By: Meredith May, Chronicle Staff Writer
Source: http://www.sfgate.com
Category: Film School Online
It's a familiar story. An out-of-work actor with a movie star name like Bingham Ray gets by trading stocks on Wall Street during the day and waiting tables at night, hoping for his lucky break.
It never comes, so he quits, spends his days at the movies, and gets a job selecting obscure samurai films for the artsy Bleecker Street Cinema.
"I was making $140 a week," he said. "My parents were so proud."
But Ray's life would turn out to be anything but familiar. The boy who loved to watch Westerns with his dad grew up to become one of the most influential forces in independent film, helping promote, distribute and produce such movies as "Hotel Rwanda," "Bowling for Columbine," "Drugstore Cowboy," "The Kite Runner," "High Art" and "The Last Seduction."
From bartender to president of United Artists, his resume unfolds like a movie, and now, in his third act, Ray has landed in San Francisco to become executive director of the San Francisco Film Society.
"I knew instinctively that I'd be able to make a living in this business, and, in truth, what I am is a sort of vagabond explorer on a continuous adventure," said Ray, 56, who was teaching film production at New York University and had just finished overseeing the renovation of a parking garage into a two-screen theater at the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York when he accepted the San Francisco job in November.
"This truly is my dream job. To get to do what I do and live in San Francisco, that's the ideal."
After his longtime predecessor Graham Leggat died of cancer in August, Ray's name rose to the top of a list of about 30 people considered to lead the society.
"The major reason independent film had a heyday in the '90s was because Ray co-founded October Films," said society board member and producer Jen Chaiken, who led the search with fellow board member Todd Traina.
"Ray changed the type of films that were available for the American public to see," she said. "No one was bringing in films quite like that."
October Films compiled a long list of Academy Award-winning and nominated films, including "Cookie's Fortune," "Life Is Sweet," "Secrets & Lies" and "Breaking the Waves," before it was bought by USA Networks in 1999.
Traina, who also produces films, quizzed several agents he works with, and all of them recommended Ray.
"My colleagues were mostly younger, cutting-edge agents and producers who could have easily suggested some up-and-coming whippersnapper or said Bingham was too old school," he said. "But everyone felt that Bingham was current and hungry and the perfect fit."
While Ray is excited to use his industry connections to bring strong films to the society's annual San Francisco International Film Festival in April, he's also eager to help local filmmakers get their work on the screen and to invigorate the year-round San Francisco film series Leggat started and now runs at the society's newly leased theater in Japantown.
He's making the rounds meeting all the right people, sitting through "a few too many speeches," scoping out all the city's movie houses and finding new haunts, such as the Presidio Social Club, where he likes to dine among portraits of old film starlets.
With two daughters in college and a son in Oakland making a go of it sampling and mixing electronic music in his one-man band Speculator, Ray and his wife, Nancy King, were feeling that their house in New York was a little too quiet and were ready for a change, he said.
Although his career sent him around the world to film festivals to watch, promote and acquire films, he's never put a festival together.
"It's interesting to be on the other side of that," he said.
He credits his father, a civil engineer, for teaching him to love movies in elementary school.
If Ray finished his homework, he was rewarded by getting to watch movies on TV with his father in Scarsdale. His mother and sisters weren't as interested, so it became their private time together.
"He'd say, 'That's Spencer Tracy, Clark Gable, Humphrey Bogart, or this movie "The Third Man" is important because Orson Welles was in it.' He directed traffic for me."
Ray absorbed the lessons and took a film class at Scarsdale High, where he first saw postwar European classics and learned of Fellini and Truffaut.
His teacher handed him a Super 8 camera, and he made his first movie, a jailbreak caper titled "The Futile Attempt."
Ray dabbled in theater with his roommates at Simpson College in Iowa, graduated with a degree in theater arts and speech, then returned to Manhattan, where he took his bartending job at a place called the Mad Hatter so he could pay his father back for the college loans.
It was the mid-1970s, and Ray was at the epicenter of the nascent indie-film movement, when director Amos Poe created "The Blank Generation" - the first home movie of then-unknown post-punk rockers Patti Smith, Blondie, the Ramones and the Talking Heads, all shot inside CBGB.
"Music and films were merging then into this vibrant new thing, and I was in the right place at the right time," Ray said.
