Poets, said Shelley, with his heart habitually full of hope and foolishness, are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
Maybe so, maybe not. But whoever the unacknowledged legislators of the world might be, Ike Ehrlichman was surely one of them.
He was all but unknown to Buffalo at large, even those who loved and cared about film the most. But to those few of us who knew what he meant to Buffalo merely being able to see the movies reviewed in these pages for 28 years, he was one of the most important people in the city.
As the president of Frontier Amusement and the booker for all of the locally owned Dipson Theaters, Ehrlichman was probably the crucial single difference between Buffalo as a film-savvy city with a full film diet and the kind of film-starved place so many cities its size are.
He died at 87, suddenly, on Sunday morning, a unique figure in the culture of Buffalo. He is, quite literally, irreplaceable.
I know what his role was in our city's movie life because Ike and I would talk at least once a week about what films he was booking into Dipson Theaters. Sometimes, when last-minute additions were made and last-minute screenings were necessary (or last-second mailings of DVD screeners), we'd talk four or five times a day. He was "Mr. Ike." I was "Mr. Jeff."
Critics and exhibitors aren't supposed to get along, much less critics and bookers or distributors. In fact, it's part of ancient Hollywood studio wisdom that, under penalty of death, they should be kept apart at all costs, lest they contaminate each other hopelessly. Critics, especially, were supposed to be kept from the presumed hardheaded practicality and cynicism of exhibitors and distributors.
But Ike's love of movies was too direct and simple not to love and revere. And his storehouse of knowledge and wisdom about a half-century of movie exhibition in Buffalo was immense. (Who else, for instance, could have told you that "Walter Matthau pictures always do business" in Buffalo?) That's why he was still deeply immersed in movies, movies, movies, almost literally to his last day on Earth.
Movies kept him a very young and spry 87. Weather permitting, you could never reach him on Thursdays because he was always playing golf.
Of course, his taste and mine differed — hugely at times. It was always great fun to hear what he had to say about movies we'd seen together the day before — and, often, it was more than a little enlightening. But what readers of this weekly arts section should understand is exactly how instrumental his love of movies and, especially, their audiences has been in Buffalo being as film-savvy a town as it is.
Of course, we owe the movies at the North Park, Amherst, Market Arcade, Eastern Hills and McKinley Mall theaters to the Clement family — most of all, the late Bernie Clement.
But as much as Bernie clearly wanted art and independent films to succeed in Buffalo, he wasn't always sure they would back in 1980. A weekend of miserable reviews from nasty critics and abysmal box office is enough to give any chain proprietor fleeting thoughts of turning art houses into second run dollar houses.
Ike was always there to reassure Bernie that he was doing the right thing by running art houses. And Ike, thank heaven, was always one of those men that people simply listen to.
The community of us that would give anything to go to just one more screening with Ike Ehrlichman is a small one.
But what Buffalo at large needs to know is how much this dapper little old man loved "good pictures" and how much he liked all those who loved them even when he thought they were full of prunes. It should also know how committed he'd been to "good pictures" here for five decades.
You can't imagine how happy it made him, on a Saturday night, to see a sold-out opening screening of "Atonement" at a Dipson theater. You should have heard him on the phone the following Monday. He sounded like a delighted kid describing the audience's evident pleasure.
"And the movie?" I asked. "It's a pretty good picture," he said.•
jsimon@buffnews.com