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Author and film critic Stephen Farber on Peter Bogdanovich: “Although he was a lover of old Hollywood, he saw the blemishes as well as the triumphs; he was a most clear-eyed observer.”

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“All film lovers were saddened by the passing of director Peter Bogdanovich last week, but I may have felt it a bit more keenly. Peter joined us for an Anniversary Classics screening of The Last Picture Show in December of 2016 at the Fine Arts Theatre, and he shared incisive memories about the making of the movie and about many of his other encounters with Hollywood legends over the decades. We were all impressed with how well his film held up after 45 years. As many people commented, it didn’t seem dated at all. The evocation of a dying Texas town in the early 1950s remained incisive and poignant.

Peter Bogdanovich & Stephen Farber in 2016. Photo courtesy of Gary Paul Andre.

“That was not my first encounter with Bogdanovich. I first met him when I was a graduate student at UCLA film school in the late 1960s and he taught a class on Howard Hawks, one of his friends and idols. I remember we got into a bit of an argument when I suggested that Hawks’ To Have and Have Not was not quite as original as he claimed but might have owed something to Casablanca, which came out a couple of years earlier and was directed by non-auteur Michael Curtiz. Anyway, Peter cheerfully dismissed my criticisms. Around the same time, I saw his first film, Targets, which impressed me greatly. Its portrayal of a mass shooter was way ahead of its time, and this story was welded skillfully to an inside-Hollywood tale starring the legendary Boris Karloff in one of his last screen performances. After that came The Last Picture Show and two other huge hits, What’s Up, Doc? and Paper Moon. We are hoping to pay tribute to Peter with a 50th Anniversary screening of Doc this year.

“Not all of his later movies were as successful, but he continued working productively, and he also scored successes as an actor and as a film historian. His books of interviews with directors and actors were enormously valuable to all film students and film lovers.

“In the 50 years between that UCLA class and the screening of The Last Picture Show, I encountered Peter on several occasions, and he was always warm and engaging. When I was writing a story about Cher in the 1990s, he shared some incisive memories of directing her in Mask, even though he spoke quite candidly about the tensions between them. Although he was a lover of old Hollywood, he saw the blemishes as well as the triumphs; he was a most clear-eyed observer. Hollywood did not always treat him any better than it treated some of his idols, like his good friend Orson Welles, but he survived to tell the tales, and he never surrendered to bitterness. I feel fortunate to have known him and to have shared a stage with him at that memorable anniversary screening five years ago.”

~ Stephen Farber was president of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association from 2012-2016. He is currently a critic for The Hollywood Reporter, a curator of Laemmle’s Anniversary Classics series and co-author of Cinema ’62: The Greatest Year at the Movies.

“No wire hangers, ever!” ~ MOMMIE DEAREST 40th Anniversary Screening December 28 at the Royal.

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Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present a special Camp Classic, the infamous and often hilarious MOMMIE DEAREST. Four years ago we introduced our first-ever Camp Classic screening with a 50th anniversary showing of the (unintended) laugh riot Valley of the Dolls, which was an enormous success. It’s time to do it again! For your holiday enjoyment, we will hold a 40th anniversary screening of the lurid Joan Crawford biopic, MOMMIE DEAREST, starring Oscar winner Faye Dunaway, in one of her most extravagant performances, as Crawford.

The film was adapted from the best-selling memoir by Crawford’s adopted daughter, Christina Crawford, who recounted her abuse at the hands of Joan over a period of years. The book helped to introduce readers to some of the realities of domestic abuse and also pulled the veil off the airbrushed image of many beloved Hollywood stars. Although some of Crawford’s friends and other family members disputed the account in Christina’s book, it took hold of the popular imagination.

For the film version, director Frank Perry (David and Lisa, Diary of a Mad Housewife) teamed up with producer Frank Yablans and Paramount Pictures. The screenplay is credited to Perry, Yablans, Tracy Hotchner, and Robert Getchell. Mara Hobel played Christina as a child, with Diana Scarwid taking over the role of the adult Christina. The cast also included Steve Forrest, Jocelyn Brando, Rutanya Alda, and Howard Da Silva as MGM chieftain Louis B. Mayer.

The film earned mainly terrible reviews. It won a Razzie Award as the worst movie of the year, and in 1990, it was named worst movie of the decade. Nevertheless, the film did have some critical champions. Pauline Kael wrote, “The best that can be said about this jumbled scrapbook of Joan Crawford’s life… is that it doesn’t get in the way of its star, Faye Dunaway, who gives a startling, ferocious performance… Her performance is extravagant—it’s operatic and full of primal anger.” Leonard Maltin concurred and called the film a “Vivid, well-crafted filmization of Christina Crawford’s book about growing up the adopted and abused daughter of movie queen Joan Crawford.” On the other hand, the Los Angeles Times’ Kevin Thomas wrote that MOMMIE DEAREST “plays like a limp parody of a bad Crawford movie.”

