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Glendale Arts Summer Soiree “Under A Thousand Stars” to Honor Laemmle Theatres’ Greg & Tish Laemmle.

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Laemmle Theatres President Greg Laemmle and his wife Tish Laemmle are being honored by the good folks at Glendale Arts “in recognition of their unparalleled legacy of dedication to independent filmmakers and the art of storytelling on the screen.” Glendale Arts is an award-winning 501(c)3 non-profit organization that generates opportunities throughout greater Los Angeles to showcase, promote, encourage, and engage with the arts. From their announcement:

Glendale Arts proudly announces the organization’s highly-anticipated Summer Soiree “Under A Thousand Stars” to be held on Saturday, July 27, 2024 from 7:00-10:00 P.M. at ace/121 Gallery. Tickets for the event of the season are now available for purchase here.

Guests are invited to revel in the dazzling beauty of the gallery, transformed into an elegant indoor/outdoor spectacle of art and performance. The inspirational evening will comprise epicurean delights, artful mixology, a silent auction featuring original works of art by emerging and renowned artists from the Los Angeles area and beyond, and a celebratory program highlighting GA’s dynamic programmatic pillars – the Glendale International Film Festival, Solo Fest, and ace/121 Gallery.

A highlight of the event will be the presentation of The Aura, Glendale Arts’ inaugural award honoring luminaries who power the arts. The first-ever recipients of The Aura are Laemmle Theatres Head Greg Laemmle and his wife Tish Laemmle, Art in the Arthouse Curator at the family-run theatres which have brought the best of foreign and independent cinema to Los Angeles for over 85 years. The Laemmles will be honored in recognition of their unparalleled legacy of dedication to independent filmmakers and the art of storytelling on the screen.

Summer Soiree proceeds benefit Glendale Arts, the city’s premier arts non-profit. Funds raised will support GA’s mission to cultivate year-round opportunities for artists and audiences to convene around mutually enriching experiences that promote creativity, foster meaningful connections, and build community through the performing, cinematic, and visual arts mediums.

“We are excited to bring supporters and community, business, and industry leaders together for a night that salutes the transformative power of the arts,” said Glendale Arts Board Chair Marci DeSousa. “The Summer Soiree will not only showcase the heart and soul that drives Glendale Arts’ mission, but will also celebrate what distinguishes GA as a unique non-profit with local roots, regional impact, and a global footprint.”

“I set out to make a film about solidarity and finding the small gestures of kindness and understanding between strangers and family alike.” Levan Akin on his film CROSSING, opening July 19 at the Royal.

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Next week at the Royal we open Crossing, the acclaimed new film by the Swedish-Georgian director Levan Akin (And Then We Danced). It follows Lia, a retired teacher living in Georgia, as she tries to fulfill a promise to find her long-lost niece, Tekla. The search takes her to Istanbul, a beautiful city that seems full of connections and possibilities. There she meets Evrim, a lawyer fighting for trans rights, and Tekla starts to feel closer than ever.
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Akin will attend the July 20 evening screening for a Q&A.
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“A piercing portrait of forgiveness across generations…Dumanli, making her screen feature debut here, is a pure joy to watch, enveloping the movie in a sense of warm coziness and safety as, just being in her presence, you feel like everything will somehow work out.” ~ Ryan Lattanzio, indieWire

“It’s seductive, fragmented, involving.” ~ Fionnuala Halligan, Screen International

“Akin makes a calculated choice to raise awareness of the trans community in Istanbul, but he does so through representation rather than manipulation.” ~ Peter Debruge, Variety

“This novelistic drama takes time to connect its central triangle but does so with a suppleness and restraint that amplify the emotional rewards of its lovely open-ended conclusion.” ~ David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

Director’s statement: With Crossing I set out to make a film about solidarity and finding the small gestures of kindness and understanding between strangers and family alike. I also wanted to show rooms and places that are rarely explored in stories from the region. 

