Bruce Goldstein is Director of Repertory Programming at New York City's Film Forum and is founder/co-president of Rialto Pictures, a classic and foreign film distributor.
Bruce Goldstein was born on July 5, 1952, in Amityville, New York. He is the son of Murray Goldstein, a commercial artist for Columbia Pictures, and Elizabeth 'Betty' ( née Horowitz), who worked for the Screen Publicists' Guild. He grew up in Hicksville, New York on Long Island graduating from Hicksville High School. His passion for film developed as a youth watching movies over and over again on the
Million Dollar Movie (1955) on WOR TV9. As a teenager, he would venture into NYC on Saturdays to visit movie revival houses, the Thalia and the New Yorker, furthering his appreciation for classic and foreign films. He attended college at Boston University but left to run a movie theater in Provincetown, Massachusetts.
Goldstein spent his twenties and early thirties, managing, programming and publicizing at several New York revival houses: Bleecker Street Cinema, Carnegie Hall Cinema, the New Yorker, and the Thalia among others. In the middle of this period, he spent 2 years abroad in London working as a publicity manager for a fashion company and later started his own PR firm, Falco & Goldstein when he returned to New York. He gained a reputation as an excellent publicist with flair for promotions, like a
Fay Wray scream-alike contest complete with a man in a monkey suit for the 50th anniversary screenings of
King Kong (1933).
Goldstein continued to make his mark in movie exhibitionism when he began a 30 year career at NYC's Film Forum handling publicity in 1986 and launched a revival screen there soon after. His first film series at the Film Forum was Bigger than Life: Movies in Scope in early 1987, a retrospective of the CinemaScope films of the '50s and '60s. He has programmed over 400 film festivals at the Film Forum covering a wide range of genres, themes, formats and artists, which are often mimicked worldwide. His management of the Film Forum's second screen established it as the leading venue for classic and foreign films, premiering virtually every major film restoration of the past twenty years.
Goldstein has made important contributions to film preservation. He participated in the restoration, reissue, and creation of new 35mm prints for over a thousand domestic and foreign film titles. As a film archivist, he has researched, located rare and lost prints, found and restored missing footage, recreated lost soundtracks, exhibited films and returned them to relevance. In 1997, he founded and remains co-president of Rialto Pictures, a film distributor specializing in classic domestic and foreign films. Rialto's past and present imports represents a who's who of world cinema, including many current and former IMDB Top 250 movies. He has been on the National Film Preservation Board, which selects films for preservation by the Library of Congress since 2010.
Goldstein has distinguished himself as a film historian. His film festivals generated support for the establishment of letterbox as the preferred format of films on video. They have sparked interest in the pre-code films of the '30s before the enforcement of the Hays Code. He has been recognized for his voluminous press kits, legendary quarterly repertory calendars, and use of original promotional material to create the ultimate film revival experience. He has produced and consulted on documentaries featuring some of the greatest performers in film history.
Goldstein has been called a "cine-showman extraordinaire'. He has produced live orchestra shows to accompany screenings of notable films from the 1920s at the Film Forum as well across the country. He revived the gimmickry of legendary film promoter
William Castle, complete with shocking seats and flying skeletons at the Film Forum and for venues around the globe. He produced film fan events annually for 'Turner Classic Movies (TCM)' film festivals and cruises.
