The Prague Post
March 17th, 2010
Endowment Fund     Business Listings ONLINE      Reservations      Classifieds    star Gift Subscriptions
Hotel Prague Centre

Home » Archives » Tempo

Meet the unsung local film hero

John Caulkins has become one of the most important voices on ilm in Prague

By Steffen Silvis
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
October 10th, 2007 issue

KURT VINION/THE PRAGUE POST
In focus. An expat's expat, John Caulkins is helping make a kino-mad city even more film-literate with MOFFOM and Aerofilms.
Stills from this year's MOFFOM lineup: The Samba Poet
The Red Elvis
COURTESY PHOTO
Theremin: An Electronic Odyssey
The history of the expatriate experience in the Czech Republic could be succinctly expressed through John Caulkins’ biography.
As a young, recent graduate of Vassar, he presciently arrived in Prague three months after the Velvet Revolution, in that brief intermission between Soviet reality and Parisian Left Bank fantasy, when discarded miniature busts of Gustáv Husák hadn’t quite yet been replaced with Franz Kafka coffee mugs.
Since that fabled Year Zero, the 41-year-old, Denver, Colorado, native has quietly built up a personal story of success. After working in various nonprofit organizations, Caulkins helped establish a popular expat bar, became a writer and publisher of an important, if short-lived, alternative weekly, founded a film and music festival, and became a partner in a new film distribution company.
With irons in so many fires, and with his Music on Film, Film on Music Festival (MOFFOM) opening next week, Caulkins is the picture of Zen-like calmness over coffee at Lucerna. Indeed, he never glances at his mobile phone once during our hour-long conversation — an unheard-of civility, and a possible clue to Caulkins’ achievements: He’s a person who knows how to concentrate.
The founding of Duende in 2000 was the first chance that Caulkins had to fully hone his business acumen. Seven years later, the “elegant dive bar,” as Caulkins calls it, is still an expat port of call on Karolíny Světlé street.
“We’ve even had musicians from famous bands stop by,” Caulkins tells me. “Manu Chao, the Pixies and Pearl Jam.”
“My Duende partners were also responsible for the legendary Borat, where Újezd Bar is now,” he says. “The common wisdom is that Sasha Baron Cohen took his character name from that bar. ‘Yagsemash’ can only be mangled Czech.”
For every wandering, entrepreneurial American who dreams of opening a bar abroad — where bartenders will be properly schooled in the chemistry differentiating a John Collins from a boilermaker — 20 more exiles follow in his wake with visions of writing at his bar.
For them, Caulkins became a bit of a saint. Not only did he provide struggling writers barstools, he gave them opportunities to be published in a newspaper.
The Prague Pill is an important component to the history of English-language newspaper publishing in Prague. Founded by Caulkins in 2001, the Pill had the look and feel of an American alternative weekly, complete with Tom Tomorrow cover art, I-Found-It junkshop photos, Max Cannon’s Red Meat comic strip, and the indispensable Savage Love sex column.
The Pill was a labor of love, according to Caulkins, and a good gauge of what the city was like at the beginning of the decade.
“There was a really gonzo city paper in Moscow called The Exile that was our model. Moscow is a much more gonzo city than Prague I think, and our paper was probably doomed from the start. But we had a good run. It was scrappy and at times mean-spirited — especially in taking potshots at The Prague Post,” Caulkins says, laughing.
It’s worth hunting down stray issues to read about the Prague of recent history. The writers ran the gamut from the very good (Alexander Zaitchik and William Hollister) to a few who chose to perfect their pose over their prose, hijacking some of the columns for some frat-house self-promotion.
But, for time capsules, old numbers of the Pill still seem timely, and, at its best, the paper still packs energy and urgency.
As the Pill went down, MOFFOM rose into being, and continues to be one of the more interesting film festivals in Prague. It also gave Caulkins a chance to marry his passion for music and film together.
“I belong to the first MTV generation,” Caulkins says, “though the primary focus of our festival is music documentaries, I do think that music videos are art. There are at least a dozen other music film festivals around the world with a similar focus, and we have already established relationships to help create a wider interest in ‘music film.’ ”
Running this year Oct. 18–22, MOFFOM will have as its primary focus the music coming out of Russia, including a Michael Apted documentary from 1989 about one of the then Soviet Union’s great rock stars, Boris Grebenshchikov.
The five-day festival also features live performances, including an annual live accompaniment to a classic silent film. Last year saw the Canadian hip-hop and klezmer artist Socalled brilliantly soundscaping Wegener’s Expressionist masterpiece, Der Golem.
