Joseph H Kanter

A wealthy 76-year-old businessman from Century City is looking to apply his golden touch to the nation's health care system. Joseph H. Kanter, who made his first fortune in real estate and then launched a successful banking career, wants to work with the federal government to establish a national health outcomes database.

A wealthy 76-year-old businessman from Century City is looking to apply his golden touch to the nation's health care system. Joseph H. Kanter, who made his first fortune in real estate and then launched a successful banking career, wants to work with the federal government to establish a national health outcomes database.

Before the beautiful new safety print of the 1912 "Richard III" unspooled Tuesday night at the AFI Film Fest's gala premiere, William Buffum exclaimed to the audience in LACMA's Bing Theater: "Now I get to see it on a big screen instead of a white sheet!" Buffum, a 78-year-old retired flour mill manager from Portland, Ore., donated his nitrate print of "Richard III" to the American Film Institute last September.

As the genial documentary "The Big Bang" opens, its director is wooing a money man across a dinner table with that patented combination of cool and fervor that constitutes the perfect pitch. The filmmaker may be a little fuzzy about his project, but it came to him at the Shangri La Hotel when he realized he knew how it all started. "How what started?" the backer asks, carefully. "The cosmos ," the director expands, "with the orgasmic explosion of God."

For more than three decades, the American Film Institute has been a cultural landmark in Hollywood, an organization that its founding chairman, Academy Award-winning actor Gregory Peck, once described as "a caretaker of our nation's film heritage." On television, at gala fund-raisers and in its literature, the institute has championed the cause of "advancing and preserving the art of the moving image"--images recorded on film and tape that make up the collective memory of the 20th century.