Looks Like They Got All the Details Right

The Scene: Monday’s benefit world premiere of Columbia’s “The Remains of the Day” at the Motion Picture Academy’s theater. A party followed in the perennially overcrowded lobby. Although the film brought together the cast and filmmakers of multiple Oscar-winner “Howard’s End,” Emma Thompson thought credit should go to the material, not the team. “I think if we were doing ‘Police Academy 5,’ we wouldn’t be getting as much attention.”

Who Was There: The film’s stars, Thompson, Anthony Hopkins and Christopher Reeve; director James Ivory, and producer Ismail Merchant, who came with Goldie Hawn; plus 1,000 guests, including David Bowie and Iman, Twiggy, Sydney Pollack, Joanna Pakula, Treat Williams, Teri Garr, Patrick Stewart, Michelle Lee, Lori Petty, and studio execs Mark Canton, Lisa Henson and Sid Ganis, and Rita Rudner, who said: “We like uptight English films because Americans have a deep-rooted suspicion that we’re not classy--and we’re right.”

Audience Review: Ecstatic. They would have handed out Oscars on the spot. Hopkins’ approval, however, was more restrained: “It’s a love story. It looks pretty. I’m in it. I recommend it.”

Best Alternate Title: Remembering Hopkins’ Oscar-winning role, one guest suggested that “Remains” be called “The Silence of the Lords.”

Dress Mode: It felt like autumn, so there was a bit of cold weather dressing--at which the English excel. They have tweeds and scarves. The locals have extra-thick sweat pants.

Money Matters: Tickets were $125, and more than $100,000 was raised for Education First!, a nonprofit devoted to making education a priority public issue. “We don’t have much time,” co-founder Lynda Guber said. “An uneducated nation will kill us all.”

Chow: An English menu, including poached shrimp, rice pudding and curried lamb skewers from two caterers: Along Came Mary on the south side of the room, Ambrosia on the north.

Quoted: Hopkins on the Merchant-Ivory magic: “Like any good director, they’re accurate about the period. They always take care that they’ve got it all right. And that somehow registers with an audience. It’s in the details. All those details add up and the audience says, ‘It feels right.’ ”

Hollywood Vocabulary: Mansion movie. An elegant period film set in palatial surroundings. As in the sentence, “You don’t make a mansion movie and then expect to sell it to a bunch of drunk teen-agers at a drive-in.”