The film is based on a true story I was told whilst researching And Then We Danced, about a grandmother traveling from Georgia to Turkey in search of her trans granddaughter. Just like with my previous film, making Crossing was very challenging. The existence of LGBTQ+ people in Georgia and Turkey is under large pressure and Turkey’s president Erdogan ran most of his  recent presidential campaign around anti-LGBTQ+ rhetorics. 

In my film we follow retired schoolteacher Lia who is looking to fulfill her recently deceased sister’s dying wish – to find her lost trans daughter, Tekla. Together with a down on his luck  young man, Achi, who claims to have Tekla’s address in Istanbul, she travels from Georgia to  Turkey to find her niece. Lia and Achi are from different generations and as such don’t have  much in common even though they live in the same country. There is a great divide of ideology in Georgia between the Soviet and the post-Soviet generation. Achi desperately wants to leave Georgia as he lives under the oppressive rule of his older brother and he knows there is no future in Georgia for his young western leaning generation. 

As the journey unravels, so does Lia. Through her relationship to Achi and her encounters with  the trans community in Istanbul, specifically with Evrim (a trans woman who works as a lawyer for an NGO in Istanbul), Lia begins to open up and see the world and her place in it differently. All three main characters have made great sacrifices in limiting their lives and inhibitions in order to not upset the ruling hegemony. 

I myself am Georgian born in Sweden (my ancestry is from Batumi), and I have ties to Turkey (both my parents were born there). The journey from Batumi in Georgia, along the Black Sea to Istanbul is a journey I have taken many times myself as a child. I am a mix of many cultures, traditions and norms and the themes of modernity versus tradition are very personal and  something I have struggled with myself. I drew a lot from my own experiences, asking myself if  my grandparents were living today, would they accept me for who I am? Probably not – but in  showing these examples of acceptance I hope to inspire new ways forward.

“Remembering Norman Mailer and His Thorny Legacy ‘HOW TO COME ALIVE With Norman Mailer’ hits on an ingenious structure that avoids hagiography even as it includes friends and family.”

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From Alissa Wilkinson’s New York Times review of the superb new documentary we are opening next week, HOW TO COME ALIVE with Norman Mailer:

Given the hagiographic bias of most celebrity documentaries, HOW TO COME ALIVE with Norman Mailer sails into choppy waters. The director Jeff Zimbalist had to figure out a way to sum up one of the 20th century’s most admired, and most notorious, cultural figures. Mailer’s legacy as a novelist, speaker, filmmaker and pop culture icon — the movie reminded me how often he’s mentioned in “Gilmore Girls” — is full of bad behavior and also brilliant work, and making a film about such a person seems nearly impossible in our nuance-averse climate.

The key is to play with the documentary’s structure, eschewing the usual soup-to-nuts setup. HOW TO COME ALIVE with Norman Mailer is admittedly designed as a roughly chronological recounting of the writer’s life, covering all the highlights: six wives (one of whom he famously, horribly stabbed with a penknife), nine children, a stint in the military, best-selling novels, a fascination with brawling, combative TV appearances, opinions about God and machines and Americans’ midcentury impulse toward conformity.

But Zimbalist hits on a great idea: arrange the film in terms of what Mailer’s friends, enemies and acquaintances believe his “rules for coming alive” might be. The author’s life and legacy can thus be traced through those rules, and his evolution as a person — and he did evolve, constantly, insatiably — starts to make more sense. What emerges is a portrait of a man as often at war with himself as with his family, friends and countrymen, driven relentlessly toward machismo and always spoiling for a fight. This is not a person you can present neutrally to an audience.

There are seven rules, announced in intertitles, including, “Don’t Be a Nice Jewish Boy,” “Be Wrong More Than You’re Right” and “Be Willing to Die for an Idea.” It’s an appealing structure, and the many interviewees discuss the ways Mailer embodied them, supported by archival film and interviews with the man himself. There’s a lot of footage to work with. By midcareer, Mailer was ubiquitous on camera; as one person notes, he seemed to never turn down an opportunity to be interviewed or share his views publicly.

