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VALLEY OF THE DOLLS 50th Anniversary Screening on Thursday, December 28 at the Ahrya Fine Arts in Beverly Hills

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Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present the 50th anniversary of the cult classic VALLEY OF THE DOLLS (1967). The misbegotten adaptation of Jacqueline Susann’s sensational 1966 best-selling novel hit the silver screen for the Christmas movie season in 1967.

We close out the year with a special screening of this vintage “so-bad-its-good” milestone virtually 50 years to the day of the original opening, on December 28 at 7:30 PM at the Ahrya Fine Arts theatre.

Click here for tickets.

Susann’s novel explored the cutthroat side of show business from the viewpoint of three young women aspiring for success. Barbara Parkins, Sharon Tate and Oscar winner Patty Duke (The Miracle Worker) play the female protagonists, with Oscar winner Susan Hayward (I Want to Live) as a grand dame Broadway actress battling to stay on top.

Hollywood veterans, director Mark Robson (Champion, Peyton Place), and writers Helen Deutsch (Lili, I’ll Cry Tomorrow) and Dorothy Kingsley (Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Kiss Me Kate), actually toned down the seamier aspects of Susann’s book. However, they left enough lurid scenes about the early days of sexual liberation to titillate audiences in this slick and glossy film version.

The film is often cited as one of the worst movies ever made; unlike amateur “camp masterpieces” like Plan 9 from Outer Space or the more recent The Room, Valley of the Dolls has the distinction of being the product of a major Hollywood studio.

Among the contributing filmmakers were Oscar winners cinematographer William Daniels (The Naked City, How the West Was Won), costume designer Travilla (How to Marry a Millionaire) and legendary composer John Williams, who garnered his first Academy nomination for adapting Andre Previn’s music score. The theme song became a major pop hit for Dionne Warwick in 1968.

Critics of the day roasted the movie, but 20th Century Fox had the last laugh as audiences made the maligned movie a box office behemoth, the highest grossing film in that studio’s history up to that time. The film developed a cult following through the years. Susan Hayward, who replaced Judy Garland after a few days into the shoot, partially escaped the critical brickbats, but the rest of the cast and the film could not hide.

Over this holiday season, see what Roger Ebert described in 1967 as a “dirty soap opera,” and posed, “I don’t understand how Patty Duke and Barbara Parkins got themselves into this movie.” Similarly, Newsweek called it “one of the most stupefyingly clumsy films ever made by alleged professionals.”

VALLEY OF THE DOLLS also features Lee Grant, Martin Milner, Tony Scotti, Paul Burke, Charles Drake, and Alexander Davion. Our 50th anniversary presentation will have a Special Introduction and a few surprises. Returns to the big screen for one show only Thursday, December 28 at 7:30 PM at the Ahrya Fine Arts Theatre in Beverly Hills.

Presented on DCP.

SILENT RUNNING 45th Anniversary Screening plus Q&A with Director Douglas Trumbull and Producer Michael Gruskoff

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Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present a 45th anniversary screening of the groundbreaking sci-fi movie, SILENT RUNNING, which marked the directorial debut of special effects wizard Douglas Trumbull. Trumbull and Producer Michael Gruskoff will participate in Q&A after the screening.

SILENT RUNNING screens Wednesday, December 13, at 7:30pm at the Ahrya Fine Arts Theatre in Beverly Hills. Click here for tickets.

Set 100 years in the future, the prophetic script written by Deric Washburn, Michael Cimino, and Steven Bochco stars two-time Oscar nominee Bruce Dern as an astronaut sent into space to preserve the last samples of plant life that are endangered on a dying Earth. His only companions are three drones named Huey, Dewey, and Louie.

The film’s ecological message was a daring one for the time, and its relevance has only grown over the subsequent decades.

Trumbull had made special effects films for NASA while he was still in his early twenties, and he was hired by Stanley Kubrick to execute many of the most challenging and innovative visual effects in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Reviewing Silent Running, Time’s Jay Cocks compared it to Kubrick’s masterpiece: “Silent Running displays the same kind of technical virtuosity, the same sense of the still, vast symmetry of the galaxies.” He added that the movie was “a quite captivating essay on futuristic ecology.” Life’s Richard Schickel declared that the film “provides a great, near-solo role for Bruce Dern.”

In addition to his work on 2001, Trumbull played a major role in creating the special effects for The Andromeda Strain, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Star Trek: the Motion Picture, Blade Runner, and Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life.

Trumbull directed Natalie Wood’s last film, Brainstorm. He is also known as an inventor and technical innovator in many other fields. He has received numerous awards over the years, including three Oscar nominations for his visual effects and The Gordon E. Sawyer Award for scientific and technical achievement from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 2012.

