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“Dedicated to all the forgotten flaming florists and hairdressers who built the gay community and blazed the trail for the rights many of us cling to today,” SWAN SONG opens at the Playhouse, Royal & Town Center August 6.

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Legendary actor Udo Kier stars as retired hairdresser Pat Pitsenbarger, who escapes the confines of his small-town nursing home after learning of his former client’s dying wish for him to style her final hairdo. Pat embarks on an odyssey to confront the ghosts of his past — and collect the beauty supplies necessary for the job. Swan Song is a funny, bittersweet journey about rediscovering one’s sparkle, and looking gorgeous while doing so.

Writer-director Todd Stephens wrote the following about his new film:

“Back in 1984, I walked into my small-town gay bar for the first time — The Universal Fruit and Nut Company. There he was, glittering on the dancefloor. Wearing a teal feather boa, fedora and matching pantsuit, “Mister Pat” Pitsenbarger was busting old school moves straight out of Bob Fosse. I was seventeen, and Pat was a revelation.

“Years later, when I set out to write my autobiographical Edge of Seventeen, I immediately thought of Mister Pat. I went back home to hunt him down, only to discover Pat had just suffered an aneurism and was temporarily unable to speak. But his lover David told me stories…about how Pat was once the most fabulous hairdresser in Sandusky, Ohio…about his legendary drag performances…about how he used to shop at Kroger’s dressed as Carol Burnett – in 1967! This was a man who always had the courage to be himself, long before that was safe.

“The truth is, Mister Pat inspired me to write Edge of Seventeen. I wrote a significant “Pat” character as my protagonist’s mentor, but midway through the shoot, the part got cut. I always knew my muse would return someday in my writing, and when he finally did many years later, I looked for Pat again only to learn he just passed away. Sadly, Pat’s legendary hand-beaded rhinestone gowns are all lost to time. Only a shoebox remains – filled with some tarnished jewelry and a half-smoked pack of Mores.

“Swan Song is a love letter to the rapidly disappearing “gay culture” of America. As it has become more acceptable to be queer, what used to be a thriving community is rapidly melting back into society. Thanks to assimilation and technology, small-town gay bars like The Universal Fruit and Nut Company are becoming extinct. Swan Song is dedicated to all the forgotten flaming florists and hairdressers who built the gay community and blazed the trail for the rights many of us cling to today. But, above all, for me this film is about learning that it’s never too late to live again.”

Laemmle Theatres will open Swan Song on August 6 at the Playhouse, Royal and Town Center.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=heN0JtJu4pE

Kurosawa, Varda, Bertolucci, Renoir, Fellini & Cuarón: Laemmle’s Anniversary Classics Abroad Series Returns.

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We’re pleased to announce the resumption of our Anniversary Classics Abroad series so moviegoers can again appreciate international cinematic masterpieces as they were meant to be seen, on the big screen. We’ll show the films all over L.A. County simultaneously at our Newhall, Pasadena, West L.A. and Glendale theaters starting July 28 with a 70th anniversary (going by its U.S. release) screenings of Akira Kurosawa’s timeless RASHOMON. Check out our trailer.
On August 25 we’ll screen Agnès Varda’s gorgeous drama about adultery in a Parisian suburb, LE BONHEUR to celebrate the 55th anniversary of its release.
We’ll follow that on September 29th with 50th anniversary screenings of Bernardo Bertolucci’s ravishing critique of  1930s Italian fascism, THE CONFORMIST.
On October 13 we’ll celebrate the 65th anniversary of Jean Renoir’s FRENCH CANCAN, a musical dramedy that chronicles the revival of Paris’ most notorious dance with the story of a theater producer (cinematic titan Jean Gabin) who turns a humble washerwoman into a Moulin Rouge star. Edith Piaf co-stars!
We’ll show Fellini’s LA DOLCE VITA on November 17. It’s the 60th anniversary of Fellini’s sardonic epic about the decadence of modern Rome.

It’s the 20th anniversary of Alfonso Cuarón’s impossibly sexy, funny Y TU MAMÁ TAMBIÉN, which we’ll screen on December 8.

Special One Night Return Engagements of Roy Andersson’s Tour de Force ABOUT ENDLESSNESS in Claremont, Glendale, Newhall, Pasadena and West L.A. July 19.

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In case you missed it in May, you’ll have another chance to see ABOUT ENDLESSNESS, one of the year’s sleeper greats, on the big screen July 19 at the Claremont, Newhall, Glendale, Playhouse or Royal. It’s on several lists as one of the best films released in the first half of 2021. Writing in the National Review, Armond White described the film as “a series of tableaux depicting mankind’s fragility and guilt” and “a moral, artistic tour de force.” Peter Bradshaw of the Guardian called it “a masterpiece. Utterly unique. A mesmerizing odyssey to the heart of existence.”