I’m impressed by how well the film balances criticism and fondness. Several of Mailer’s children are among the interviewees, as are ex-wives, all of whom have frank stories, while also respecting his rapacious intellectual curiosity, his drive to always be thinking and questioning. Especially delightful is the segment that revisits his appearance as rabble-rouser in an explosive panel discussion on feminism held in 1971 and documented in D.A. Pennebaker’s excellent documentary “Town Bloody Hall” (streaming on the Criterion Channel). Mailer was set up on the panel as the opposing voice to feminist theorists, and came in for a drubbing; this film reminds us that Mailer was there because he was valued by those same interlocutors, some of whom are interviewed expressing their respect for his input.

I expect every viewer of HOW TO COME ALIVE with Norman Mailer will have some quibble with it, but it’s an accomplishment nonetheless — a model for how to reimagine a standard documentary structure to accommodate a multifaceted subject without smoothing over the rough spots and slapping on a halo. And for those who don’t know his work, it’s a worthy introduction: a study in how not to live, but also in how to come alive.

A SUMMER PLACE 65th Anniversary Screening July 11.

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A SUMMER PLACE 65th Anniversary Screening July 11 with special introduction by film music historian Steven C. Smith celebrating the career of composer Max Steiner.

Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present the 65th anniversary of the teen angst romance classic A SUMMER PLACE (1959) starring Sandra Dee and Troy Donahue on Thursday, July 11 at 7 PM at the historic Royal Theatre in West Los Angeles. Written and directed by Delmer Daves, the lavish melodrama is now best remembered for introducing the phenomenally successful “Theme from A Summer Place,” the best-selling instrumental in pop music history.

Adapted from a popular novel by Sloan Wilson (The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit), the film deals with two families intertwined through their teenage children while on summer holiday at a coastal resort in Maine. Bert and Sylvia Hunter (Arthur Kennedy and Dorothy McGuire) are the proprietors of a faded resort and the parents of a teenage son Johnny (Troy Donahue) who play host to a vacationing wealthy businessman, Ken Jorgensen (Richard Egan), his wife Helen (Constance Ford), and their daughter Molly (Sandra Dee). Johnny and Molly embark on a summer romance while Ken and Sylvia rekindle an illicit affair, reuniting twenty years after Ken worked at the resort. The rest of the film deals with the hot button topics (this was the 1950s after all) of infidelity, scandal, divorce, and teenage pregnancy, which raised the hackles of the watch-guard censors.

Warner Bros. hoped to emulate the box office smash Peyton Place, which had depicted similar subject matter just two years earlier, even casting one of its Oscar-nominated supporting actors (Arthur Kennedy). Lushly mounted, with Technicolor cinematography by veteran Harry Stradling, Sr. and a sumptuously romantic score by Max Steiner, the film also echoes the extravagant 1950s melodramas of Douglas Sirk. Sandra Dee, who had become a teen favorite in Gidget and Sirk’s Imitation of Life that same year, was elevated to a four-year run as a top ten box office star, while Troy Donahue, who had been in small parts in a few previous films (including Imitation of Life) had a star breakthrough.

The box office success of A SUMMER PLACE overrode contemporary critics’ concerns. Howard Thomson in The New York Times called it a “raucously sensual drama…and one of the most garishly sex-scented movies in years.” Variety also pointed out its obvious appeal, saying “it makes the most of Hollywood’s newly discovered freedom to display the voluminous vocabulary of sex,” while the Harvard Lampoon kiddingly named it one of the ten worst movies of the year. The dubious notices and controversial subject matter, combined with the repressive morality of the era, made the film ripe for “camp” evaluation. Seemingly innocent dialogue like Molly’s inquiry “Johnny, have you been…bad…with girls?” and Constance Ford’s overwrought performance as Molly’s shrewish mother unknowingly contributed to that camp reputation, with one wag citing Ford’s part as the “Wicked Witch of the West.”