After working as a highly successful agent during the 1960s, Michael Gruskoff produced his first film, Dennis Hopper’s The Last Movie, in 1971. His other films include Mel Brooks’ comedy smash, Young Frankenstein, Quest for Fire, and My Favorite Year, which we featured in a highly successful Anniversary screening earlier this year.

Presented digitally.

Angie Dickinson In-person for 50th Anniversary Screening of POINT BLANK, December 5th in Beverly Hills

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Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present a screening of the influential and imaginative 1967 thriller, John Boorman’s POINT BLANK. Co-star Angie Dickinson will participate in a Q&A after the screen film.

POINT BLANK screens at 7:30pm on Tuesday, December 5th at the Ahrya Fine Arts theater in Beverly Hills. Presented digitally. Click here to purchase tickets.

Later critics described POINT BLANK as a blend of the style of classic film noir and the technical innovations of the French New Wave. Oscar winner Lee Marvin stars as a man seeking revenge against a former business partner, who double crossed him, stole his wife and left him for dead during a robbery at the deserted prison of Alcatraz.

Marvin’s Walker (no first name) tracks them both to Los Angeles, which has been brilliantly photographed by Boorman and cinematographer Philip H. Lathrop. The screenplay was written by Alexander Jacobs, David and Rafe Newhouse, from a novel by Richard Stark (Donald E. Westlake).

Jacobs and Boorman were both British filmmakers who were stimulated by Los Angeles in the 1960s, and they made the most of archetypal settings like a hilltop house, a sprawling car lot, a frenetic disco, and the eerie storm drains along the Los Angeles River. The film crew was also the first ever to be allowed to film at Alcatraz, which had closed in 1963.

Although the film scored at the box office, it was critically underrated at the time. As Leonard Maltin wrote years later, Point Blank is a “taut thriller, ignored in 1967, but now regarded as a top film of the decade.”

Indeed it was selected for preservation by the National Film Registry in 2016 and had a strong influence on later filmmakers, including Steven Soderbergh and Michael Mann. Philip French, writing in the London Observer, called it “a landmark in the history of the crime movie.”

Angie Dickinson, John Vernon, Carroll O’Connor, and Keenan Wynn co-star. The haunting music was composed by Johnny Mandel.

Angie Dickinson was our very first guest when we launched our Anniversary Classics series four years ago. She appeared at a screening of her 1963 hit, Captain Newman, M.D., in which she starred with Gregory Peck and Tony Curtis.

Her many other memorable films include Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo; the original Ocean’s Eleven with the Rat Pack; Don Siegel’s The Killers, in which she also co-starred with Marvin, along with John Cassavetes and future President Ronald Reagan in his last feature film; Arthur Penn’s The Chase, in which she played opposite Marlon Brando; and Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill.

Dickinson also starred in the immensely popular TV series, Police Woman, during the 1970s, and was one of Johnny Carson’s favorite guests on his nightly talk show.

Click here for tickets.

 

30th Anniversary: Lasse Hallstrom’s MY LIFE AS A DOG Screens November 15th in Pasadena, Encino, and West LA

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Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present the 30th anniversary of the American release of director Lasse Hallstrom’s breakthrough film, MY LIFE AS A DOG (1987).

This screening, the latest installment of the Anniversary Classics Abroad program, takes place at three locations: Royal in West LA, Town Center in Encino, and Playhouse 7 in Pasadena on Wednesday, November 15 at 7PM. Presented digitally.

Click here for tickets.


The film, based on an autobiographical novel by Reidar Jonsson, was a huge art-house hit in 1987, and was nominated for two Academy Awards, including Lasse Hallstrom as Best Director and Screenplay from Another Medium (Jonsson adapting his novel along with Hallstrom, Brasse Brannstrom and Per Berglund).

Its success launched Swedish helmer Hallstrom’s Hollywood career. The former music video director for 1970s pop group Abba went onto a run of acclaimed films including the Oscar nominated What’s Eating Gilbert Grape (supporting actor nod -Leonardo Di Caprio), The Cider House Rules (best picture, director nods and supporting actor Oscar for Michael Caine), Chocolat (best picture nod), The Shipping News, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, and the forthcoming Disney film version of The Nutcracker and the Four Realms.

MY LIFE AS A DOG, set in Sweden in 1958-59, relates the adventures of plucky 12-year
Ingemar Johansson (played to impish perfection by Anton Glanzelius), who is sent to live with relatives in a small town during his mother’s health crisis.

Through a series of anecdotes and vignettes, he copes with a variety of characters and encounters in such an engaging manner that Vincent Canby in the New York Times noted, “Ingemar is a most winning adolescent – skeptical, introspective, curious – trying earnestly to bring order of nature’s chaos.”

Leonard Maltin offered similar praise, “Both comedic and poignant, this is ultimately an honest depiction of the often confusing nature of childhood.” The Washington Post summed up its appeal as a “well-constructed crowd pleaser.”