Make up your own minds as you join other Camp movie lovers for this one-night-only screening on Tuesday, December 28, at 7 PM at Laemmle’s Royal Theatre. Special guests and other surprises may add to the fun.

“Now, there’s nothing to be nervous about. I’ve flown thousands of miles and I can tell you it’s a lot safer than crossing the street!” ~ 50th anniversary screening of the mother of all disaster movies, AIRPORT.

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On Wednesday, December 15, at 7 PM at the Royal Theatre, Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present a (slightly belated) 50th anniversary screening of the melodrama that launched the all-star disaster movie craze, Ross Hunter’s production of Airport. Set during a fierce winter snowstorm at and around a Chicago airport, and with the added complication of a mad suicide bomber aboard a jet headed for Rome, the film was full of spectacle and a heady mix of tempestuous subplots. It earned 10 Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and Best Screenplay, and won the award for Best Supporting Actress Helen Hayes as a feisty stowaway aboard the plane headed for disaster.

David Newman, son of Airport composer Alfred Newman, will be in attendance.

Multiple past and future Oscar winners were also in the cast, including Burt Lancaster, George Kennedy, Van Heflin, and Maureen Stapleton, along with “king of cool” Dean Martin, Jacqueline Bisset, Jean Seberg, Barbara Hale, Dana Wynter, Lloyd Nolan, and Barry Nelson. The film was written and directed by Oscar-winning filmmaker George Seaton (Miracle on 34th Street, The Country Girl, The Counterfeit Traitor). It was adapted from the best-selling novel by Arthur Hailey and also earned nominations for Best Cinematography, Art Direction, Film Editing, and Sound. It also marked the final Oscar nomination for composer Alfred Newman, who died shortly before the film opened. It was Newman’s 45th nomination in a remarkable career that included nine previous Oscar wins (for such diverse films as The King and I, Love is a Many Splendored Thing, and The Song of Bernadette).

Although in essence an old-fashioned melodrama, the film broke new ground in several areas. The idea of a suicide bomber, a desperate and disgruntled construction worker, was a novel plot point in 1970. Although the movie was G rated, it dealt with extramarital romances in a nonjudgmental way that would have been unthinkable just a few years earlier. And its formula of an all-star cast of characters in jeopardy set the model for other disaster movies of the 70s, including The Poseidon Adventure, The Towering Inferno, and Earthquake, not to mention three sequels and the hugely successful parody Airplane!

AIRPORT, Dean Martin, Jacqueline Bisset, Jean Seberg, Burt Lancaster, Lloyd Nolan, Maureen Stapleton, Helen Hayes, Van Heflin, Dana Wynter, Barry Nelson, Barbara Hale, George Kennedy, George Seaton and Ross Hunter, 1970

The movie grossed a phenomenal $100 million (equivalent to more than $650 million today), making it the highest grossing picture in Universal’s history up to that time. When it had its TV network premiere three years later, it also broke records. Although reviews at the time were mixed, Variety declared good-naturedly, “Based on the novel by Arthur Hailey… with a cast of stars as long as a jet runway, and adapted by George Seaton in a glossy, slick style, Airport is a handsome, often dramatically involving” film. Or as Leonard Maltin put it, “Grand Hotel plot formula reaches latter-day zenith in ultra-slick, old-fashioned movie that entertains in spite of itself.”

Special guests and other surprises will enhance this fun-filled holiday screening.

‘Y Tu Mamá También’ 20th Anniversary Screenings Wednesday, December 8, 7 PM at the Royal, Playhouse, Glendale & Newhall.

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On December 8 we’ll screen our final Anniversary Classics Abroad film of the year — the modern classic Y Tu Mamá También — and stay tuned. We hope to have dates soon for both Airport and Mommie Dearest screening before year’s end.  We are also planning more Abroad titles for 2022.

Alfonso Cuarón’s sexy and provocative road movie, Y Tu Mamá También marked a homecoming as well as a breakthrough for Cuarón in 2001. After making his directorial debut a decade earlier in his native Mexico, Cuarón was drawn to Hollywood, where he earned strong reviews for A Little Princess and a modern-day reworking of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations. Then, however, Cuarón decided to return to Mexico to make a more personal film and he wowed the cinematic world with this coming-of-age drama. Y Tu Mamá También broke box office records in Mexico when it opened in the summer of 2001. It went on to win the Best Screenplay award at the Venice Film Festival and was also nominated for an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay the following year. Cuarón wrote the film with his brother Carlos Cuarón.