Daves had been an accomplished director in different genres since the 1940s (Pride of the Marines, Dark Passage, Broken Arrow, 3:10 to Yuma, An Affair to Remember), but after the commercial success of A Summer Place he finished his career mostly helming similar but inferior melodramas like Parrish, Susan Slade, and Youngblood Hawke in the 1960s. Despite critical reservations, A SUMMER PLACE remains a consummate example of top-notch craftsmanship at the end of the studio era. It has also achieved extended notoriety by its inclusion in a memorable scene in Barry Levinson’s Diner (1982) and the use of its hit instrumental theme in a number of films over the past 60 years.

Max Steiner was one of the original founders of the Hollywood Sound in motion picture scoring, and “did more than any other composer to introduce and establish the language of film music.” Over the course of a four-decade film career he provided memorable scores to such classics as King Kong, Gone with the Wind, Now, Voyager, Casablanca, The Big Sleep, White Heat, and The Searchers, among many others, while winning three Academy Awards. “Theme from A Summer Place” was recorded by Percy Faith and had a then record-breaking nine week run at the top of the pop charts, winning the Grammy as Record of the Year, while Steiner collected a nod for Song of the Year and a bounty of royalties.

Our guest commentator Steven C. Smith is a four-time Emmy-nominated journalist and producer of more than 200 documentaries about music and cinema. He is the author of the definitive biography, “Music by Max Steiner: The Epic Life of Hollywood’s Most Influential Composer,” which will be available for sale and signing.

A SUMMER PLACE and the celebration of Max Steiner shows one night only: Thursday, July 11 at 7:00 PM at the historic Royal Theatre, enjoying its centennial year as a continuously operating movie theatre since opening in 1924. Coming attractions for the Anniversary Classics Series include the 40th anniversary of Suburbia on July 24 at the NoHo with guest writer-director Penelope Spheeris as a preview of Art House Day.

Agnieszka Holland’s unforgettable new film GREEN BORDER opens Friday at the Royal.

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We are proud to open filmmaker Agnieszka Holland’s powerful new film Green Border this Friday at the Royal Theater in West L.A. Thirty years after her Oscar-nominated film Europa Europa, Green Border is set in the treacherous and swampy forests that make up the so-called “green border” between Belarus and Poland. Here refugees from the Middle East and Africa trying to reach the European Union are trapped in a geopolitical crisis cynically engineered by Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko. In an attempt to provoke Europe, refugees are lured to the border by propaganda promising easy passage to the EU. Finding themselves pawns in this hidden war, the lives of Julia, a newly minted activist who has given up her comfortable life; Jan, a young border guard; and a Syrian family intertwine.

“By replicating the process of dehumanization, the film’s form forces us to confront our own inaction. Green Border is unforgettable, in all senses of the word.” ~ Bilge Ebiri, New York Magazine/Vulture

The “cruelty can be shocking, and while there are moments in this tough movie when I wept, the rigor of Holland’s filmmaking, and the steadfastness of her compassion, help steady you as a viewer.” ~ Manohla Dargis, New York Times
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“A heart-in-mouth thriller… Agnieszka Holland‘s bruisingly powerful new refugee drama ultimately comes from a place of optimism.” – Jessica Kiang, Variety

“A righteous, infuriating and woefully compelling watch.” – Laura Babiak, Observer

“Profoundly moving, flawlessly executed… if cinema is an empathy machine, to paraphrase the late Roger Ebert, then Agnieszka Holland‘s new film is one precision-tooled specimen.” – Leslie Felperin, The Hollywood Reporter

“A humanitarian masterpiece.” – Damon Wise, Deadline

“A rapturous cinematic experience,” JANET PLANET opens Friday at the Laemmle Royal, Town Center, and Glendale.

