Mayra Langdon Riesman, Movie Website Creator, Dies at 64

Mayra Langdon Riesman, who in the mid-1990s turned her fascination with movies into Film Scouts, an early and ambitious website that offered film festival coverage, movie reviews, trailers and interviews with Hollywood personalities, died Nov. 4 at her home in Manhattan. She was 64.

Her husband, Michael Riesman, said the cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease.

Riesman had done some acting, sold designer clothes, worked for a German film distributor and served as an associate producer on a movie when she became intrigued by the idea of covering the film industry in a realm known as the World Wide Web.

“The internet is a new medium, certainly,” she recalled in an interview in 1999 on the Film Scouts website, “but I still see the basis in what I’m doing in the tradition of film, radio and television — programming pioneers who developed new ways of telling stories to the public.”

Film Scouts, which started on AOL in 1994 and shifted to its own website two years later, took an entertaining approach to storytelling that earned it high rankings among the growing selection of movie sites by Yahoo and Netscape. Visitors to the site were guided by an animated character, Jerry the usher, to the site’s “theaters” to read or watch its content.

As the self-proclaimed Chief Film Scout, Riesman toted a camcorder to festivals to record interviews with dozens of actors, including Andy Garcia, Kenneth Branagh and Rosanna Arquette, and directors like Robert Altman and Mike Leigh. She also wrote diary posts about her festival experiences and, with Kathleen Carroll, a former film critic for The Daily News in New York, irreverent guides to the Cannes Film Festival.

“She was elegant and quite bright and just loved movies,” Carroll said in a telephone interview. “And she loved being in places like Cannes. It gave her a great role to play.”

Riesman, who financed Film Scouts through sponsorships, developed a network of writers and critics who filed dispatches from festivals, transcribed festival news conferences and reviewed films.

“When the spirit moved me, I’d tell her I was going to a festival and send her some things,” David Sterritt, a former film critic for The Christian Science Monitor, said in a telephone interview. He added, “It was a smart and energetic venture that reflected Mayra’s own vitality and intelligence.”

Riesman understood that in the late 1990s, well before the rise of streaming services like Netflix, the internet was not mature enough technologically to show full-length films to broad audiences.

“Right now, the Net is not a way to see movies,” she said in an interview with The New York Times in 1998.

But she made one exception: In 1999, Film Scouts carried the internet premiere of “Koyaanisqatsi” (1982), Godfrey Reggio’s cinematic essay about the state of American civilization in images and sound. Philip Glass’ music for the film was conducted by Michael Riesman, a composer and keyboardist who lent technical help to his wife at Film Scouts. He survives her, as does her sister, Barbara Cohen.

Mayra Riesman learned she had Parkinson’s in 2000 and began reducing her stewardship of Film Scouts. The site still exists as a raw-looking time capsule of the film industry of the ‘90s, albeit with reports filed by contributors over the years since she stepped away.

Mayra Phyllis Levy was born on April 5, 1954, in Perth Amboy, New Jersey. Her father, Kalman, a brush salesman, died when she was an infant. Her mother, Bernice (Kluft) Levy, took jobs as an office manager after her husband’s death. A childhood interest in theater led Mayra to study drama at Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont, and perform with the radical Bread & Puppet Theater, then the school’s theater-in-residence.

She struggled for acting work and took a variety of jobs, from curator of a Soho art gallery to associate producer of “Seven Minutes,” a 1989 film by Klaus Maria Brandauer. She adopted the Langdon name from a friend and mentor, actor Robert Langdon Lloyd.

Around that time she tried, unsuccessfully, to produce a film based on a manuscript of medieval poems and dramatic texts called “Carmina Burana.”

Film Scouts became her avenue to success, melding her passion for films with prescience about the power of the internet.

Asked in the 1999 interview about the future of the site, she said it would be “discovering just what it is that this unique medium can do.”

“I have glimpses of that even now,” she said, “but we are still in the very infant stages.”