Black Gold was doomed from the start in LA. Sure, it’s a damn good and important film. Sure, it got an excellent review in the LA Times. But after a week, the film got thrown out of a shitty, super unpopular theater in downtown LA.

Seriously — When’s the last time you went out to watch a movie at Laemmle Grande?

It’s a theater that plays weeks-old movies and, in the case of Black Gold, the occasional documentary. 3rd and Figueroa’s pretty much a ghost town after 6, when all the working stiffs flee to suburban homes. It is not, in short, a place where most people who might be interested in Black Gold hang out.

This theater actually threw away the activist Oxfam stuff that I was supposed to pick up and mail back to Oxfam. Cuz despite the horrid location and the assured low turnout, coffee activists signed up to show up and table at various showings, wear Oxfam T-shirts, and ask moviegoers to sign on the Make Trade Fair campaign.

My job, as requested of me by Oxfam, was to send the signatures back to Oxfam after the movie run. Which is why I had this convo with the manager of Laemmle Grande yesterday:

Him: We threw it away.
Me: What?
Him: Yeah.
Me: Are you the manager?
Him: Yeah.

This lil convo cost me two hours in traffic and $10 in parking ($2.25 per 15 mins), cuz I first stopped by at 3 pm — at which point the theater still wasn’t open. Yes, that’s how shitty this theater is. So I went to USC, taught a class, and came back at 6:30 — to get this happy news.

If this was the sole snafu that the LA effort at Black Gold had hit, I’d shrug it off. But the probs started long before that. Oxfam was unprepared for the training conference call for the people who’d signed up to volunteer at the Black Gold showings — So unprepared that a volunteer had to log on to the Laemmle’s website during the call to get the movie times so we could at least assign people to time slots.

Then, the box of materials from Oxfam wasn’t there on Friday, when Black Gold opened, so the confused volunteers — some who fought rush hour traffic from Orange County for 2 hours to make it to the theater by 7 pm — couldn’t do shit.

Finally, a Saturday volunteer let me know about the problem (the Friday volunteers emailed me after I heard from the Saturday volunteer — I guess they were too pissed off to deal with the issue immediately). At which point I sent a pissed-off email to Oxfam.

But apparantly, Oxfam had sent the package. The problem: There wasn’t adequate followup. So the package languished somewhere upstairs, then was brought down on Sunday. Then it got thrown away.

While I get that this theater’s plagued with undermotivated employees, I’m sure this problem could’ve been avoided if a local person — say, me — made an effort to talk to and collaborate with the manager of this theater. But Oxfam had told us they’re handling it, and that all they needed was for volunteers to show up to collect signatures at the showings, and for me to send the signatures back to them afterwards.

I know that Oxfam is not responsible for all that went wrong here. But I do have questions, which are twofold:

1. Why didn’t Oxfam ask for more local help, despite the fact that local activists offered it, and

2. Why did California Newsreel, the US distributors of Black Gold, screen the film in such an unpopular theater?

The answers hardly matter now, as Black Gold’s no longer even screening in the LA area. And as I know nothing about the difficulties of getting docus into theaters, perhaps California Newsreel knew about the issues with this theater but went with it anyway. Perhaps this was the best option that Black Gold had in LA.

If the film had actually played at a theater where interested folks could go see it (i.e. the theaters where An Inconvenient Truth had played), and if informational materials had been avaliable for those motivated after the screening, we might’ve actually created a serious fair trade coffee movement in LA.

As it is, the movie played almost exclusively to the already converted who made near-superhuman efforts to get to the shitty theater. And now, even the signatures of the friends who were dragged to the theaters by the converted are comfortably rotting in a landfill somewhere.

Tags: blackgold, film, fairtrade, activism, coffee, ethiopia, losangeles

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