That’s an Hour for Every Year of the War

The Scene: Thursday night’s premiere of “Gettysburg,” the Civil War epic from Turner Pictures and New Line Cinema. It was one of five premieres in one week for the film, which was also feted in Washington, Atlanta, Detroit and Gettysburg.

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Who Was There: Ted Turner and Jane Fonda; director Ronald Maxwell; stars Sam Elliott and Kevin Conway; and guests Charlton Heston, Tom Hayden, Nicholas Roeg and Theresa Russell, Nancy Allen, Lou Diamond Phillips, Zelda Rubenstein and the Barbarian Brothers.

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Dress Code: Loose and comfortable. (Would you want to sit through a four-hour movie in a tux?) Turner, caught up in playoff fever, wore a tie stitched with tiny replicas of the Atlanta Braves’ logo.

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Chow: With its four-hour, eight-minute running time, “Gettysburg” made for a marathon premiere--snacks were served as guests arrived for the 6 p.m. screening, a light buffet was brought out at intermission, and guests emerged to a full supper when the movie finally broke at 11 p.m.

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Quoted: Was Turner worried about enticing modern Americans, with their “Beavis and Butt-head” attention spans, into theaters to watch a four-hour movie about three days of the Civil War? “No.

We wanted to make this the longgest movie ever,” he boasted. “This is even longer than ‘Cleopatra’!” (When it airs on the Turner cable channel TNT next year, “Gettysburg” will be a six-hour mini-series, with footage not seen in the theatrical release.)

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Overheard: Turner was happy to meet and greet after the screening, but Fonda had other ideas. “I’ll be waiting in the car,” she told him before disappearing.

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Triumphs: The lobby of the Director’s Guild Theater in West Hollywood was turned into an elaborate replica of antebellum splendor, with bronze statues of Confederate soldiers, live plants, a cannon, a mock-up of a Southern mansion and a string quintet playing period songs.

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Best Touch: The lobby’s supporting pillars were wrapped in bark with pepper tree branches hanging from them.

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Glitches: With a screening this long, telephone panic is inevitable. The three public phones in the DJA lobby were under constant siege by anxious, cellularless Hollywood types.

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Exit Line: As the credits rolled, one man came out of the theater rolling his neck. “How was it?” someone inquired. “The North won,” he mumbled.