Cuarón cast two up-and-coming young actors, Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna, as teenage friends from different social classes. The working class Julio (Bernal) and the upper class Tenoch (Luna) are friends and rivals. They both become infatuated with an older woman (Spanish actress Maribel Verdú) and invite her to join them on a road trip to a spectacular, secluded beach. She accepts and they embark on an adventure that turns out to be a funny, sexy and revelatory experience for all three of them. Much of the film was improvised by the actors, with Cuarón’s encouragement.

In addition to the luscious cinematography and the sexual candor (it was released unrated in the U.S.), the film features narration in the style of some of the European films that inspired Cuarón, particularly Truffaut’s Jules and Jim, another landmark movie about a ménage à trois. Reviews were almost universally glowing. In Newsweek David Ansen wrote, “The movie has an emotional kick that lingers like a primal memory.” Entertainment Weekly’s Lisa Schwarzbaum called the movie “sad, funny, sexy, and altogether marvelous.” The New York Times’ Elvis Mitchell concurred, describing Y Tu Mamá También as “fast, funny, unafraid of sexuality and finally devastating.”

The film’s success propelled Cuarón to the front ranks of contemporary directors. He went on to helm the best Harry Potter movie (The Prisoner of Azkaban), the dystopian Children of Men, and earned an Oscar for his direction of the sci-fi adventure Gravity. When he returned to Mexico to make the autobiographical Roma, he earned a second Oscar as Best Director.

Y Tu Mamá También will play for one night only at the Royal in West L.A., the Playhouse in Pasadena, Glendale, and Newhall December 8.

“The three great escapes — smoking, drinking, bed.” LA DOLCE VITA 60th Anniversary Screenings November 17.

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Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Abroad Series present Federico Fellini’s masterpiece, LA DOLCE VITA, as part of the monthly revival series of great international classics. LA DOLCE VITA earned four Academy Award nominations in 1961, including Best Director Federico Fellini (the first time in Oscar history for a director of a foreign language film) and Best Original Screenplay. It won the Oscar for Piero Gherardi’s elegant costumes.

Marcello Mastroianni & Anita Ekberg.

Fellini’s sardonic epic about the decadence of modern Rome is one of the most influential of foreign films, and its influence can still be seen today in films like the recent international Oscar winner, The Great Beauty. Fellini even added a new word to our vocabulary when he introduced the character of the celebrity-chasing photographer, Paparazzo. Cruise along the Via Veneto with Marcello Mastroianni, then take a dip in the Trevi Fountain with the voluptuous Anita Ekberg. Writing in The New York Times, critic Bosley Crowther praised the film as a “brilliantly graphic estimation of a whole swath of society in sad decay.” Roger Ebert called it “an allegory, a cautionary tale of a man without a center…a handsome, weary, desperate man, who dreams of someday doing something good, but is trapped in a life of empty nights and lonely dawns.”

Anouk Aimée & Marcello Mastroianni.

Also starring Anouk Aimee, Nadia Gray, Walter Santesso, and Yvonne Furneaux, the 60th anniversary of LA DOLCE VITA will play for one night only on November 17 at 7:00 PM at the Royal, Playhouse 7, Glendale and Newhall.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyC_mJ7QjRc

BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S 60th Anniversary Screening With Guest Author Sam Wasson.

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Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present one of the screen’s most iconic romances, BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S (1961), with a 60th anniversary screening on November 10 at the Royal Theatre in West LA. Audrey Hepburn stars as Holly Golightly, and besides the image of Hepburn in that famous black Givenchy dress, the most enduring legacy of the movie is the song “Moon River,” composed by Henry Mancini for Hepburn, and a “melody of a lifetime.”

BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S was adapted from a popular Truman Capote novella and brought to the screen by director Blake Edwards and writer George Axelrod, with considerable alterations to the story about a flighty call girl from the country aspiring to the high life in New York City. Capote had envisioned Marilyn Monroe in the role, but it was Audrey Hepburn who immortalized Holly Golightly for the screen. Henry Mancini provided the Oscar and Grammy-winning soundtrack that accompanied her amorous adventures. TIFFANY’S was a box office hit and nominated for five Academy Awards, including Hepburn for Best Actress and Axelrod for Best Screenplay. Mancini and lyricist Johnny Mercer wrote one of the most popular songs of the twentieth century, “Moon River,” and the pair won an Oscar (double winner Mancini also won for his score).