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From film critic Tim Grierson’s recent L.A. Times profile of Janet Planet star Julianne Nicholson:
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“When she was 18, Julianne Nicholson came to New York City to model but quickly grew tired of that — she knew she wanted to act. “I was waitressing and just living my best life,” she says over Zoom, smiling, from A24’s Manhattan offices. “I was basically being a young person in New York without a care in the world. It was wildly different from Janet Planet.” She’s referring to the wonderful new film set during summer 1991 in which she stars — a film that, like Nicholson, doesn’t put on airs but is capable of small miracles. Since its premiere at Telluride, Janet Planet, the debut feature of acclaimed playwright Annie Baker, has been the sort of understated indie revelation that discriminating viewers excitedly share with their friends like a gift.

“Now finally opening in New York on Friday, with the Los Angeles release planned for June 28, Janet Planet is ready for its grand unveiling — and, in a sense, so is the marvelous Nicholson, an Emmy winner who has read the same stories about her that you have.

“Normally, the first thing that’s said about me is ‘underused,’ ‘underappreciated,’ ‘overlooked,’” says Nicholson, with a heard-it-all grin, At age 52, she tries to ignore other people’s perception of her fame and how much more massive they think it ought to be. “Normally, I’m fine with it because I continue to work. But every once in a while, I feel like, ‘Oh, my God. I’m so tired — am I still trying to get people’s attention?’”

“Those who have worked with Nicholson need not be reminded of her greatness or the way she makes her artistry invisible. Just don’t expect them to explain why Nicholson isn’t a huge star. When I ask Baker in a separate interview why she thinks the actor isn’t more renowned, she’s mystified that the industry can’t see what she and so many others do. “I find that really perverse,” Baker, 43, replies. “I’m outside of the Hollywood machine, and in my world, Julianne is a mega-celebrity.””

 Click here to read the rest of Mr. Grierson’s profile.
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“There is no way to predict what will strike a chord, or an arrow into your heart, but one thing is certain: the temporal, emotional, and sensory experience of Janet Planet is a uniquely rare gift that needs to be seen and savored.” ~ Katie Walsh, Tribune News Service
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“Janet Planet is a brilliant debut for Baker, who doesn’t so much translate her artistry to the screen as discover a whole new frontier for her singular sensibility.” ~ Charles McNulty, Los Angeles Times

“It’s the kind of minimalist, yet emotionally rich memory piece that’s so quietly attuned to people, place and the passing of time that, ironically, it makes you want to shout hosannahs from a mountaintop until you’re hoarse.” ~ David Fear, Rolling Stone

“Whether you’re a longtime fan of Annie Baker’s plays, or meeting her work for the first time, Janet Planet is a rapturous cinematic experience.” ~ Drew Gregory, Autostraddle

A HARD DAY’S NIGHT 60th Anniversary Screening June 25 with pop music expert Domenic Priore.

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Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present the 60th anniversary of A HARD DAY’S NIGHT (1964). Starring the Beatles at the height of Beatlemania, we’ll screen this rock ‘n’ roll movie classic on Tuesday, June 25, 7:30 PM at the historic Royal theatre in West Los Angeles. Directed by Richard Lester from an Oscar-nominated original screenplay by Alun Owen, the milestone film was also aptly nominated for musical scoring. (George Martin lost to Andre Previn for My Fair Lady.)

After the Beatles exploded onto the global stage by early 1964, the British pop group (John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Ringo Starr) conquered the American pop music charts with record-breaking domination, and their appearance on the “Ed Sullivan Show” on American television in February that year cemented their phenomenal popularity. A movie starring the quartet was then put into production in England, planned for a summer release. The finished film, A HARD DAY’S NIGHT, portrays 36 hours in the life of the group as they prepare for a televised variety show concert. Director Richard Lester utilizes several techniques in a semi-documentary style, reinforced by Gilbert Taylor’s black-and-white cinematography, all on dazzling display in the high energy musical comedy.

