Richard Lorber, whose Lorber Films merged with Kino International a year ago, and other indie-film veterans are quick to point out that Los Angeles has never been as friendly a market for their movies as New York. But the landscape has changed significantly over the past decade.
Laemmle tells the Weekly that business at the Music Hall and Sunset 5 has suffered from relatively new, upscale competitors such as the ArcLight Hollywood, Pacific's The Grove 14 and the Westside Pavilion's Landmark (part of Landmark's nationwide chain of art houses, which includes the single-screen Nuart and Westwood's Regal).
PHOTO BY PIPER FERGUSON
Edgar Wright
PHOTO BY ANNE FISHBEIN
Location Info
Related Content
More About
As the newer theaters book the first runs of top-flight Indiewood films, the Laemmle chain has turned to the controversial practice of four-walling to help subsidize the screens they devote to lower-grossing art pictures. A four-wall is essentially a pay-for-play plan through which representatives for a film give the theater cash up front for the use of the hall for a week, and then the filmmakers keep the total box office. Four-walling happens at theaters all over town, but it may be most conspicuous at the Music Hall and Sunset 5, where highly praised art films play next to movies from no-name filmmakers with no reputation to preceed them.
"These movies that really don't deserve screen time are taking up valuable screens in independent theaters," says Marcus Hu, president of L.A.-based specialty distributor Strand Releasing.
"It's a cash cow for them," Kino's Palmucci says. "So they have tended to be much more, shall we say, circumspect about playing some of these smaller foreign films that we might have otherwise had an easier time [opening in L.A.]."
"There's a lot of dross that's mixed in with some of the quality films," Laemmle admits. "There are a lot of filmmakers that want their films to play in Los Angeles, and we do provide them that opportunity. All I can say is that not every film that we play is going to be a quality film."
It's easy to see why this compromise in quality has made financial sense for the Laemmle chain. But to cinephiles, it's not always clear why unworthy films fill screens in L.A. when many better movies that get a minimum of a one-week run in New York will show for just one night in Los Angeles, if they screen here at all. Of course, L.A. doesn't have year-round, nonprofit venues quite like New York's Anthology Film Archives and Filmforum. Our closest analogues, like the American Cinematheque and Cinefamily, are only just starting to dip their toes into first-run exhibition.
Still, even when screens are easy to come by, distributors of highly acclaimed, international prize-winning, critically adored films tell the Weekly that opening their movies in L.A. doesn't always make financial sense.
"New York, for all of our successful titles, does double the business, if not maybe three times the business, compared to L.A.," says Tom Quinn, senior vice president of Magnolia Pictures, a distributor of foreign, documentary and independent American films, which like the Landmark chain is owned by Mark Cuban and Todd Wagner. Quinn cites the Oscar-nominated documentary Food Inc. and the Tilda Swinton–starring Italian movie I Am Love as examples.
David Fenkel, who co-founded indie distributor Oscilloscope Laboratories with Beastie Boy Adam Yauch, explains: "For art house films, it costs much more money to reach the same amount of audience these days in L.A. as it does in New York. The typical platform release was New York and L.A. at the same date, but [now] we actually don't always do that. There is a lot of potential to gross in L.A., but it's harder to get a high per-screen average."
Per-screen average is generally the rubric by which success is measured for limited releases, and often the determining factor for their expansion into additional neighborhoods and cities. That's one reason distributors prefer to book such films at the larger chains: A film like Black Swan, intended for a middlebrow-verging-on-highbrow audience, does very well at theaters such as the ArcLight and the Landmark, which offer amenities like reserved seating and premium concessions, at premium prices. Moviegoers happily accept inflated charges in exchange for luxe atmosphere, comfort and convenience. Both the ArcLight and the Landmark cater to a specific kind of L.A. behavior: Attached to shopping centers with easy, affordable parking, they allow a moviegoer to get several things done at once — shopping, a meal, a post-movie drink — without having to worry about moving their car. That's a nonapplicable concept at the Music Hall, located on a relatively sleepy stretch of Wilshire Boulevard, and is not a particularly attractive prospect at the Sunset 5, the crown jewel of a half-empty shopping complex now that Virgin Megastore has vacated its anchor space.
There are exceptions: Quinn notes that Let the Right One In, Magnolia's hit Swedish film about a preteen vampire that was remade as Let Me In, "did very, very well" at the Sunset 5. But generally, he says, the ArcLight and Landmark "are the highest-grossing theaters in L.A. for the films that we release."
