Bingham Ray, Executive Who Championed Independent Films, Dies at 57 LOS ANGELES - Bingham Ray, a colorful indie-film executive who helped steer art-house movies like "Bowling for Columbine" and "Hotel Rwanda" to the masses, died on Monday in a hospice in Provo, Utah. He was 57. The cause was a series of strokes, according to the San Francisco Film Society, where he had only recently become its executive director, an appointment he described in October as "too good to be true." He was in Utah to attend the Sundance Film Festival. Volatile and blunt, Mr. Ray championed stylized, intellectually challenging films, buying distribution rights to movies that few believed had a box-office prayer. "The words "fearless" and "brave" are tossed around a lot in our world, but that's the only way to describe Bingham," said Eamonn Bowles, the president of Magnolia Pictures. Mr. Ray helped create a business model in which art-house movies grew into a powerful economic and cultural force. He co-founded one of the first major indie distributors, October Films, in 1991, working with Jeff Lipsky in a house in suburban Los Angeles. October Films, along with Miramax Films and Sony Pictures Classics, was designed to snap up indie gems from festivals like Sundance and distribute them broadly, relying on guerrilla marketing campaigns and the Oscars to get them noticed. "Secrets & Lies," directed by Mike Leigh, and Lars von Trier's "Breaking the Waves," both from 1996, were two of October's biggest successes. October Films was also responsible for David Lynch's "Lost Highway" and one of the first widely seen Iranian movies, "The White Balloon," directed by Jafar Panahi. Mr. Ray left October Films in 1999, when it was sold to USA Networks. After a series of mergers and acquisitions, the company emerged in 2002 as Focus Features, which remains an art-house leader. "If you draw a line back to the rise of independent film, you find Bingham," Mr. Bowles said. Born on Oct. 1, 1954, Mr. Ray grew up in Scarsdale, N.Y. He was fascinated with movies from an early age; one of his first jobs was as a projectionist in a Greenwich Village theater. He started his formal career in 1981 in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's New York office, where he sold library titles to hospitals, colleges and ships at sea. He worked at five other distribution companies, including New Yorker Films and Avenue Pictures, where he oversaw the release of Gus Van Sant's "Drugstore Cowboy" in 1989 before founding October Films. From 2001 to 2004 Mr. Ray was president of United Artists, working to revive its reputation for serving up top-notch specialty films. "Bowling for Columbine," a Michael Moore documentary on the American gun culture, and Terry George's "Hotel Rwanda," starring Don Cheadle in a fact-based tale set during the Rwandan genocide, were two United Artists films released under Mr. Ray's watch. His subsequent jobs included running Sidney Kimmel Entertainment. He was also a consultant to the Film Society of Lincoln Center, IFC Films and Snag Films, which focuses on documentaries, and an adjunct professor at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. Mr. Ray is survived by his wife, Nancy King; their children Nick, Annabel and Becca; and his sisters, Susan Clair and Deb Pope. Peter Biskind's book "Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance and the Rise of Independent Film" (2004), captured the excitement Mr. Ray felt about art-house movies. "We're not as well-heeled as some of these other companies, but we're hungrier, because it's me, and I'm really, really hungry," Mr. Biskind quotes him as saying during a Sundance bidding war. This film, I'm drooling. I would chop my left arm to do it.