Cinema Society Rounding Up the Usual Suspects: Real Buffs : Movies: About 100 film fans have bought memberships in a new Orange County chapter, which shows U.S. films before they premiere and sponsors receptions and talks.

Owning and running a restaurant used to keep La Jolla film buff Bruce Klowden from going to the movies as often as passion impelled him. Work botched up any sort of social life, in fact. Cinema Society helped change all that.

For the last four years, Klowden and his wife have belonged to the society, an organization for movie lovers that offers private screenings of major, first-run U.S. films before they premiere publicly. Advance-screening receptions and post-show lectures and audience discussions are part of the package.

Begun in San Diego in 1984 and since expanded to three other West Coast chapters, the society has now found its way into Orange County with a fifth chapter in Costa Mesa and is scheduled to screen its first film in January, organizers said.

“We love it,” said Klowden, owner of Aesop’s Table restaurant in La Jolla. “It forces us, in our busy schedule, to go and do something of a social nature, and we have an interaction with people doing the same thing we are interested in.”

Much like season subscribers to the ballet or opera, for $150 annually members are guaranteed admission to at least 10 films and typically are shown more, said society founder and director Andy Friedenberg.

Among movies the society has screened, anywhere from a few days to a month before general release: “Moonstruck,” “A Room With a View,” “Working Girl,” “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” “Stand by Me,” “Mystic Pizza” and, recently, “Steel Magnolias.”

Membership also includes a monthly newsletter with screening dates, the advance-screening receptions with free light refreshments and post-movie lectures, delivered occasionally by an actor in the film or its director, but most often by local specialists conversant with each movie’s subject matter.

“For instance, when we showed ‘The Last Emperor’ in San Diego, we had a professor of Chinese history from the local university,” Friedenberg said. “When we showed ‘Punch Line,’ we had a local stand-up comic.”

In Costa Mesa, the society will be co-sponsored by Women in Commercial Real Estate, a trade group that sells memberships to the movie group in return for 15% of the revenues. Films will be shown Thursday nights at the Edwards Town Center Cinema.

Why join the society, whose San Diego branch has sold out its 500 memberships annually since 1984, rather than simply drive to the local multiplex? Several reasons, Friedenberg said, but mainly it “forces” busy people, as Klowden put it, to make the time and commitment to movie-going.

“We send members the newsletter two to three weeks before, and they put (screenings) on their calendar,” Friedenberg said. “Also, they have a cocktail party where they know they’ll see friends, they know they won’t wait on lines, that they’ll learn about the film they’re seeing and get to talk about it, that they’ll see it before others see it, and see it with a mature audience with no crying kids.”

Indeed, the society’s “mature audience” is key to its modus operandi, Friedenberg said.

While he said he has no special arrangement with the Hollywood studios from which he rents films, the society generates ticket sales and support for movies that appeal to “adult, sophisticated” film fans (you won’t see “Friday the 13th,” for instance)--the very sort of films that he would like to see Hollywood make more often.

Society members, mostly professionals whose average age is 40, “are key opinion-makers in the community (who) will see a film and tell their friends,” said Friedenberg, who also runs a nonprofit foundation screening classic films. “Word of mouth is the strongest advertising tool for studios.”

Friedenberg, 34, created the film society after working for six years a regional publicist and promoter for such studios as Columbia and United Artists. The society screens mostly U.S.-made films because “it just works out that way,” he said. “There are a lot of interesting films being made in this country.”

He decided to open a chapter in Orange County partly because “people said, ‘You have to do it in Orange County. They support the arts, they love the arts there.’ ”

Newport Beach-based Women in Commercial Real Estate will use its 15% of county membership revenues to support its own work encouraging professional development among real estate women, said Patricia Ann Rock, a Newport Beach real estate agent who is coordinating the effort.

Rock added that some of her group’s proceeds may also go to a local charity. The other society chapters--based in northern San Diego County, Seattle and Portland, as well as the city of San Diego--form similar partnerships.

“I think it’s an interesting joint venture between an artistic group and a business organization in a local community, and a novel way to promote the film arts,” Rock said.

About 100 Orange County Cinema Society memberships have already been sold, she said. For information, call (714) 733-5545, or the society’s San Diego headquarters, (619) 454-7373.