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Cliff Froehlich returns to Cinema St. Louis ... this time for real
By Tom WeberPhotograph by Ashley Heifner
For most filmgoers, seeing 10 different movies at the Tivoli during the 10-day St. Louis International Film Festival is a treat. For Cliff Froehlich, that was college.
Froehlich estimates that the Tivoli’s regular double bills helped him see 200 to 300 movies a year while he attended Saint Louis University in the 1970s. His former classmates aren’t surprised that Froehlich has become the go-to guy for the region’s annual film showcase.
“Few others have such a ridiculous, absurd interest in film,” says Froehlich, who wrote his first movie review (of All the President’s Men) for SLU’s student newspaper and went on to write and edit film reviews and arts features for the Riverfront Times as its associate editor.
Now 50, Froehlich was named executive director of Cinema St. Louis in January after leaving the same job three years earlier to become the Post’s arts-and-entertainment editor. He says he grew frustrated with daily journalism: “The notion that people have short attention spans and need to be fed in small bits—that is not what I signed up to do.”
Froehlich took a pay cut to return to Cinema St. Louis, where Chris Clark, who took over festival duties after Froehlich’s first departure, had grown miserable—and put on 20 pounds—working two jobs. “Having him back makes a great job even better,” says Clark, who shed the weight almost immediately.
As for the festival, Froehlich hopes to make it fatter. He added Plaza Frontenac and the Saint Louis Art Museum as venues and is using his Rolodex of film contacts to score bigger names for festival programs (Roger Ebert has been invited but has not confirmed).
Froehlich also hopes that Cinema St. Louis’ new digs in the Centene Center for the Arts will mean more partnerships with other small and mid-sized arts organizations in Grand Center. “We want to offer the best regional film festival for St. Louis,” he says, noting that a shoestring budget of less than $400,000 makes this a constant challenge. “The only way to put money in the bank is to cheat the audience with a less-stellar film fest, and I don’t like that approach.”
Jay Kanzler, the organization’s board chairman, agrees: “I don’t think Cliff would leave the Post-Dispatch to be executive director of a run-of-the-mill film fest—that’s not who we are.”
TRAILER
Here’s what Froehlich and Cinema St. Louis are scheming for this year’s St. Louis International Film Festival:• The Hi-Pointe Theatre, dropped as a venue last year, has been replaced with the Saint Louis Art Museum. Froehlich hopes that the partnership will be the first of many: “Film is an art form in which the art museum doesn’t have a huge presence,” he notes. “This is a good match.”
• Plaza Frontenac returns as a site this year as part of an agreement with Landmark Theaters to keep one Tivoli screen open for regular runs. Film-fest movies will only play on two Tivoli screens this year, but Froehlich still expects the Tivoli to be the de facto festival headquarters.
• St. Louis’ favorite vacuum-cleaner collector and organist, Stan Kann, returns to accompany King Vidor’s 1928 silent comedy Show People.
• The festival brings a double bill of musical films from South Africa: U-Carmen eKhayelitsha, an adaptation of the opera Carmen, and Son of Man, a contemporary African musical take on the story of Jesus. (If his health allows, Roger Ebert, who screened U-Carmen at his own film fest in Champaign-Urbana, Ill., this year, may participate.)
• Also look for an appearance from Brent Hoff, the editor of Wholphin, a magazine in DVD format from McSweeney’s that features short films of all genres. Get a preview of what’s coming at wholphindvd.com.
CLIFF’S NOTES
• His master’s thesis at the University of Missouri–Columbia was a history of Film Comment magazine, “the New Yorker of film mags.”• Movies aren’t Froehlich’s only love. In 1986, he and his wife, lawyer Ledy VanKavage, co-founded the Metro East Humane Society, and they share 3 acres in Collinsville with about 30 feral—but fixed—cats and three dogs.
• His take on the film industry today: “Both feast and famine, simultaneously. Film was the mass cult experience—that hypnotic state you enter into in a darkened room with large numbers of people. But, because of the evolution of digital movies and the web, anybody can make a movie now—and the viewing experience is changing, the distribution system is changing, the content’s more youth-driven.”
• If he has his way ... Werner Herzog and Steven Soderbergh will be lured to future film festivals.
• His take on local audiences: “St. Louis has shown itself increasingly open to alternative film—meaning international film, American independent film and documentaries.”