ABOUT ENDLESSNESS is a reflection on human life in all its beauty and cruelty, its splendor and banality. We wander, dreamlike, gently guided by our Scheherazade-esque narrator. Inconsequential moments take on the same significance as historical events: a couple floats over a war-torn Cologne; on the way to a birthday party, a father stops to tie his daughter’s shoelaces in the pouring rain; teenage girls dance outside a cafe; a defeated army marches to a prisoner-of-war camp.

Simultaneously an ode and a lament, ABOUT ENDLESSNESS presents a kaleidoscope of all that is eternally human, an infinite story of the vulnerability of existence.

“Give Roy Andersson 76 minutes, and he’ll give you the universe.” ~ David Ehrlich, IndieWire

An official selection of the Venice Film Festival (where Andersson won the Silver Lion for Best Director), the Toronto International Film Festival, and the Palm Springs International Film Festival.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1YlILv8eMo

“I believe God made me for a purpose, but he also made me fast. And when I run I feel his pleasure.” CHARIOTS OF FIRE 40th Anniversary Screenings.

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To celebrate the 2021 Olympics, Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present one of the best-loved sports movies of all time: the 1981 Oscar-winning drama, ‘Chariots of Fire.’ The picture retrieved a largely forgotten chapter of Olympic lore, the British triumphs at the 1924 games in Paris. In a neat parallel to the story told on screen, the film’s victory at the Academy Awards ceremony has to be considered one of the most surprising but gratifying upsets in Oscar history. We’ll screen the film July 20 at the Newhall, Playhouse and Royal at 7 PM.

The year 1981 was one of the most competitive years in recent memory. The other films nominated for Best Picture were Warren Beatty’s ‘Reds’ (with a total of 12 nominations), ‘On Golden Pond’ (10 nominations), ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’ (eight nominations), and Louis Malle’s ‘Atlantic City.’ ‘Chariots of Fire‘ came into the ceremony with a total of seven nominations, and unlike the other contenders, it had no major stars in the cast. Yet audience and industry love for the movie pushed it over the finish line. In addition to winning Best Picture, it also won Best Original Screenplay for Colin Welland, Best Costume Design, and Best Musical Score by Vangelis. The film also earned nominations for Hugh Hudson as Best Director, Ian Holm for Best Supporting Actor for his delightful portrayal of the track coach who guided the winning runners, and Best Film Editing.

The two leading roles in the film are portrayed by Ian Charleson as Eric Liddell and Ben Cross as Harold Abrahams. Both of them confronted daunting obstacles in their preparation for the 1924 Olympics. Liddell, the son of Scottish missionaries, came from a strict Christian upbringing, and he created complications for the British team when he refused to race on Sunday. Abrahams was Jewish and faced discrimination as a student at Cambridge and as an Olympic competitor. The excellent supporting cast includes Oscar winner John Gielgud and acclaimed director Lindsay Anderson as two stuffy, bigoted Cambridge dons, Alice Krige, Nigel Havers, Cheryl Campbell, and young American actors Dennis Christopher (‘Breaking Away’) and Brad Davis (‘Midnight Express’).

Producer David Puttnam (‘Midnight Express,’ ‘The Killing Fields,’ ‘Local Hero’) had conceived the film as a drama about faith and principle, in the tradition of such earlier award winners as ‘A Man for All Seasons.’ He assembled a first-rate team, including award-winning cinematographer David Watkin (‘Out of Africa,’ ‘Moonstruck,’ ‘Yentl’) and first-time feature director Hudson. Perhaps Puttnam’s boldest move was to hire Greek-born electronic composer Vangelis to provide an innovative musical score. Vangelis said that he was inspired by the fact that his father was a runner, and the score was intended as a kind of family tribute. His music has proved especially durable, serving as the theme for the 2012 Olympics held in London 30 years after the film’s release.

Reviews were largely celebratory. Kathleen Carroll of the New York Daily News praised “a movie that, with the help of Vangelis’s wonderfully stirring score, lifts the spirits to a new high.” Time magazine’s Richard Schickel added, “Like every element in this picture, the actors look right; they seem to emerge from the past, instead of being pasted on to it.” Roger Ebert declared, “’Chariots of Fire’ is one of the best films of recent years.” Later evaluations echoed the praise. Writing in 2012, Kate Muir of the UK Times said “From the opening scene of pale young men racing barefoot along the beach, full of hope and elation, backed by Vangelis’s now famous anthem, the film is utterly compelling.”

