The official blog of Laemmle Theatres
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Michael York and Richard Chamberlain will participate in a Q&A moderated by LA Film Critics Association President Stephen Farber following the 40th anniversary screening of THE FOUR MUSKETEERS on Tuesday, 9/29 at the Laemmle Royal in West LA.
Purchase your tickets in advance here. For more information about our Anniversary Classics series, visit http://www.laemmle.com/ac.
We’re celebrating the first anniversary of CULTURE VULTURE with a slew of stellar offerings that will take us into the new year.
For the uninitiated, CULTURE VULTURE is our weekly series of opera, stage and ballet/dance performances plus art exhibitions and documentaries.
These are often live performances that have been recorded – and they are typically breathtaking! If you are a lover of the high arts and have yet to experience Culture Vulture, you owe it to yourself to attend one of our upcoming programs.
Screenings take place Monday nights with repeat performances Tuesday afternoons.
Please note that we’ve shuffled the deck a bit with regard to venues. Culture Vulture will be continuing at the Playhouse, Claremont, and Town Center. In addition, it will be offered at the newly re-opened FINE ARTS in Beverly Hills. It will no longer run at the Royal, Music Hall, or NoHo.
There’s more! We’ve developed a new scheduling model that will make it easier for you to plan in advance. Each month will be calendared as follows:
1st Monday – Opera
2nd Monday – Ballet/Dance
3rd Monday – Stage
4th Monday – Art Exhibits/Documentaries
The 5th Monday (when it occurs) will be a surprise!
September 21 and 22: PAUL TAYLOR: CREATIVE DOMAIN (dance documentary)
September 28 and 29: THE IMPRESSIONISTS (exhibition)
October 5 and 6: AIDA (opera from Teatro alla Scalla)
October 12 and 13: L’HISTOIRE DE MANON (ballet from the Opera Nacional de Paris)
October 19 and 20: THEODORE BIKEL: IN THE SHOES OF SHOLOM ALEICHEM (stage production via the National Center for Jewish Film)
October 26 and 27: VINCENT VAN GOGH: A NEW WAY OF SEEING (exhibition)
November 2 and 3: RISE AND FALL OF THE CITY OF MAHAGONNY (opera from the Royal Opera House)
November 9 and 10: MOVIMENTOS: LA DANZA DE LA PUNTA AL TACON (dance from the Teatro Real, Madrid)
November 16 and 15: MAN AND SUPERMAN (stage production from the National Theatre, London)
November 23 and 24: PALIO
November 30 and December 1: THE THREE TENORS CHRISTMAS CONCERT (Wiener Konzerthaus)
December 7 and 8: THE MAGIC FLUTE (opera from Bregenzer Festspiele)
December 14 and 15: THE NUTCRACKER (ballet from the Bolshoi)
December 21 and 22: HAMLET (stage from the National Theatre)
UPDATE: Our schedule is limited 10/26 through 10/29 as our largest auditoriums are closed for the installation of new seats and carpets. Check www.laemmle.com for showtimes.
Dear Town Center 5 moviegoers, please note we will be closing down the theater after the last shows on Sunday, September 13th to begin refurbishing the theater, beginning with the lobby and concessions area.
We plan to re-open on Friday, October 2nd with several terrific new films, including Francois Ozon’s The New Girlfriend, Zhang Yimou’s Coming Home and the moving new British drama A Brilliant Young Mind.
Auditorium improvements including seats, carpet, and curtains will begin in phases soon after we re-open.
Here’s a rendering below. Thanks for your patience and patronage!
Laemmle Theatres is proud to announce we have taken over the management and operation of the Ahrya Fine Arts Theatre in Beverly Hills. The theatre has been closed for five years. At the time of its closure it was used exclusively as a private screening venue. Laemmle will book the theatre with first run films screening daily for the general public. Laemmle will also use the Ahrya Fine Arts to host regular series like our Culture Vulture program, festivals and special event screenings.
According to CinemaTreasures.org, the Fine Arts first opened in April 1937 as the Wilshire Regina, with seating for 800. It has been well maintained over the years and is – and under Laemmle’s stewardship will remain – a single-screen theater, though now with slightly more than 400 seats. (Movie patrons’ expectations of things like leg room have understandably risen over the decades.) We last operated the venue from 1985 to 1993, mostly screening foreign films.
The Ahrya Fine Arts Theater is owned by Shawn Far. He runs Vertigo USA, a successful clothing company based in Downtown Los Angeles, and is a Beverly Hills resident. The Fine Arts will share its name with Mr. Far’s eldest son, Ahrya. Appropriately, our first film beginning September 18th will be JEREMY SCOTT: THE PEOPLE’S DESIGNER, a documentary about a rising star of the fashion industry.
