Owner of Brattle Theatre Applauds Sophistication of Harvard Audiences

"Harvard Square audiences are the most sophisticated in the United States," said Cyrus Harvey, owner of the Brattle and Harvard Square Theatres, at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education last night.

Harvey, who also pioneered the distribution of Bergman and Antonioni films in the United States, and who produces English horror movies, arrived at his judgment by watching and listening to the people in his theaters.

"The Harvard audiences really react," he said. "They stamp their feet, boo, whistle, and write letters. Their reaction to a Walt Disney film, for example, would be entirely different from most of the nation.

In trying to satisfy his sophisticated clientele, Harvey says he has run up against the tyrannical and ignorant distribution practices of the large companies. The Brattle Theater publishes a list of over a hundred desired films which cannot be shown, including most Garbo, Chaplin, and the Marx Brothers, and Bogart's African Queen.

These classics are often locked away, Harvey said, because the large companies are uninterested in their relatively limited appeal. "If a big executive can make a thousand dollars by lifting one finger, he doesn't want to lift two," be explained.

Despite his description of the movie industry as a chaotic battle of competing inter cuts surrounded by antiquated laws, arbitrary labor unions, and general corruption, Harvey is clearly a happy showman.

As he once said to Ingmar Bergman, in persuading him to change the title of The Face to The Magician, "you may think of yourself as an intellectual, but you're primarily a showman, Your goal is to people into the theatres to see movies."