Chillin’ With the Gang at the ‘Ghettoplex’

Call up the phone number in the movie ads and the recording offers a bright greeting: “Thank you for calling CinemaCal’s Americana 5 Cinemas!”

But if you talk to some of the customers who patronize the Americana, you might learn about its nickname.

“Some people call it the Ghettoplex,” acknowledged a theater employee.

Maybe that started the night “Colors” opened and gangbangers drove by and shot out the windows. When I drove out to Panorama City the other night with a friend, the Americana was so dark that we feared there might have been some more trouble. The marquee lights were off, but you could still read what was, or maybe wasn’t, playing.

“Jurassic Park.” “Cliffhanger.” “Made in America.” “Menace II Society”. . . .

It looked closed to me, but my friend noticed that the door was open and people were playing video games. I pulled against the curb and suggested that she wait while I found out if the films were playing.

She was incredulous: You want me to wait here? By myself?

Fears of carjackings danced in our heads as we parked around the back and locked the Club on the steering wheel.

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I don’t usually hang out in Panorama City, not unless duty calls. We’d come to watch “Menace II Society.” Or, more precisely, to watch the audience watch the movie. Other films get more hype, but few may be so potent as this critically acclaimed depiction of life in South-Central that makes “Boyz N the Hood” seem as saccharine as a Disney film.

Given the subject matter, “Menace” has caused theater owners to worry about a repeat of the violence that accompanied “Boyz N the Hood,” “Colors” and “New Jack City.” Westwood won’t touch it, and you can bet that Universal City’s Cineplex Odeon, where gunfire and chaos greeted the “Boyz” opening, won’t tempt fate again.

But check it out, a friend told me. John, who is African-American and a family man, had seen it down in Torrance and was disgusted by the way some inner-city youths cheered on the routine brutality of the protagonist Caine and his fellow antiheroes.

This being Los Angeles, it’s not hard for me to be shaken and at the same time understand why some black youths would get a vicarious kick out of the opening scene, in which a Korean liquor-store owner is shot dead as surely as Latasha Harlins. But as the film progressed, John could see that many young people seemed to be cheering the violence itself--most of which, in another bow to realism, is black on black.

A couple of women, John said, walked out in anger over the dialogue’s rain of “bitch” and “ho.’ ”

“When it was over,” John said, “I felt like driving to LAX and going back to New York.”

My experience was different. I went to see “Menace” twice. At an Encino theater, the audience was better dressed, racially mixed but older and whiter than the small crowd a few nights later at the Americana. Both nights there wasn’t much cheering but some laughter at the film’s deliberately perverse humor.

Some critics have suggested the film’s message is embodied in the warning a friend’s caring father gives to Caine: “The hunt is on and you’re the prey. All I’m saying is: Survive.”

But it’s easy to see how some may interpret the message as: Kill or be killed.

To Darrell Waters, the Americana’s young black assistant manager who said he grew up on the periphery of gang life, the message is: “Here it is, and this is how it is.”

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The night “Menace” opened at the Americana, Waters said, several gangsters, both Crips and Bloods, drove out to catch the movie, joining several Latino gangs from the Valley.

There was cheering at the events on screen but no trouble between the gangs. “There was like a truce so they could just watch the movie,” Waters said. “The reaction was like, ‘Damn. That’s realistic.’ ”

On this night, three young black men from Panorama City were in the audience. For 17-year-old Terrell Strong, this was a second viewing. He was here on opening night, when, as he put it, “everybody was chillin’.” He identified himself as a member of the “posse” that goes by the initials EWF--short for Every Woman’s Fantasy.

It was a good movie, they agreed. Terrell and his friends said they could relate to Caine all the way, from his desire to avenge his cousin’s murder to his abrupt dismissal of a girl who tearfully tells him that she’s pregnant and only he could be the father.

How, they asked me, is Caine to know that the girl isn’t lying?

Scott Harris’ column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday. Readers may write Harris at The Times Valley Edition, 20000 Prairie St., Chatsworth 91311.

But as the film progressed, John could see that many young people seemed to be cheering the violence itself. . . .