in Berkeley’s film community by almost-singlehandedly sponsoring the Berkeley Film Foundation. The Foundation is in its third year of dispersing grants to local filmmakers and supporting local talent. As far as affinities go, it also didn’t hurt Fantasy Studios that Wareham Development head Rich Robbins is a diehard CCR fan (despite the bitter Zaentz-Fogerty dustup).
There was some concern that Fantasy’s sale to Wareham Development would cause corporate takeover friction. It was Saul Zaentz’s hands-off management style and the autonomy he gave his directors, not only his aesthetic instincts, that many have credited for his success. “People felt when the building was taken over by Wareham that would change, but eighty-five percent of the filmmakers stayed in the building and they kept the community going,” Wood told me.
Everyone I talked to about Fantasy was quick to heap praise on Wood’s direction of the studio. Wood was just as quick to attribute any success to Fantasy’s amenities and his coworkers, telling me that “It’s the rooms and the staff that are the assets, whether you’re doing film or music work.” Wood evinces a staunch belief in the quality of Fantasy’s staff and equipment, which is evident in conversation. “Why isn’t there an active record label on an international level happening out of here?” he asked me rhetorically during our interview. I don't know but the opportunity is begging.
Meanwhile, Wood himself has treated Fantasy Studios like a world-class recording studio, and others have taken notice. “It’s having an environment that nurtures and gives credibility to those outside the Bay Area. You have to think internationally.”
Wood’s faith in the quality of work that happens at Fantasy speaks to the legacy in the Zaentz center. Wood praises the center, saying “it’s always been a hub in the Bay Area because people can get everything done within the building. What I love about the creative community is that you can walk down a hall, knock on a door, and share information.” Though the center is a product of Northern California’s lone wolf film culture, it’s attracted enough talented and likeminded people that there is something of a community in the building and it is growing stronger by the day.
And what could be more Berkeley than that? Saul Zaentz, ever the egalitarian, has even helped out by appearing in two BDFI student films. “One of them he kind of took over,” Kriwanek recounts, “he was supposed to only do one take, and he only had time for one. So he did the take, and said ‘let me see the playback.’ Next thing you know, he’s doing six takes and talking to everyone on the crew.”
Lest anyone forget, that’s the NorCal filmmaking spirit. Posted on Jun 30, 2011 - 11:30 PM