Bookend Parties for Cambridge Professor

The Scene: Bookend parties Friday night for the West Coast premiere of “A Brief History of Time,” based on Cambridge University professor Stephen Hawking’s life and his concepts of the origin and fate of the universe, at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences.

Before the screening, Shirley MacLaine hosted a small reception at the Peninsula Hotel. Afterward, there was a larger confluence of bodies in the Academy lobby.

Hero Worship: Hawking loves Hollywood (he keeps pin-ups of Marilyn Monroe on his office wall), and Hollywood apparently loves Hawking. Although he suffers from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, and must communicate through an IBM laptop computer with a voice synthesizer, he is known as quite the charmer. “He told me he liked dancers, especially women, not the men,” said producer/director/choreographer Debbie Allen. “I told him he was my kind of guy.”

Who Was There: Director Errol Morris, producers Gordon Freedman and David Hickman, Triton Pictures president Jonathan Dana, Hawking’s “partner” Elaine Mason, Kathleen Tynan, Kathleen Kennedy, Robert Wise, Brian De Palma and Gale Anne Hurd, Sydney Poitier, Wendy Goldberg, Valerie Harper, Ed Begley Jr., Robert Downey Jr., Kathy Bates and Robert Blake.

Audience Comprehension Level: Poor. “I read the book and listened to the tape, and I still don’t understand it,” a young woman said, voicing a typical response to the complex scientific theories. “It was absorbingly beyond me,” said another viewer.

The Buzz: Lightweight metaphysical chit-chat: “I think this room is a black hole, and everyone’s sliding under the table”; disappointment that the movie barely touches on Hawking’s romantic life; actual number of pages read of the book on which the film is based--”Of course, I finished the book,” said Poitier, “I finished it twice”; and certainty that the movie--hardly your typical Hollywood fare--will find an audience.

Understated: “The real star of the film is my mother,” said Hawking.

New Best Friends: MacLaine said that she and Hawking met through their mutual editor at Bantam Books. She calls him whenever she’s in London. “I could relate to him in a more human way than I could relate to anybody,” she said of their first meeting.

Has he read her books?

“Let’s put it this way,” she replied. “He says he’s not a mystic, but he needs more than astrophysics to believe in.”