Hollywood Shows Off ‘Logic’

It was an industrial screening that New Vision Pictures gave “Queens Logic” at Century City’s AMC Century 14 Theaters.

That’s a Hollywood term for opening a film with a party that ranks somewhere between a screening (showing the film to industry friends) and a gala premiere (showing the film to industry friends, but making them wear black-tie and donate money to charity.)

It was the kind of party Thursday that “suggests a kind of hospitable prudence,” said New Line Cinema’s chairman Robert Shaye, who’s distributing the film with Seven Arts.

Held across the Marketplace plaza in the Stage Deli, it was billed as a “New York-style nosh” to accompany the film’s Borough of Queens setting.

Egg creams were delivered on trays, pizzas were sliced with a Rockaway Boulevard expediency, and enough corned beef and pastrami sandwiches were served to feed Ozone Park.

Wandering beneath hundreds of yellow and black balloons were 600 guests, among them the film’s co-stars: Kevin Bacon, Ken Olin, Joe Mantegna, Tony Spiridakis and Chloe Webb (who had the best definition of what the film’s title, “Queens Logic,” meant--”common sense with an attitude”).

One co-star who didn’t attend was John Malkovich (whose performance in another film, “The Sheltering Sky,” recently was described in the British magazine Blitz as “an idiosyncratic form of acting that may soon be known simply as Malkoviching”).

Others on hand included Rosanna Arquette, James Woods, Elizabeth Perkins, Timothy Busfield, Ron Perlman, Helen Hunt, Marlee Matlin, Gary Busey and the film’s executive producers, Taylor Hackford and Stuart Benjamin. The schmoozing, networking and deal making went on until the Deli pulled the plug on the flow of pastrami.