Inside Move: No re-'Birth'
Silent pic makes noise with screening plans
As the owner of Hollywood's Silent Movie Theater, Lustman's efforts last week to screen a rare print of D.W. Griffith's "The Birth of a Nation" yielded torrents of anonymous death threats against him and his employees.
As a result, he pulled the pic and has no future plans to unspool it.
The rarely screened, infamously racist 1915 artifact -- originally titled "The Clansman" -- had attracted sell-out crowds, as well as numerous civil rights protesters. One group, the ironically monikered Los Angeles Coalition for Peoples' Democracy, even seemed to call for the assassination of Lustman, with a flyer demanding that "the owner of the theater & all connected need to be targeted -- Death to White Supremacy!"
"It's off the Richter scale," says Lustman, who had planned to bring in a panel of experts -- including film preservationist David Shepard -- to discuss the film.
"Protest is what this country was founded on," Lustman says. "(But) I canceled before they got here because I got a barrage of threats."
It's not the first time an attempt at unspooling "Birth" generated outrage. Lustman tried to screen the film during the 2000 Democratic National Convention, but stood down after NAACP Los Angeles topper Geraldine Washington warned that screening the pic might spark hate crimes.
Lustman is now focused on the next film in his rare pic series, the 1920 Jewish mystical thriller "The Golem."
But he's not out of the politically charged woods yet. Pic depicts aclay statue first brought to life to save the Jews from brutal persecution that ultimately embarks on a murder spree.
Says Lustman, "I hope I get to see this one -- I hear it's really good."
