WESTSIDE / COVER STORY : A CLASSIC

The box office is barely the size of a broom closet, the screen curtain is torn and stained, and the battered orange seats make a high school auditorium look fashionable. Even the snack counter sells nothing more exotic than popcorn and Raisinets.

At the Nuart Theatre in West Los Angeles, patrons forsake creature comforts for the sake of cinema.

Probably the foremost theater in Southern California devoted to first-run art films, old-movie revivals and documentaries, the Nuart has carved out its own niche in the annals of theater exhibition. It has given important early bookings to a host of young directors who went on to greater glory--John Waters, David Lynch and Jane Campion, to name a few.

Waters’ “Pink Flamingos” and Lynch’s “Eraserhead,” two ‘70s films now considered classics, each received important early exposure at Nuart midnight screenings, which attract a colorful mix of aging hippies, tweedy cineastes , leather-clad punkers and others.

Yet as the Nuart marks its 20th anniversary under the same management, the venerable movie house finds itself at a crossroads.

Landmark Theater Corp., co-founded in 1974 to operate the Nuart, was acquired in 1991 by the Samuel Goldwyn Co., which has since embarked on an aggressive national expansion. Based in West Los Angeles, Landmark now runs 120 screens in 16 cities, employs 1,000 people nationwide and is building new multiscreen theaters in San Francisco, Minneapolis and Boston. The company also operates two other Westside first-run specialty houses, the Pavilion in Rancho Park and the NuWilshire in Santa Monica.

Industry experts say the so-called multiplexes, along with the rise of home video, have gone a long way toward making single-screen theaters like the Nuart all but obsolete. But Landmark insists its 550-seat flagship theater on Santa Monica Boulevard can thrive in the changing marketplace.

“No one builds single-screen theaters anymore,” concedes Landmark President Steve Gilula. But, he adds, “the Nuart is a unique institution.”

The Nuart owes its singularity, in part, to the rise of independent films in the last decade or so. This has given art cinemas plenty of new movies--allowing the Nuart, for instance, to offer such sleeper hits as Campion’s “Sweetie” and Gus Van Sant’s “Drugstore Cowboy.”

But at the same time, the availability of old movies on video and cable TV has made it harder for theaters that show classics to attract audiences.

So the Nuart, like a handful of other art theaters nationwide, has survived with a crazy quilt of offerings--some old movies, some new, some totally obscure. The eclectic mix is reflected in the four-color calendar that the theater publishes every three months, replete with boxes of blurbs and photo cutouts.

The Nuart’s programming has slowly evolved since the mid-1970s, when Gilula and partners Gary Meyer and Kim Jorgensen took over the theater and devoted it almost entirely to revivals of old movies. Such theaters were called “grindhouses” because they showed a different double-feature bill every night.

Previously, the Nuart had, like many art cinemas, fallen on hard times. Built during the 1920s, the theater played studio pictures that had just finished six or eight weeks in the plush movie palaces along Hollywood Boulevard. Then, during the ‘50s and ‘60s, the Nuart began riding a wave of high-brow foreign films by Ingmar Bergman and others.

But by the late 1960s, U.S. studios had begun making bolder, more artistically challenging pictures that competed favorably with the foreign films. Movies such as “Midnight Cowboy” and “The Godfather” sold out at neighborhood theaters that were previously not known for showing cutting-edge cinema.

The Nuart and many other art cinemas survived by showing racy potboilers and, later, soft-core pornography.

“If you’re a theater operator, you’ve got to keep the doors open,” Meyer said. “They found out sex was selling and subtitles weren’t.”

Gilula, now 44, and Meyer, 46, were both fresh out of college when they met in the film-buying department at United Artists Theaters in San Francisco during the early 1970s. After a brief period working for a small film company, Gilula in 1974 teamed up with Jorgensen to run the Nuart. Meyer became involved in programming the UC Theater in Berkeley, which was another early Landmark property.

Meyer handled film bookings from his native San Francisco as Gilula managed Landmark’s growth from Los Angeles. During the mid-1970s, the chain more than doubled its number of screens (from four to 10), using internal cash flow and financing from a concessionaire. In the early 1980s, Landmark--so named because many of its theaters were in historic buildings--merged with Movie Inc., a New Mexico-based exhibitor that ran about 13 single-screen theaters in the Southwest.

