Business screen magazine (1946)

IMRAM NOWAK Associates, a well4 known sponsored film company in New Yrk for the past ten years, has completed a f£ture film which is scheduled for a New Yrk opening at the Little Carnegie Theatre e iy this spring. vVhile the sponsored film field has supplied tl theatrical feature film industry with a nnber of producers, directors and writers itpast years, very few production companies Spcializing in sponsored films have gone into ftture films as a logical extension of their biiness. "Logical" is exactly the term Amram No\xk. head of the firm, uses in describing his n.v venture. "Up until just a few years ago," h says, "most feature film production meant K Mitchell cameras and giant Houston cines. It meant budgets well beyond the nans of the sponsored film maker. But now V are in the midst of a technological revolutn; first in the underground movies, and recitly in such films as Faces, Greetings and I'll less Summer, it has been proved that 1 v-budget but high quality films made with I rtable 16mm ctiuipment can be successful tlic box-office." \ii\\ak"s film is King, Murray, which is. hefly, about a wild weekend junket to Las ^■gas with Murray King, a real live hyper hctic super insurance salesman. (The film originated in Nowak's production Siedule following the success of several self f)nsored shorts which convinced him that eature film would not be beyond the means his facilities, which are largely devoted to h making of documentary films for such orJnizations as the National Tuberculoisis As^ciation. Public Broadcasting Laboratory, Educational Television, MetropoliU.S. State Department, Bureau of Affairs, and others. One of these orts, made two years ago, A Day with Tim ige. proved to be enormously successful. It National m Life, ational lavld Hoffman, vice president and creative direcsr of Amram Nowak Associates, who directed King, Murray." Feature Films— A Logical Extension for Industrial Producers? "Yes" says this New York producer whose feature "King, Murray" is opening at the Little Carnegie Theatre. And, the film joins a few other current features in proving that low-budget, high quality films made with portable 16mm equipment can be successful at the box office. was sold to PBL for a one-shot TV performance, won six awards at various film festivals, and brought a contract from Eastman Kodak to do a major TV commercial based on Timmy Page, a young boy-film maker of Storrs, Conn. The idea for the film originated with Nowak's partner, Dave Hoffman. Murray King, the star of the film, who is actually the firm's insurance agent, struck him as being a remarkable subject for a film. When King invited them to Las Vegas, Hoffman talked Nowak into taking the plunge and making King the subject of their first feature. Together with Jonathan Gordon, who codirected and took sound, four suitcases full of camera equipment, and their toothbrushes, they set off with King for Las Vegas. After three incredible days with only two hours sleep, and with 30,000 feet of exposed 16mm color film, the Nowak crew came back to New York and started to hack away at the materials for several weeks until they were sure there actually was the core of a feature film in Murray King's Las Vegas experiences. So, several more days of shooting were scheduled in New York and other places to flesh out the junket footage until a rough cut two-hour film was worked out. It is a long hard journey for the documentary film trying to break into the commercial theatres. The first big break in this direction that Nowak and Hoffman got was when Sheldon Gunsberg of the Walter Reade Organization, a big New York exhibition company, took a look at it and believed it might be potentially commercial. He encouraged them to go on with it. After several more months of editing, a 35mm blow-up print of a 90-minute film was made, and a major Wall Street investor, Leeam Lowin. entered the picture as co-producer with capital enough to finance completion and a New York opening in a prestige theatre. King Murray, which will probably be compared to Faces, which it follows into the Jt J^M ^^^^■^ *"iF^^| Hftll rS ^LJP^;^ ^j ^^^^H V. AMRAM NOWAK Little Carnegie, is actually much different. Faces started and finished as a completely scripted film with the emotional fireworks and the documentary appearance developing from the extraordinarily personal style of camerawork and the direction of John Cassavetes. King, Murray, while shot in a somewhat similar camera style, actually grew out of the documentation of actual happenings, and was only somewhat fictionalized when the film was well along. And, rather than in cinema verite style, in which the handheld camera is purely an observer of undirected happenings. King, Murray's cameras and film makers are an important part of the action in a totally original film form. Amram Nowak has a broad background in the cinema arts. He taught dramatics at Syra Continued on next page kPRIL, 1969 85