San Francisco International Film Festival 2011 (year 54)

[Chris Knipp]

Bingham Ray (1954 - 2012)
SFFS New Director Suddenly Dies


BINGHAM RAY [from IMDb]

Sad story. Three months after the death of Graham Leggett of cancer at 51, on November 7, 2011, the 57-year-old "colorful indie film executive" Bingham Ray was appointed executive director of the San Francisco Film Society to replace him. Now, before I'd even gotten around to reporting on Bingham Ray, he has died while attending the Sundance Film Festival. He had served little longer than two months as new SFFS director. The cause was a series of strokes.

He had described the SFFS directorshop as a job "too good to be true," and citing Graham Leggat's great success during his six-year leadership in revitalizing the San Francisco Film Society, Ray had said that you don't fix something that is not broken, and he would seek to follow the good path Leggat had set.

As a New York Times obit by Brooks Barnes describes him, Ray was "volatile and blunt" and "championed stylized, intellectually challenging films, buying distribution rights to movies that few believed had a box-office prayer." Barnes quotes Eamonn Bowles, president of Magnolia Pictures: "The words 'fearless' and 'brave' are tossed around a lot in our world, but that’s the only way to describe Bingham."

Ray spent his life dedicated to film. After growing up in Scarsdale, New York, Ray worked in his younger days as a projectionist at the now defunct Bleeker Street Theater in Grenwich Village, then gained regular employment at the NYC office of MGM in the Eighties. He subsequently worked at five other distribution companies, including New Yorker Films and Avenue Pictures, where he oversaw the release of Gus Van Sant’s Drugstore Cowboy in 1989. In 1991 with Jeff Lipsky in LA Ray co-founded October Films, which after several mergers in 2002 became the immportant art house distributer Focus Features. Ray was an indie mover and shaker who was active during the glory days of Sundance, so that his being stricken there has a certain special tragic significance, and has caused widespread shock at the festival.

Ty Burr of the Boston Globe in a Sundance blog wrote of Ray, "I imagine there will be many, many glasses raised on Park City's Main Street tonight. He'll be missed, and I don't say that sentimentally. Ray was attending the Art House Convergence Conference when he was stricken, advising theater owners on how to bring the movies he loved to the audiences who might best appreciate them. In other words, he was in his prime and still making a difference. He will be missed."

Through October and Focus Films Ray was partly responsible for the release of such films as The War Room, Secrets and Lies, Breaking the Waves, High Art, The Apostle, Cookie's Fortune, The Celebration, and Lost Highway and an early Iranian export success, Panahi's The White Balloon. He went on to run United Artists, during which time he was involved in the release of Bowling for Columbine and Hotel Rwanda.

Recently Ray had been a programming consultant to the Film Society of Lincoln Center, IFC Films and Snag Films, which focuses on documentaries, and an adjunct professor at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.

Further coverage on MUBI./, my source as well as the Times piece and one by Karina Longworth in the Village Voice.