Documentarian Morgan Neville on Transforming 10,000 Hours of Very Raw Footage into ROADRUNNER: A FILM ABOUT ANTHONY BOURDAIN.

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ROADRUNNER is the latest from Academy Award®-winning filmmaker Morgan Neville (20 Feet from Stardom, Won’t You Be My Neighbor?). It’s unflinching look at chef, writer, adventurer, and provocateur Anthony Bourdain and it reverberates with his presence because it’s culled from 10,000 hours of raw footage from his TV shows. It’s “raw” in that most of it is from outtakes, but also in the sense that Bourdain’s technique to help his interview subjects open up was to get very personal with them first.

From Eric Kohn’s recent interview with Neville in Indiewire:

Q: How much footage do you estimate you went through?

A: There was anything from 60 – 100 hours of footage per episode. There were 96 episodes of “Parts Unknown.” That’s just “Parts Unknown.” Then there was “No Reservations” and “Cook’s Tour.” Not all the raw footage exists for those episodes, but it does for certain seasons. Of course, we didn’t go through all the footage, that would’ve taken years and years. We probably went through 10,000 hours. We had six of us all looking at footage, sometimes double-timed, because there was so much to go through. I love archive docs, and this was a unique one because the camera was always there and running. It becomes its own weird, interesting verite thing. It has a behind-the-scenes quality that feels raw, which I wanted to carry over into the telling of it.

Q: How did you narrow down the process?

A: We were going through footage for at least a year. Anytime there was an episode that he talked about or a crew member mentioned, we’d go through those episodes. There were definitely a number of episodes that were easy wins. A lot of the domestic ones. Or whenever Tony was on a beach. You can see that he’s in a different gear in those episodes. It’s pretty easy to tell early in a scene where Tony is phoning it in or actually wants to learn about a person. Those scenes floated to the top pretty quickly.

Q: Given how much of his shows were infused with his personality, what surprised you about the way he came across in this additional footage?

A: One of the biggest challenges early on was not to make the film feel like the show. Among the things that really surprised me was that he was fundamentally a shy person. Once you hear that, it makes sense — you can see that in him — but I don’t think it’s otherwise obvious. He overcame it in a big way, but there was always a part of him that was a little walled off.

When I was first talking to people who worked on the show, they would say, “Tony had this technique, and we didn’t know it was his technique.” When he was shooting a scene with someone he didn’t know, he would open up about himself in a really raw way. The crew would be sitting there wondering when he’d get to the point of speaking about the subject. Eventually he would, but by speaking about himself, he would get other people comfortable talking about themselves.

Of course, they cut all that stuff out of the show. But the raw footage has a lot of Tony revealing a lot about himself to people — knowing it was never intended for broadcast. It was part of who he was. I remember talking to David Simon about Tony and he said the first time he met Tony, the first thing he said was, “Oh, you’re from Baltimore. I tried to score heroin once there and couldn’t.” To which Simon replied, “Then you must have been a terrible junkie.”

Read Kohn’s full piece here.

This behind-the-scenes look at how an anonymous chef became a world-renowned cultural icon is enjoying universal acclaim:

“It feels like an essential document, created in the radical no-reservations spirit in which he lived.” ~ Leah Greenblatt, Entertainment Weekly
“An intimate and fascinating portrait of the beloved celebrity chef and television globe-trotter. It is also, inevitably, a spiritual investigation into why his life ended.” ~ Owen Gleiberman, Variety
“It does what Bourdain’s work did: ROADRUNNER makes you want to jump on a plane, discover a new place, a new culture, eat a great meal, and make a new friend. What could be more valuable?” ~ Jason Bailey, The Playlist
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cmtJFKMFU1c

“It’s Not Easy to Show Your Life as Undocumented People. But We are Ready…Because It is Time.” The Filmmaker & the Subjects on the Making of I CARRY YOU WITH ME.

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Based on a true love story, the decades-spanning romance I Carry You with Me begins in Mexico between an aspiring chef and a teacher. Their lives restart in incredible ways as societal pressure propels the couple to embark on a treacherous journey to New York with dreams, hopes, and memories in tow. We’ll open this moving film this Friday at our Playhouse and Town Center theaters, with additional venues in the subsequent weeks.

Reviews have been glowing. “A gay story and a border story, told in the universal language of love, family, and dreams.” (Entertainment Weekly). “Ravishing and unshakable, Ewing’s authentic film feels like the crossbreed between a painful memory and a hopeful dream about a place, a relationship and a fight for acceptance that’s not political but entirely humanistic.” (Remezcla) “Dreams make up both the form and substance of I Carry You with Me, Heidi Ewing’s accomplished narrative feature debut.” (Washington Post)

The director Heidi Ewing, center, on the set of “I Carry You With Me.” Courtesy of Loki Films.