Lester’s approach was fully embraced by film critic Andrew Sarris, who wrote in the Village Voice, “A HARD DAY’S NIGHT (is)… the Citizen Kane of jukebox musicals, the brilliant crystallization of such diverse cultural particles as pop music, rock ‘n’ roll, cinema-verite, the nouvelle vague, free cinema, and studied spontaneity.” Roger Ebert was equally impressed, citing it as “one of the great life-affirming landmarks of the movies.” Bosley Crowther of the New York Times, one of the powerful tastemakers of the era, also raved, calling it “a whale of a comedy…a wonderfully lively and altogether good-natured spoof of the juvenile madness called Beatlemania.” Comparing the Beatles’ clowning to the Marx Brothers, Crowther enthusiastically endorsed the movie as “rollicking, madcap fun.”

The film was highly influential, spawning numerous imitators including the pop group the Monkees‘ television series later in the decade, and the advent of music videos in the 1980s. Lester went onto a long career, helming the second Beatles’ film Help, The Knack, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Petulia, and The Three (and Four) Musketeers among others. The Beatles, of course, became the most influential and innovative pop musicians of the twentieth century, achieving that lofty status in a single decade, the 1960s, before going their separate ways. A HARD DAY’S NIGHT showcases their dynamic music early in their careers, and, as pointed out by TV Guide, “ the strength of their songcraft is stirring.”

Our guest Domenic Priore is an author, pop music historian, and pop culture commentator. He has contributed to several books and is the co-author of “Riot on Sunset Strip: Rock ‘n’ Roll’s Last Stand in Hollywood.”

A HARD DAY’S NIGHT plays one night only Tuesday, June 25, 7:30 PM at the historic Royal Theatre, celebrating its centennial year, operating continuously as a movie theatre since opening in 1924. Our next attractions include The Secret Garden with guest Agnieszka Holland on June 29, and A Summer Place with film music historian Steven C. Smith on July 11.

The “unequivocally beautiful” Senegalese film BANEL & ADAMA opens Friday at the Royal.

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A rare debut feature that premiered in competition at the Cannes Film Festival, and Senegal’s official submission to the 96th Academy Awards, Banel & Adama is a lush and lyrical West African dreamscape, a tragic romance that soars to the heights of longing and descends deep into the realm of myth as it sets its protagonists’ perfect everlasting love on a collision course with their community’s traditions. We’re proud to open it this Friday at the Royal. Click here to see the trailer.

“Unequivocally beautiful. Sy paints breathtaking scenes with her camera, demonstrating a gorgeous way of seeing the world.” – Lovia Gyarke, Hollywood Reporter

“A striking debut that puts Sy on the map. The combination of ethereal voiceover with nature at its most breathtaking evokes our cinema’s philosophical high priest, Terrence Malick.” – Sophie Monks Kaufman, Indiewire

 

“Transfixing… a tragic, evocative love story.” – Robert Daniels, OkayAfrica

“In Ramata-Toulaye Sy’s impressive debut, she’s saying we’re more than flesh and blood – and that if things are falling apart, we can still make sense of it because we’re storytellers.” – Steve Pond, TheWrap

“The directorial debut of French-Senegalese filmmaker Ramata-Toulaye Sy, this is one of those pictures to which the phrase “every frame a painting” might apply.” – Glenn Kenny, RogerEbert.com

“A cosmic love story. With its balletic choreography of performance and statuesque visual approach, Sy’s film is a work of remarkable composition.”  – Little White Lies

“Wonderfully photographed and vehemently acted, the film is full of ideas. An impressive piece of work from a natural filmmaker.” – Peter Bradshaw, Guardian

“It really gets under your skin.” – Damon Wise, Deadline

“It’s a remarkable performance from Mane, who conveys the mutinous, deluded anger in a young woman who would bend the world around her to her will if she could.” – Wendy Ide, Screen International