The official blog of Laemmle Theatres
BENDING THE ARC co-directors Kief Davidson and Pedro Kos will participate in Q&A’s following the 7:20 PM screenings at the Monica Film Center on Friday and Saturday, October 13 and 14. They will be joined by supporters of the film Marcia Gay Harden and Maria Bellow for the Saturday, October 14 Q&A.
THE PATHOLOGICAL OPTIMIST subject Andrew Wakefield and Director Miranda Bailey will participate in Q&A’s after the 7:20 PM screenings on Friday and Saturday, October 6 and 7, and the after the 2:20 PM show on Sunday October 8 at the Monica Film Center.
BIG BEAR stars Adam Brody, Zach Knighton, and Pablo Schreiber will participate in a Q&A following the 9:40 PM screening at the Monica Film Center on Friday, September 22.
Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present a tribute to Oscar-winning actor Paul Newman with the latest installment in our popular Twofer Tuesday program.
Newman received one of his nine Oscar nominations for the landmark prison drama, COOL HAND LUKE, released in 1967. He reprised his acclaimed stage performance in the film version of Tennessee Williams’ steamy melodrama, Sweet Bird of Youth from 1962.
Enjoy these two films for the price of one on Tuesday, October 3rd at your choice of three Laemmle locations—the Royal in West LA, the NoHo in North Hollywood, and the Playhouse in Pasadena.
COOL HAND LUKE received a total of four Academy Award nominations in 1967, and George Kennedy won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor, an award that invigorated the career of one of Hollywood’s most well liked character actors.
Newman plays a rebellious prisoner on a Southern chain gang who eventually wins the support of all his fellow convicts even though he infuriates the prison officials.
The warden’s rebuke to Newman—“What we’ve got here is failure to communicate”—became one of the most quoted lines in cinema history, and many scenes, including an egg-eating contest and an unexpected song that Newman sings after learning of his mother’s death, have also entered the lexicon.
The supporting cast includes a number of other acclaimed actors—Dennis Hopper, Harry Dean Stanton, Strother Martin, and Oscar winner Jo Van Fleet.
Stuart Rosenberg directed the Oscar-nominated screenplay by Donn Pearce and Frank R. Pierson.
The Saturday Review’s Hollis Alpert called Luke “a film as beautifully executed as any made this year.” Charles Champlin of the Los Angeles Times added that the film was “a triumph for Paul Newman.”
SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH received three Oscar nominations in 1962, and Ed Begley won the award as Best Supporting Actor for his vivid portrayal of a tyrannical Southern political boss.
Lead actress Geraldine Page and supporting actress Shirley Knight also earned nods from the Academy. Page and Newman had both starred in the Broadway production of Williams’ play, and they revisited and deepened their performances in the screen version, which despite a few compromises dictated by the Production Code, was generally regarded as superior to the play.
Richard Brooks, who had also adapted Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof with Newman, wrote the screenplay and directed.
The heart of the film lies in the provocative bedroom scenes between Page and Newman, playing a gigolo slightly past his prime and a has-been movie star happy to pay for his sexual favors.
The cast also includes Rip Torn, Mildred Dunnock, and Madeleine Sherwood.
Newsweek praised Sweet Bird as “a forceful, often devastating piece of work.” The Hollywood Reporter wrote that “Newman is the almost perfect Williams hero, sensitive, vulnerable, but undeniably masculine.”
Click here to get tickets to the 4:40pm show of SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH, admission to the 7pm COOL HAND LUKE is included. Click here to buy tickets to the 7pm show of COOL HAND LUKE, admission to the 9:30pm SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH is included.
NO MAPS ON MY TAPS director George T. Nierenberg will participate in Q&A’s following the 7:30pm shows on Friday 9/15, Saturday 9/16, and following the 5pm show on Sunday 9/17. Q&A’s will be followed by a spectacular tap performance by Sarah Reich and Anissa Lee on Friday night and Lee Howard on Sunday 5:00 showing. The Saturday night special tap guest performer will be announced.
Correction: An early version of this post incorrectly stated the director would attend every screening.
Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present a 50th anniversary screening of one of the most delightful and innovative romantic comedies ever made, Stanley Donen’s Two for the Road.
TWO FOR THE ROAD (1967)
50th Anniversary Screening
Q & A with Co-stars William Daniels and Jacqueline Bisset
Wednesday, September 27, at 7:00 PM
At the Royal Theatre in West L.A.
Click here for tickets
Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney star as a couple trying to come to terms with the changes in their marriage over a 12-year period.
Screenwriter Frederic Raphael, who had won an Oscar for writing Darling two years earlier, received another nomination for Best Original Screenplay for his groundbreaking, time-traveling script for Two for the Road.
Donen, the director of such films as Singin’ in the Rain, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Funny Face, and Charade, here created one of his most provocative works.
This excavation of a marriage centers on half a dozen trips through the south of France taken by Mark and Joanna Wallace (Finney and Hepburn). But these trips are not presented in chronological order. In fact, the different time sequences are intercut breezily throughout the film. This experiment in non-linear storytelling was clearly influenced by some of the movies of the French New Wave during the 60s. But this was the first major Hollywood film to try to translate that innovative approach to a more mainstream commercial picture. Reactions were mixed at the time, but the film’s reputation has grown in later years, and many now cite it as one of their all-time favorite romantic films.
Life magazine’s Richard Schickel was one of the few to appreciate it in 1967. As he wrote, “Mr. Donen has always been one of the truly stylish directors of light comedy, but here he has surpassed himself and in the process made it clear that the commercial filmmaker no longer has to be bound by the traditions of the past.” Leonard Maltin calls it a “perceptive, winning film… beautifully acted.”
The supporting cast includes William Daniels, Eleanor Bron, Claude Dauphin, Nadia Gray, and Jacqueline Bisset in one of her very first screen roles. Other key contributors to the film include cinematographer Christopher Challis, whose glorious images of the French Riviera dazzle the eye, and multiple Academy Award-winning composer Henry Mancini, who regarded this lyrical score as one of his personal favorites.
Co-star William Daniels, who portrays a hilariously finicky American tourist, had a busy year in 1967. In addition to this film, he co-starred in The President’s Analyst and also played Dustin Hoffman’s father in The Graduate. His other films include A Thousand Clowns, The Parallax View, Oh God!, and Warren Beatty’s Reds. He played John Adams in the acclaimed stage musical, 1776, and reprised his role in the 1972 movie version. Daniels played John Quincy Adams in the TV miniseries, The Adams Chronicles, and also had major roles in the series St. Elsewhere, Boy Meets World, and Grey’s Anatomy.
Two for the Road was one of her very first movies. Her many other films include Roman Polanski’s Cul-de-Sac, Bullitt, Airport, The Grasshopper, Murder on the Orient Express, The Deep, George Cukor’s Rich and Famous, John Huston’s Under the Volcano, and Francois Truffaut’s Oscar-winning classic, Day for Night. Tickets are available here.