The New York Times recently published a Nicolas Rapold piece headlined “When Truth Melds With Fiction: Making I Carry You with Me. Here is the beginning of the piece:

“Heidi Ewing knew her friends Iván García and Gerardo Zabaleta for seven years before learning the full story of their journey. Iván and Gerardo first fell in love in the 1990s in Mexico, where they had to keep their relationship a secret. They emigrated separately to the United States, with Iván crossing the border first on foot at great risk.

“In New York, the men eventually thrived as restaurateurs, and today run two Williamsburg establishments. But, Ewing learned, the couple remained undocumented, like millions of others.

“Ewing, an Academy Award-nominated filmmaker (“Jesus Camp”), recognized a captivating romance when she saw one. But how could she portray her friends’ in-between status, living in a world that kept forcing them to conceal basic facts of their existence?

“In I Carry You with Me , now in theaters, Ewing found her own in-between path by filming a hybrid fiction. Spanning childhood through adulthood, from Mexico City to New York, it’s the rare movie that both stars actors — Armando Espitia plays Iván and Christian Vázquez plays Gerardo — and the people being portrayed.

Vázquez, left, with Ewing on set. Courtesy of Loki Films

“But the project — Ewing’s first fiction feature — looked a little different at first.

““It was so trial-and-error, because when they first told me their story, my go-to was, ‘This is a beautiful documentary,’” Ewing said one morning at a Lower East Side eatery.

“Beginning around 2013, she filmed significant moments in Iván and Gerardo’s lives — birthdays, restaurant openings, Cinco de Mayo. She also shot interviews with them (carefully lit and partly inspired by “My Dinner with Andre”). While gathering these materials for several years, she continued to make movies with her longtime co-director, Rachel Grady: “Detropia,” “Norman Lear: Just Another Version of You” and “One of Us.”

“Heidi Ewing directed a film about two of her friends and their love story, both following them in real life and using actors to portray them in narrative moments.” Here are the first few paragraphs:

“But her documentary about her friends kept posing certain challenges. Hardly any archival photos or video of Iván and Gerardo existed, for example. And she usually steered clear of documentary productions that did not have a “current-day evolution of a story or narrative,” as she put it.

“There was also the question of doing justice to her friends’ romance.

““You want to see somebody fall in love. A documentary camera is never there — at the bar, the restaurant, the street corner, the subway, the bus, the glance between two people,” Ewing said.

“She decided to cast actors to dramatize Iván and Gerardo’s history together. The couple gave their full support.

Christian Vázquez as Gerardo, and Armando Espitia as Iván in “I Carry You With Me.” Courtesy of Alejandro Lopez Pineda/Sony Pictures Classics

Read the rest of the piece on the New York Times website.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKH-PKU2hsQ

The Soul Lift We Need: Joyous Music Documentary SUMMER OF SOUL (…OR, WHEN THE REVOLUTION COULD NOT BE TELEVISED) Opens July 2.

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In his acclaimed debut as a filmmaker, Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson presents a powerful and transporting documentary: part music film, part historical record, created around an epic event that celebrated Black history, culture and fashion. Over the course of six weeks in the summer of 1969, just one hundred miles south of Woodstock, The Harlem Cultural Festival was filmed in Mount Morris Park (now Marcus Garvey Park). The footage was never seen and largely forgotten–until now. SUMMER OF SOUL shines a light on the importance of history to our spiritual well-being and stands as a testament to the healing power of music during times of unrest, both past and present. The feature includes never-before-seen concert performances by Stevie Wonder, Nina Simone, Sly & the Family Stone, Gladys Knight & the Pips, Ray Baretto, Abbey Lincoln & Max Roach and more. SUMMER OF SOUL won both the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award for Feature Documentary at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. Laemmle Theatres opens in July 2 at the Claremont, Glendale, Monica Film Center, Newhall, NoHo and Playhouse theaters.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slFiJpAxZyQ&t=3s

Reviews have been rapturous:

“A joyous piece of filmmaking, something that I could have watched for literal hours, and contains quite simply some of the best concert footage ever put on film.” ~ Brian Tallerico, RogerEbert.com

“SUMMER OF SOUL is as thoughtful as it is rousing, a welcome shot of adrenaline to kick off not just a film festival but a new year.” ~ Sheri Linden, Hollywood Reporter

Sly Stone performs at the Harlem Cultural Festival in 1969, featured in the documentary SUMMER OF SOUL. Photo Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures. © 2021 20th Century Studios All Rights Reserved

