Featured Player: Marin Karmitz
Producer finds gold underneath the surface
WHO: French producer/distrib/exhib cum neighborhood gentrifier
WHAT: Set to open 14-theater multiplex in an unfashionable section of southeast Paris
WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING: Start buying real estate in Paris' 13th district -- everything Karmitz touches turns to gold.
PARIS -- People thought Marin Karmitz had lost it in 1974 when he opened his first MK2 multiplex in a predominantly working-class Paris neighborhood and began showing foreign films in their original language.
At the time, there were only two big movie theaters in the French capital that showed subtitled films -- one on the tony Champs Elysees and the other in the literary Latin Quarter.
But Karmitz, who got into the exhibition business because he couldn't find the films he loved on Paris screens, is a man with a mission: to raise the cultural level of the masses and make money -- lots of money -- at the same time.
"People can change, they are not condemned to idiocy and baseness," Karmitz tells Variety. "You don't have to create insulting products to make money. You can make money doing intelligent things."
Almost 30 years later, the Bastille, the Paris neighborhood where he first 'plexed his muscles, is one of the city's trendiest areas, and Karmitz's nine multiplexes welcome 3.5 million moviegoers annually, making MK2 among the three most profitable theater chains in France.
In 1996, Karmitz again defied odds when he opened a complex in a run-down section of town notorious for its street crime and drug traffic. Over the years, all 20 of the neighborhood's movie theaters had shuttered.
These days, the Quai de Seine multiplex, which also houses a bar and restaurant, welcomes more than 500,000 moviegoers a year. Karmitz recently bought property across the street and will double its six-screen capacity by year's end. Area real estate prices have soared; a local developer even put a photo of the MK2 multiplex on the cover of its brochure as a draw.
Across the river, in the multi-ethnic 13th district, MK2's 14-theater Tolbiac multiplex will open this year.
All MK2 multiplexes, regardless of their clientele, show at least 80% of their films in the original language.
"Education is not done by creating a rupture," Karmitz explains. "Little by little, we get our clientele used to subtitled films."
Karmitz, who abhors political correctness both on- and offscreen, always speaks his mind, whether he is criticizing American cinema for its "spectacular and gratuitous violence" or describing political and philosophical battles.
His eloquent and slightly intimidating discourse has caused his detractors to label him an "intellectual terrorist."
Since MK2's creation in 1971, Karmitz has produced more than 60 films (many of them Cannes prize-winners) and distributed more than 200. He is most proud of his long-term relationships with directors such as Claude Chabrol, Ken Loach, the Taviani brothers, Jacques Doillon, Abbas Kiarostami and Krzysztof Kieslowski, with whom he did "Red," "White" and "Blue," and whose death in 1995 sent Karmitz into a depression.
But Karmitz's mood gradually improved thanks to a little help from his friends. "I was able to get out of mourning for Kieslowski thanks to Kiarostami," Karmitz states. Kiarostami and Karmitz are presently collaborating on their third film as a team.
The peripatetic Karmitz has projects shooting around the globe, from Brooklyn to Bangladesh. He recently wrapped Raphael Nadjari's "Apartment #5C," about two young Israelis living illegally in New York City.
Nadjari, who just received his green card, had been living in the U.S. on a tourist visa for 10 years when Karmitz picked up his second film "I Am Josh Polonski's Brother" for distribution.
Karmitz is also involved in the first French/Bangladesh co-production, Tareque Masud's "L'Oiseau de Terre," and will produce Claude Chabrol's next picture, the 11th they have done together.
Karmitz recently returned from the desert location of Amos Gitai's "Kedma Vers l'Orient," a film about a group of concentration camp escapees who arrive in Palestine eight days before the creation of the state of Israel.
