LACMA Goes Hollywood With Elvis Mitchell

Museum scrapped its film program for a star-studded partnership aimed at courting showbiz bucks — helmed by the nation's most controversial critic

A A A Comments (0) By Karina Longworth Thursday, Nov 17 2011

Mitchell had originally booked Paul Feig, director of the summer blockbuster Bridesmaids, as his postscreening guest. After the Josh Radnor debacle, Feig was quietly taken off the schedule and replaced with James Gray, a filmmaker who, like Mitchell, keeps one foot in Hollywood commerce while maintaining higher-brow interests: His last film, Two Lovers, was a riff on Dostoyevsky's White Nights, starring Gwyneth Paltrow and a pre–hip-hop Joaquin Phoenix.

Opening with an anecdote about seeing La terrra trema as a 14-year-old double-feature rat in New York, Gray dominated the conversation — schooling Mitchell and the audience on Visconti's backstory as a "Mercedes Marxist," doing a charmingly terrible Scorsese impression. It was as lively and engaging a postscreening presentation as I've ever seen at a classic film screening in L.A.

PHOTO BY KEVIN SCANLON

Elvis Mitchell

The previous incarnation of LACMA's film program offered works by foreign auteurs, such as Wong Kar Wai's Fallen Angels.

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It doesn't take a cynic to see that a program that met the needs of a small but passionate group of film lovers has been replaced with a program designed to attract general audiences and curry favor with Hollywood players, in order to pull big-money donors to the museum at large. But there is a best-case scenario in which Govan could have his "sustainability" and LACMA could serve an audience that cares about film as an art form and not just a commercial enterprise. Maybe they can't all be James Gray nights. Let's just hope for no more Josh Radnor nights.