“You can come for the music and stay for the politics, or vice versa; either way, it’s a vibrant document of an inspiring event that never loses sight of what that event meant for a community, a city and a culture.” ~ Steve Pond, TheWrap

Nina Simone performs at the Harlem Cultural Festival in 1969, featured in the documentary SUMMER OF SOUL. Photo Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures. © 2021 20th Century Studios All Rights Reserved

“SUMMER OF SOUL stirringly captures the moment when a sea of people in Harlem heard a grand series of voices and said, Yes.” ~ Owen Gleiberman, Variety)

Mavis Staples and Mahalia Jackson performing at the Harlem Cultural Festival in 1969, featured in the documentary SUMMER OF SOUL. Photo Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures. © 2021 20th Century Studios All Rights Reserved

“Seething through the entire documentary, against the backdrop of a racially turbulent 1960s, is an insistence on a new kind of racial pride and unity across the diaspora, which infuses “Summer” with an honesty and realism.” ~ Tambay Obenson, indieWire

Gladys Knight & the Pips perform at the Harlem Cultural Festival in 1969, featured in the documentary SUMMER OF SOUL. Photo Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures. © 2021 20th Century Studios All Rights Reserved

“The lack of awareness of this event is another tragic example of black history being ignored. Only this time the record survived, and now we all get to share in it.” ~ Jordan Hoffman, Guardian)

Hugh Masekela performs at the Harlem Cultural Festival in 1969, featured in the documentary SUMMER OF SOUL. Photo Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures. © 2021 20th Century Studios All Rights Reserved

THE LADYKILLERS Alec Guinness, Peter Sellers, and Herbert Lom Arrive at the Royal, Playhouse, and Town Center July 2.

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In the newly restored British comedy THE LADYKILLERS (1955), a crew of thieves led by Professor Marcus (Alec Guinness) pulls off a daring heist and tricks their elderly landlady, who believes them to be a string quintet, into sneaking the loot past the authorities. When things don’t go as planned, the crew must improvise to keep their treasure and to ensure the old woman’s silence. Widely considered one of the finest comedies ever filmed, we’re proud to screen it at the Royal, Playhouse and Town Center starting July 2.

Katie Johnson and Alec Guinness in Alexander Mackendrick’s THE THE LADYKILLERS (1955). Courtesy: Rialto Pictures/StudioCanal.

“A superbly elegant comedy. Even after 65 years, it still kills… Subversive, hilarious and as English as Elgar… A mixture of cynicism with guileless innocence.” – Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

“Extravagantly funny.” – Pauline Kael

Peter Sellers and Danny Green in Alexander Mackendrick’s THE LADYKILLERS (1955). Courtesy: Rialto Pictures/StudioCanal.

“Near flawless.” — Philip French

“The last, most enduring and best known of all the studio’s comedies, in which the sheer blackness of the central concept is barely disguised by the accomplished farce which surrounds it.” – Time Out

Rialto Pictures on the 2021 restoration:

As the last British film shot in three-strip Technicolor, THE LADYKILLERS is fortunate to have all thirty-three reels of its original Technicolor camera negative. So it was crucial and important that these elements be used for StudioCanal’s restoration, the best version of the film since its original release.

The restoration began with the 4K pin-registered scanning of the original 1950s Technicolor three-strip camera negative. With three-strip Technicolor (a process that was last used by Hollywood in the early 1970s), three color separations (r yellow, cyan and magenta) are combined to create the full Technicolor palette. Therefore, though the release prints of THE LADYKILLERS are 11 reels total, there are 33 reels of camera negative.

One of the biggest issues to overcome was the proper alignment of the separations. This was automated to a certain extent, but a huge amount of manual tweaking was required, involving tracking each one of the perforations. This is performed to avoid “fringing,” which causes colored outlines on edges of objects, faces etc.

Manual and automated digital restoration was then carried out over the aligned images. This was to remove particles of dirt, debris, hair, sparkle and then moving onto bigger issues such as stains, marks and scratches. The film suffered from a few extreme issues such as blue marks in the middle to right hand side of frame throughout the film that had to be removed. There was significant flicker that has been corrected as best as possible on a shot-by-shot basis. Many shots suffered from instability and some sections also suffered from scratching, the worst being four minutes of scratched film throughout an entire sequence.

In total, the film benefitted from over 1000 hours’ worth of 4K digital restoration. A 35mm Technicolor print was used as a reference for the color grade to ensure the new HDR Dolby Vision master stayed true to the film’s original 1950s “color by Technicolor” look.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TdJGho9p-wA