Source: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/12/20/DDB61MD15I.DTL
Source: http://www.sfgate.com
Category: Film School Online
It's a familiar story. An out-of-work actor with a movie star name like Bingham Ray gets by trading stocks on Wall Street during the day and waiting tables at night, hoping for his lucky break.
It never comes, so he quits, spends his days at the movies, and gets a job selecting obscure samurai films for the artsy Bleecker Street Cinema.
"I was making $140 a week," he said. "My parents were so proud."
But Ray's life would turn out to be anything but familiar. The boy who loved to watch Westerns with his dad grew up to become one of the most influential forces in independent film, helping promote, distribute and produce such movies as "Hotel Rwanda," "Bowling for Columbine," "Drugstore Cowboy," "The Kite Runner," "High Art" and "The Last Seduction."
From bartender to president of United Artists, his resume unfolds like a movie, and now, in his third act, Ray has landed in San Francisco to become executive director of the San Francisco Film Society.
"I knew instinctively that I'd be able to make a living in this business, and, in truth, what I am is a sort of vagabond explorer on a continuous adventure," said Ray, 56, who was teaching film production at New York University and had just finished overseeing the renovation of a parking garage into a two-screen theater at the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York when he accepted the San Francisco job in November.
"This truly is my dream job. To get to do what I do and live in San Francisco, that's the ideal."
After his longtime predecessor Graham Leggat died of cancer in August, Ray's name rose to the top of a list of about 30 people considered to lead the society.
"The major reason independent film had a heyday in the '90s was because Ray co-founded October Films," said society board member and producer Jen Chaiken, who led the search with fellow board member Todd Traina.
"Ray changed the type of films that were available for the American public to see," she said. "No one was bringing in films quite like that."
October Films compiled a long list of Academy Award-winning and nominated films, including "Cookie's Fortune," "Life Is Sweet," "Secrets & Lies" and "Breaking the Waves," before it was bought by USA Networks in 1999.
Traina, who also produces films, quizzed several agents he works with, and all of them recommended Ray.
"My colleagues were mostly younger, cutting-edge agents and producers who could have easily suggested some up-and-coming whippersnapper or said Bingham was too old school," he said. "But everyone felt that Bingham was current and hungry and the perfect fit."
While Ray is excited to use his industry connections to bring strong films to the society's annual San Francisco International Film Festival in April, he's also eager to help local filmmakers get their work on the screen and to invigorate the year-round San Francisco film series Leggat started and now runs at the society's newly leased theater in Japantown.
He's making the rounds meeting all the right people, sitting through "a few too many speeches," scoping out all the city's movie houses and finding new haunts, such as the Presidio Social Club, where he likes to dine among portraits of old film starlets.
With two daughters in college and a son in Oakland making a go of it sampling and mixing electronic music in his one-man band Speculator, Ray and his wife, Nancy King, were feeling that their house in New York was a little too quiet and were ready for a change, he said.
Although his career sent him around the world to film festivals to watch, promote and acquire films, he's never put a festival together.
"It's interesting to be on the other side of that," he said.
He credits his father, a civil engineer, for teaching him to love movies in elementary school.
If Ray finished his homework, he was rewarded by getting to watch movies on TV with his father in Scarsdale. His mother and sisters weren't as interested, so it became their private time together.
"He'd say, 'That's Spencer Tracy, Clark Gable, Humphrey Bogart, or this movie "The Third Man" is important because Orson Welles was in it.' He directed traffic for me."
Ray absorbed the lessons and took a film class at Scarsdale High, where he first saw postwar European classics and learned of Fellini and Truffaut.
His teacher handed him a Super 8 camera, and he made his first movie, a jailbreak caper titled "The Futile Attempt."
Ray dabbled in theater with his roommates at Simpson College in Iowa, graduated with a degree in theater arts and speech, then returned to Manhattan, where he took his bartending job at a place called the Mad Hatter so he could pay his father back for the college loans.
It was the mid-1970s, and Ray was at the epicenter of the nascent indie-film movement, when director Amos Poe created "The Blank Generation" - the first home movie of then-unknown post-punk rockers Patti Smith, Blondie, the Ramones and the Talking Heads, all shot inside CBGB.
"Music and films were merging then into this vibrant new thing, and I was in the right place at the right time," Ray said.
Source: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/12/20/DDB61MD15I.DTL