The live gig to seek out this year will be Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglová, the stars of the surprising indie sleeper, Once. The film will have its premiere at MOFFOM, and its stars will perform a concert at Lucerna.
Coming to a cinema near you
In constructing the yearly MOFFOM, Caulkins became acutely aware of how complicated film distribution could be. Far too often, interesting films would lack proper backing to get them placed in cinemas or even one-off festivals without some struggle. Seeing both the unfairness and the opportunity that the situation presented, Caulkins partnered with a group of Czechs to create a new film distribution company, Aerofilms.
“I’ve been invested in many start-up businesses over the years,” Caulkins says, “many of them my own brainchildren. This is a situation where my partners were already so well-positioned in the market — as owners of the best art-house cinemas in Prague, Aero and Světozor — that I could just trust their judgment to invest in order to buy a first batch of films for distribution without any other input.”
Nearing its second anniversary, Aerofilms has had a definite impact on cinema scheduling in Prague even outside of the Aero and Světozor network, with many of the company’s films finding multiplex screenings.
So far, the company has been responsible for bringing in Super Size Me, Shortbus, the unfairly overlooked Red Road and the Hungarian grande bouffe Taxidermia. It’s the first company to present a lot of documentaries, especially ones on artists and architects like Frank Gehry, Louis Kahn and soon, Annie Leibovitz.
“It helps that I have been working in ‘indie culture’ in Prague for a long time and have an inkling of what local and expat audiences like,” Caulkins says. “Though not all of our films have been hits, we have done well.”
The Aerofilms selection has so far been impressive, and Caulkins and his partners, Ivo Andrle and Petr Jirásek, have become serious scouts for films that might get lost in the high-stakes, multiplex shuffle. “We shop first at big festival markets like Berlin and Cannes to find the festival favorites that are below the radar,” he says.  “Our first really big film was Super Size Me, which everyone here knew about in advance as ‘the McDonald’s Movie.’ The Croatian-Bosnian film Grbavica and Shortbus both did well.”
There have also been some intriguing publicity stunts.
“For the Taxidermia premier, we had all these weird stuffed animals on stage that someone found at some hunting lodge,” Caulkins says.
Aerofilms has also decided to create in-house film posters, giving work to some talented graphic artists, with the posters for Shortbus and Taxidermia becoming something close to collectors’ items.
The company’s latest release didn’t need stunts or startling graphics to attract attention, however. In what is obviously Aerofilms’ first coup, the young company got the distribution rights to Guillermo del Toro’s critically acclaimed Pan’s Labyrinth, which has quickly assumed scheduled spots in both Village and Palace multiplex cinemas. Still, it remains a daily struggle for screen space when you’re up against giants like Warner Brothers, Bonton and Falcon.
“In the Czech Republic, the major companies completely dominate the market and the small companies pick up the crumbs,” Caulkins complains. “However, we do have one organization that is on our side: the Association of Czech Film Clubs. They really do an astonishing job of getting art-house films into the hinterlands.”
Still, the future looks promising for Aerofilms. The company is already in discussions about simulcast screenings, which have quickly become a new cultural fad in U.S. cinemas.
As for Caulkins’ own work, as he’s a man who has everything under masterly control, he’s planning another festival, this one dedicated to the Coen Brothers’ greatest cult film.
“I just returned from Edinburgh after checking out the first Lebowski Fest,” he exclaims. “I’m hoping to bring it to Prague … soon.”
Some expats come to see how much they can get from the Czech Republic. Others, like John Caulkins, try to see how much they can give back.

Steffen Silvis can be reached at ssilvis@praguepost.com


Other articles in Tempo (10/10/2007):

Browse the Current Issue

If you enjoyed this article, why don't you subscribe to the print version!
We accept secure online transactions provided by PayPal and Moneybookers

Be the first to add a comment!


Full Name: *
City: *
E-mail: **
This comment can be published in the print version of The Prague Post
Enter the text on the right:
 visual captcha
Comment: *
* Required field. In order to be approved for display, comments must have a first and last name and a city.
** E-mails are required and will only be used for internal purposes.

Most visited in Business Listings

Hotel booking
The Prague Post Online contains a selection of articles that have been printed in
The Prague Post, a weekly newspaper published in the Czech Republic.
To subscribe to the print paper, click here.
Unauthorized reproduction is strictly prohibited.