New York magazine epitomized the praise for the movie, which helped launch the Fabulous Sixties in American culture, by stating, “a film that not only captures the sedate elegance of a New York long gone, but that continues to entrance as a love story, a style manifesto, and a way to live.” Our guest, author Sam Wasson, reinforces that notion by titling his book about the making of the movie, Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M.: Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and the Dawn of the Modern Woman. He will discuss the film in a Q&A before the screening, and the newly revised edition of his critically lauded book will be available for purchase and signing. The New York Times cited it as “a bonbon of a book…as well tailored as the little black dress the movie made famous.” Wasson is also the author of the acclaimed best seller The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood.

The 60th anniversary of BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S, also starring George Peppard, Patricia Neal, Mickey Rooney, and Buddy Ebsen, will screen on Wednesday, November 10, at 7:30 PM at the Royal Theater in West Los Angeles. Tickets on sale now at Laemmle.com/ac

Jean Renoir’s FRENCH CANCAN ~ 65th Anniversary Screenings October 13 at the Royal, Playhouse, Glendale, Newhall.

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Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present FRENCH CANCAN, one of the best late films created by master director Jean Renoir: a rousing tribute to the 19th century world that his celebrated father, Pierre Auguste Renoir, and other Impressionists created in their paintings. Set mainly in Montmartre and the original Moulin Rouge nightclub in the 1890s, the film chronicles the revival of the cancan that electrified Paris. This film marked Renoir’s return to filmmaking in France after a lengthy exile caused by World War II.

Renoir’s main character, a theatrical impresario named Henri Danglard, is portrayed by legendary French actor Jean Gabin, who had worked with Renoir in the 1930s in The Lower Depths, La Bete Humaine, and the director’s antiwar masterpiece, La Grande Illusion. Gabin, for decades the face of French cinema, creates a vivid character in FRENCH CANCAN, a producer who has the restlessness of an artist, always seeking new challenges—and new romances in his personal life. The principal women in his life are portrayed by Francoise Arnoul and Maria Felix, with the legendary singer, Edith Piaf, in a tasty supporting role.

One of the critics who endorsed the film in the 1950s was Francois Truffaut, who was writing criticism before he embarked on his directing career. Truffaut considered FRENCH CANCAN a milestone in the history of color cinema. He observed that one scene of a dance class “reminds us of a Degas sketch,” and he added that Renoir’s direction was “as vigorous and youthful as ever.”

Later reviews also endorsed the film, especially after footage cut from the initial release was restored. Leonard Maltin paid tribute to the “brilliantly beautiful restored version” and called the film “an impressive, enjoyable fiction about beginnings of the Moulin Rouge and impresario Gabin’s revival of the cancan.” Roger Ebert called the film “a delicious musical comedy that deserves comparison with the golden age Hollywood musicals of the same period.” In The Guardian Peter Bradshaw wrote, “The glorious final sequence, in which the cancan is finally unveiled to the rowdy audience, is some kind of masterpiece, perhaps the equal of anything Renoir ever achieved: wild, free, turbulent, exhilarating.”

This musical delight will play at 7 PM on Wednesday, October 13, at four Laemmle theatres: the Royal in West L.A., the Playhouse in Pasadena, the Laemmle Glendale, and the Laemmle Newhall.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLivSvCNe84

Bernardo Bertolucci’s THE CONFORMIST ~ 50th Anniversary Screenings.

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We continue our Anniversary Classics series with Bertolucci’s stunner at 7 o’clock on Wednesday, September 29 at our Glendale, Newhall, Pasadena and West L.A. theaters. The film follows Marcello Clerici (Jean-Louis Trintignant), a member of the secret police in Mussolini’s fascist Italy. He and his new bride, Giulia (Stefania Sandrelli), travel to Paris for their honeymoon, where Marcello also plans to assassinate his former college professor Luca Quadri (Enzo Tarascio), an outspoken anti-fascist living in exile. But when Marcello meets the professor’s young wife, Anna (Dominique Sanda), both his romantic and his political loyalties are tested.

“It’s easy to overlook how stark THE CONFORMIST‘s political and allegorical message is because it’s just so damn beautiful.” (Aja Romano, Vox)

“Bertolucci’s masterpiece—made when he was all of 29—will be the most revelatory experience a fortunate pilgrim will have in a theater this year.” (Michael Atkinson, Village Voice)

“THE CONFORMIST is celebrated for cinematographer Vittorio Storaro’s tumbling autumn leaves, but its emotional impact involves a tumbling soul.” (Joshua Rothkopf, Time Out New York)

“THE CONFORMIST is a beautiful and provocative film, and its theme could not be more timely.” (John Hofsess, Maclean’s Magazine)