Audiences agreed, and accolades followed, with the film winning year-end awards as best foreign film from the Hollywood Foreign Press, National Board of Review, and New York Film Critics.

THE WHALES OF AUGUST 30th Anniversary Screening November 8th in Encino with Producer In-person

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Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present a 30th anniversary screening of THE WHALES OF AUGUST (1987), a poignant drama featuring an all-star cast of actors from Hollywood’s Golden Age.

Silent screen legend Lillian Gish and two-time Oscar winner Bette Davis play elderly sisters spending the summer on an island off the coast of Maine, struggling with jealousy, loss and regret.

The supporting cast includes Ann Sothern, who earned an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in the film, screen veterans Vincent Price (who co-starred with Davis in The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex in 1939 and went on to become the master of horror for producer Roger Corman) and Harry Carey Jr., one of the favorite actors of director John Ford.

The film is adapted from a play by David Berry and was directed by Lindsay Anderson (the acclaimed British director of This Sporting Life, If…, and O Lucky Man), making his American film debut.

The lovely cinematography of the windswept New England coast is by Mike Fash, and Anderson’s frequent collaborator Alan Price provided the musical score.

Margaret Ladd, Mary Steenburgen, and Tisha Sterling (Sothern’s daughter) portray the three women in flashbacks to their youth.

The New York Times’ Vincent Canby wrote, “With its two beautiful, very different, very characteristic performances by Miss Gish and Davis… Lindsay Anderson’s ‘Whales of August’ is a cinema event.”

Leonard Maltin called it “an exquisitely delicate film,” adding that “Gish and Davis dominate the film, a lifetime of movie memories in each classic face.”

Producer Mike Kaplan is a long-term member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and a marketing and sales veteran who first met Gish when he worked on her 1967 film, The Comedians, early in his career. Over the years he consulted for many top directors, including Stanley Kubrick, Robert Altman, and Mike Hodges.

Kaplan produced Barbet Schroeder’s The Valley, Hodges’ I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead starring Clive Owen and Malcolm McDowell, and Never Apologize, a documentary that recorded McDowell’s one-man stage show about his collaboration and friendship with Lindsay Anderson.

The film and Q & A will be followed by a special bonus screening of revealing interviews with the five principal actors of The Whales of August, filmed on location in Maine at the time of the shooting.

THE WHALES OF AUGUST screens at 7:30pm on Wednesday, November 8th at the Laemmle Town Center 5 in Encino. Producer Mike Kaplan will participate in a Q&A at the screening. Click here for tickets.

For more about our Anniversary Classics Series, visit www.laemmle.com/ac and join our Facebook Group.

Halloween Twofer Tuesday: THE MUMMY and CAT PEOPLE on October 31st in NoHo, Pasadena, and West LA

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Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present a special Halloween double feature in the popular Twofer Tuesday Series (two films for the price of one) on October 31.

We will show a “double treat” of the 85th anniversary of THE MUMMY (1932) with the 75th anniversary of CAT PEOPLE (1942). Both films epitomize atmospheric black-and-white chills from the classical studio era.

THE MUMMY was one of the early efforts from Universal studios to capitalize on the their success in the horror genre (following the 1931 hits Dracula and Frankenstein).

Karl Freund, the German émigré cinematographer of Metropolis and Dracula, made his directorial debut with this film inspired by the opening of Tutankhamen’s tomb in 1922.

Producer Carl Laemmle Jr. hired one of the writers of Dracula, John L. Balderston, to craft a screenplay from a story by Nina Wilcox Putnam and Richard Schayer, and cast Boris Karloff, fresh from his star-making performance in Frankenstein, as the three-thousand-year-old mummy stalking an English girl (Zita Johann) he believes is the reincarnation of his ancient love.

The cinematography is credited to Charles Stumar (who shot the Lon Chaney silent The Hunchback of Notre Dame). The result is a masterpiece of mood, described by critic Pauline Kael as “…disturbingly beautiful. No other horror film has ever achieved so many emotional effects by lighting; the film has a languorous, poetic feeling, and the eroticism that lives on under Karloff’s wrinkled parchment skin is like a bad dream of undying love.”

With David Manners, Bramwell Fletcher, Arthur Byron, and Edward Van Sloan.

CAT PEOPLE was the first venture from producer Val Lewton (I Walked With a Zombie, Curse of the Cat People, The Body Snatcher) as head of RKO’s new horror division in 1942. He gave Jacques Tourneur the chance to direct his first feature with this tale of a new bride (Simone Simon) who fears she is a descendant of a predatory cat family.

