See and Be Seen

The Scene: Saturday night at Brentano’s in the Century City Shopping Center at Santa Monica Boulevard and Century Park West. Next door, at the AMC Century 14 movie complex, the 7:15 p.m.showing of “A River Runs Through It” is just letting out, and the crowd is building for the 10:25 p.m. showing of “The Lover.” It’s a peak moment for Brentano’s, the highest-grossing location among the 1,500 or so bookstores in the K-Mart-owned book empire (which includes Brentano’s and Waldenbooks) and the place where the literati and the glitterati of Southern California gather to check out the books and each other.

The Buzz: Quite aside from the 50,000 or so titles on display in 9,000 square feet of prime Westside real estate, Brentano’s offers an opportunity to make significant eye contact with beautiful people who may turn out to be authentic moguls or maybe script-readers for an authentic mogul, agent-lawyer-managers with a lot of juice, or maybe cabdrivers and waitresses with SAG cards in their wallets and hot scripts in their glove compartments. What they have in common is that they still know how to read something weightier than a treatment.

Dress Code: Baseball caps, Levi 501s and collarless shirts, white-on-white cable-knit sweaters over lace-trimmed leggings, and expensive leather. The profusion of beepers on belts and handbags is a bit misleading--Houston’s, the yuppie watering spot next door, hands them out to customers waiting for a table.

The Draw: A clean, well-lit place to browse before or after the show, Brentano’s is open until 11:00 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays, and 10:00 p.m. the rest of the week. The crowds visibly ebb and flow according to the literary merit of the movies at the AMC Century 14; “Sheltering Sky” and “Prince of Tides” rang the bookstore registers more loudly than, say, “Terminator III.” Says Brentano’s merchandise manager, Dan Christaens: “When a ‘challenging’ movie sells out, our business will go through the roof.”

The Rack: Most of the courtship ritual on a Saturday night occurs around the outsized magazine rack that looms in the middle of the store. All the upscale periodicals are here, the “lifestyle” mags and the gossip rags with glossy covers, plus a selection that runs the aesthetic, political and alphabetical gamut from Audacity (“The Magazine of Business Experience”) to ZooLife (“Exploring the World of Wildlife & Nature”).

“Are You in the Business, Too?”: Brentano’s is the place to go for the required reading of the entertainment industry. A special magazine rack is set aside especially for “the trades,” starting with Variety and Dramalogue and not forgetting Publishers Weekly, Electronic Media and Advertising Age. The show-business bios on display by the front door include not only “Unauthorized Michael Jackson” but also “George Cukor: A Double Life.” By the cash register, Donald A. Passman’s “All You Need to Know About the Music Business” is still on display more than a year after its publication.

The Back Bench: Not everyone in Brentano’s, of course, is a rake on the make or a Spike Lee wannabe. The bifocal set can be seen in a little seating area next to the biography section, where they are invited to rest their bunions while perching on elegant little park benches.

The Last Word: “When are you going to have ‘Sex?’ ” asks one platinum-blonde woman in white-on-white Spandex with an Evian bottle in a mesh bag hanging from her shoulder. She is, of course, referring to Madonna’s book. Brentano’s quickly sold out its 900-copy allotment, but “Sex” is not out of stock--Brentano’s in Century City is able to restock from other locations in the chain where the crowds are not quite so hip.