We have promoted Guy Valdez, long-time manager at our Playhouse 7 venue in Pasadena, to lead the Fine Arts as its general manager.
Our Back to School theme continues this week at the Laemmle NoHo 7 with a Throwback Thursday screening of FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH starring Phoebe Cates, Sean Penn, Forest Whitaker, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Judge Reinhold, Ray Walston, Vincent Schiavelli and more!
*Buy your tickets before Wednesday, 9/9 at noon and pay only $5! Full price tickets are $11.
FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH screens at 7:30PM on 9/10 at the Laemmle NoHo 7 and is part of our THROWBACK THURSDAY series in partnership with Eat|See|Hear. The Konestruction truck will arrive at the theater around 6:30pm. You can bring food from the truck into the theater! See you there!
As we move into the Fall season, there are several new Anniversary Classics screenings scheduled for September, all at the Royal Theatre in West L.A.
First up on September 17th is the 55th anniversary of Director Elia Kazan’s WILD RIVER, an underappreciated gem from 1960 starring Montgomery Clift, Lee Remick, Jo Van Fleet, and featuring the film debut of our guest star, two-time Oscar nominee Bruce Dern, who will appear for a Q&A following the screening on Thursday the 17th at 7:30PM at the Royal.
Cloris Leachman will participate in a Q&A following the September 24th screening of CRAZY MAMA (1975). CRAZY MAMA was one of the early movies directed by Oscar winner Jonathan Demme.
On September 29th, we feature the 40th anniversary of Director Richard Lester’s THE FOUR MUSKETEERS (1975), with a special reunion of two of its co-stars, Michael York and Richard Chamberlain, who will appear for a Q&A at the screening at 7 PM.
Tickets for all three screenings are on sale now. Do not wait to buy tickets; these shows will sell out. For tickets and info on upcoming screenings, bookmark http://www.laemmle.com/ac.
Also, check out the Laemmle’s Anniversary Classics Facebook group: https://facebook.com/groups/laemmlesanniversaryclassics/
This #TBT at the Laemmle NoHo 7: Lindsay Lohan, Rachel McAdams, Amanda Seyfried, Lacey Chabert, and Tina Fey star in MEAN GIRLS!
*Buy your tickets before Wednesday, 9/2 at noon and pay only $5! Full price tickets are $11.
MEAN GIRLS screens at 7:30PM on 9/3 at the Laemmle NoHo 7 and is part of our THROWBACK THURSDAY series in partnership with Eat|See|Hear. The Haute Burger truck (where classy meets trashy) will arrive at the theater around 6:30pm. You can bring food from the truck into the theater! See you there!
Click here to buy tickets.
This Friday, at five of our six venues, we’ll be opening a film we enjoyed immensely, THE DIARY OF A TEENAGE GIRL. The girl of the title is Minnie Goetze (fantastic newcomer Bel Powley), who is longing for love, acceptance and a sense of purpose in the world. She begins a complex love affair with her mother’s (Kristen Wiig) boyfriend, “the handsomest man in the world,” Monroe Rutherford (Alexander Skarsgård). What follows is a sharp, funny and provocative account of one girl’s sexual and artistic awakening, without judgment.
Based on a 2002 graphic novel, film critics have embraced the film (it has a 93% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes as of this writing). Writing in New York Magazine, Bilge Ebiri exclaimed, “the first thing to know about THE DIARY OF A TEENAGE GIRL is that young British actress Powley is staggeringly good in it.” In the L.A. Times, Rebecca Keegan wrote, “big summer action movies can be thrilling, but if you really want to feel your heart pounding out of your chest, try being a 15-year-old girl for 101 minutes.” In the New Republic, Elaine Teng called the film “a startlingly tough, authentic depiction of budding womanhood.” And in the New York Times, Manohla Dargis declared the film “exhilarating…the novel is life-specific, but what makes Minnie – on the page and now on the screen – greater than any one girl is how she tells her own story in her own soaringly alive voice.”
The extended Vox review included this observation by the film’s director, Marielle Heller: “I think as a society, we’re just a little bit afraid of teenage girls, and we’re definitely afraid of their sexuality. There’s a desire to shelter girls and also to ignore what they might be feeling or experiencing. The result of that is if you’re a teenage girl who’s having thoughts about sex, you think something’s wrong with you.” This is the same approach to the topic as what you can find other people writing about, and what the reasons are it for, for instance on this Lovegasm blog article about sexual forward-thinking within the media.
THE DIARY OF A TEENAGE GIRL wonderfully rejects that path.