DeWitt Bodeen (I Remember Mama, Billy Budd) wrote the screenplay from a short story by producer Lewton, who also employed cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca and editor Mark Robson (future director of Peyton Place and Valley of the Dolls), to create one of the most imaginative low-budget films ever made. Tourneur and Musuraca later collaborated on one of the seminal film noirs, Out of the Past.

Roger Ebert called Cat People one of the “Great Movies,” extolling it as “frightening in an eerie, mysterious way that was hard to define; the screen harbored unseen threats, and there was an undertone of sexual danger that was more ominous because it was never acted upon.”

With Kent Smith, Tom Conway, and Jane Randolph. Inducted into the National Film Registry in 1993.

Our Halloween Twofer plays October 31 at three locations: Royal, NoHo 7 and Pasadena Playhouse 7. The complete double feature screens twice, with THE MUMMY shown at 5:00 pm and 8:20 pm; CAT PEOPLE at 6:40 pm and 10:00 pm.

Director Richard Donner In-person for LETHAL WEAPON 30th Anniversary Screening on October 24 at the Ahrya Fine Arts

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Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present a 30th anniversary screening of LETHAL WEAPON, the hyperkinetic buddy cop movie that launched an enormously popular franchise.

LETHAL WEAPON (1987)
Q&A with Director Richard Donner
Tuesday, October 24, at 7:30 PM
at the Ahrya Fine Arts
Click here for tickets

Mel Gibson and Danny Glover star as cops who are polar opposites but are forced to work together to break up a deadly drug ring. Gibson plays a reckless, undisciplined, suicidal detective who is paired with a cautious family man, played by Glover.

Screenwriter Shane Black brought a fresh twist to the thriller genre with these unexpected characterizations, and Richard Donner directed with energy and finesse.

Gary Busey and Mitchell Ryan portray the villains, and Darlene Love and Traci Wolfe co-star. Joel Silver produced the film.

The Washington Post called the film—a box office smash in 1987–“a vivid, visceral reminder of how exciting an action film can be.”

Roger Ebert declared, “This movie thrilled me from beginning to end,” and his critical confrere, Gene Siskel, added, “Gibson and Glover make a great team.” Three sequels and a TV series followed.

After starting in television, Richard Donner scored his first big-screen success with a low-budget horror movie, The Omen. He then launched the comic book film craze with Superman in 1978, which introduced Christopher Reeve as the Man of Steel. Donner’s many other films include the three Lethal Weapon sequels, Inside Moves, Ladyhawke, The Goonies, Scrooged, and Conspiracy Theory.

55th Anniversary Screenings of BOCCACCIO ’70 on Wednesday, October 18th in Encino, Pasadena, and West L.A.

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Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series presents a 55th anniversary screening of the Italian anthology film BOCCACCIO ’70 from 1962. It will play at three locations: Royal, Town Center 5 and Pasadena Playhouse 7 on October 18, 2017, as part of our popular Anniversary Classics Abroad series.

International omnibus films were in vogue during the golden age of the art house in the early 1960s, and BOCCACCIO ’70 was the most critically and commercially successful of these anthologies.

The film is a four part production about morality and love, re-imagining how the ribald Renaissance author Giovanni Boccaccio might have presented these tales if writing them in the 20th century, as contemporary versions of his 14th century Decameron.

Conceived by the Italian screenwriter Cesare Zavattini, and produced by Carlo Ponti, the film’s reputation rests on its collection of international talents, with segments by directors Mario Monicelli (Big Deal on Madonna Street), Federico Fellini (La Dolce Vita) featuring Anita Ekberg, Luchino Visconti (The Leopard) featuring Romy Schneider, and Vittorio De Sica (The Bicycle Thief) featuring Sophia Loren.

Although the film seems innocuous by current standards, it was the center of two uproars in 1962. The original four part version seen in Italy was trimmed for its international premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, with Monicelli’s segment dropped. That spawned a boycott of the festival by the film’s four directors.

Then for its American release the now three part version became the focus of a crusade by the Legion of Decency, the censorious arm of the Roman Catholic Church (who had condemned it for its nudity and frank sexuality), to boycott showings when it was booked by regular movie theaters in the fall of 1962.

With all the attention (coupled with the marquee draw of the directors and European beauties) the film became a crossover hit, playing beyond the art houses. It was another triumph for Sophia Loren, the reigning Oscar queen (she had won Best Actress for De Sica’s Two Women in April); for her performance Show magazine called her “one of the most accomplished comediennes in film today.”

“It has glamour, sophistication, color, wit and sensuality,” proclaimed Bosley Crowther in The New York Times, but he only saw the three part film.

Now here is a rare opportunity to the see the complete, four part version, which was never released theatrically in the United States. Come and see what all the fuss was about with this special presentation on Wednesday, October 18 at 7:00 pm at three Laemmle locations: Royal, Town Center 5 and Pasadena Playhouse 7. Click here for tickets.