The Blossoming of Art-House Screens : Movies: ‘These new theaters are the art houses of the ‘90s,’ says Robert Laemmle, who just opened a multiplex devoted to specialty films.

What’s this? Another multiplex in Los Angeles?

This week’s grand opening of the Sunset 5 Theaters at Sunset and Crescent Heights boulevards is yet the latest in a significant number of new movie theater screens that have blossomed throughout the region during the last several years.

But unlike the vast number of multiplex complexes that book mostly mainstream Hollywood movies, the Sunset 5 will be devoted to the showing of specialty and foreign language films. The operators, the family-owned Laemmle Theatres chain, are longtime Los Angeles-area movie exhibitors with a history of running art-film theaters such as the Royal in West L.A., the Monica 4, the Music Hall in Beverly Hills and the Colorado in Pasadena.

Robert Laemmle, the owner of the chain, said the opening of the Sunset 5 is part of a small, almost undetected, movement in some metropolitan centers toward showing art films in multiplex complexes, instead of single-screen theaters.

“These new theaters are the art houses of the ‘90s,” Laemmle said. He said multiple screens give exhibitors booking flexibility and reduce the number of employees per screen.

Laemmle’s own Monica 4 in Santa Monica and the six-screen Angelika Film Center in lower Manhattan set the stage for the Sunset 5, Laemmle said.

Two of the theaters opened Wednesday with Eric Rohmer’s “Tale of Springtime” and Pedro Almodovar’s “Pepi, Luci, Bom.” On Friday, the other three theaters are scheduled to open with “Johnny Suede,” “A Brief History of Time” and “Mistress.”

“Sunset 5 will create a whole new market,” predicted Robert Berney, the senior vice president of marketing and distribution for Santa-Monica-based Triton Pictures, which is distributing “A Brief History of Time.”

“On one hand, there are a lot of screens in the immediate area, but they don’t have an exclusive art-house policy,” Berney said. Among the theaters he referred to were General Cinema’s seven-screen Beverly Connection, the Cineplex Odeon’s Beverly Center Cineplex and a number of large Hollywood district theaters, including last year’s addition of General Cinema’s six-screen Hollywood Galaxy.

“This opens up the art-house market,” he said. “What we’ll generally do is to take a Westside art-house location, like the Samuel Goldwyn Pavilion Cinemas (in the Westside Pavilion shopping mall) along with this new West Hollywood location.

“This year has been really good for independent films,” Berney said. “With films like ‘Howards End,’ ‘The Hairdresser’s Husband’ and ‘Raise the Red Lantern’ doing well, and with the number of films that a company like Miramax Films has, we’ve been a little underscreened.

“People think L.A. has been a soft market for art films. But it’s quite the opposite. There are even theaters out in Encino and in Orange County (showing some art-house fare) that have been doing better this year.”

Laemmle said his plans for the Sunset 5 date back more than five years, from the time he gave up the Los Feliz Theatre in 1987. In addition, Laemmle recently sold the Fine Arts Theatre on Wilshire Boulevard to PentAmerica Communications, but continues to run it and the nearby Music Hall Theatre.

Eventually, the new owners of the Fine Arts plan to convert it into a showcase for Italian movies, according to Anna Gross, vice president of production for Pent-America, a unit of Italy’s Penta Group. That group made the Oscar-winning “Mediterraneo,” spurring an enormous resurgence of interest in Italian movies.

The Sunset 5, with a total of 1,000 seats, is on the upper floors of a new neo-Italianate design shopping complex on the site of the legendary Hollywood drugstore Schwab’s, which was torn down in 1983. The new center will house shops, restaurants and the first Virgin Megastore in the United States, selling recorded music, videotapes and other products.

Two of the theaters are relatively large, with 280 and 220 seats, and all the auditoriums are equipped with stereo sound and high-backed seats. The floors in each theater have substantial slopes, resulting in good sightlines that are especially useful for movies with subtitles. Each theater is also accessible for wheelchairs and have systems for the hearing impaired.

The new theaters feature an airy lobby and a continuation of the neo-Italian theme of the shopping center, said Sunset 5 architect-designer Dale R. Furman, but he called the look even more “more colorful.”

Admissions will be $7 for most showings and $4 for the first matinees on weekdays.