Even as the company grew, Gilula kept the atmosphere relaxed.

“No one in our office wears a suit and a tie,” he said. “We’re high-energy and intense but very casual about the environment.”

Meyer spent much of his time screening new movies and traveling to film festivals. But he and the other principals realized that a slate of old movies wasn’t enough for a single screen like the Nuart. They needed a gimmick. So, in addition to reviving movies ranging from “Casablanca” to “A Clockwork Orange,” the Nuart--like some other art theaters around the country--began offering midnight screenings of fringe cinema, including films by Waters, Lynch and others.

Soon midnight movies became a cultural phenomenon from coast to coast. Fans of “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” packed screenings at which they sang, danced and wore outrageous costumes inspired by the comic musical. The events became more live theater than cinema--and remain so to this day.

“It was an occasion for the audience to identify itself, to cluster around a particular movie,” said Jim Hoberman, film critic of the Village Voice and co-author of the book “Midnight Movies.”

“Often these were films regarded as outre , and in midnight screenings they could be released without the typical procedures of reviews and conventional release patterns,” Hoberman said. “The films could catch on and be an in-group kind of thing.”

Theaters in New York were the first to show Waters’ “Pink Flamingos” and Lynch’s “Eraserhead,” but both directors credit the Nuart for giving their careers an early boost in the film capital of the world.

“The Nuart ran ‘Pink Flamingos’ for 10 years, for heaven’s sake. Talk about good legs,” Waters said in a telephone interview. “It’s still a theater (where) I go to to see a film. . . . It always had the films that took the most chances.”

Sometimes these runs led to special relationships between certain directors and the Nuart. For instance, Waters made a short film for the Nuart about 10 years ago that was soon picked up by other theaters nationwide. The film showed the director smoking a cigarette and reminding audiences that the law prohibited smoking in a public theater.

“But don’t you wish you had a cigarette now?” Waters asked viewers. “Go ahead and smoke. It gives ushers jobs.”

By then, many viewers had begun watching old movies on VCR and cable and stopped going to revival houses. Over the past dozen years, the number of Landmark screens devoted solely to old movies has dwindled, from almost two dozen to about four or five.

Meyer and Gilula (Jorgensen left the company in 1982) began mixing more first-run foreign and independent movies into the Nuart’s revival programming. They scored some big successes with Wim Wenders’ “Wings of Desire” and the director’s cut of “Blade Runner,” among others.

The merger with Goldwyn three years ago benefited both parties. To expand, Landmark needed capital that could be provided by a large, publicly traded company. Goldwyn, meanwhile, was interested in acquiring the theater chain to help diversify its holdings beyond TV, and movie production and distribution.

Meyer Gottlieb, president and chief operating officer of the Samuel Goldwyn Co., said that the audience for specialized movies such as those shown at the Nuart is the fastest-growing segment of the market, accounting for almost 20% of the $5-billion annual box office ticket sales in the United States.

Goldwyn has so far resisted the temptation to turn the Nuart into a reconstituted movie palace. Unlike the El Capitan or Chinese theaters in Hollywood, the Nuart has no grand rococo details or stately lobbies. Instead of classical or easy-listening music before the feature, the speakers pipe out be-bop jazz.

But Nuart patrons come for the movies, not the ambience.

“It’s certainly not the most comfortable theater in the world, but that’s a small price to pay for what they show,” said Jonathan Benair, a Los Angeles screenwriter who has frequented the Nuart for years. Meyer said that Landmark prefers to spend money on upgrading sound and projection equipment rather than interior design, but he added that a new curtain is on order.

The theater’s main marketing tool remains the calendar, which is distributed in the lobby and at area coffeehouses and bookstores. The current issue advertises a December run of “Red,” the final segment in a trilogy by Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski, and a special series of old noir films in February. And there’s a Betty Page look-alike contest on Jan. 6, at a midnight screening of some rare burlesque reels featuring the famous ‘40s and ‘50s pinup.

The eclectic approach has captured a broad cross-section of film-goers. Benair said he often sees the seats fill up with hard-core movie buffs he calls “film geeks.” But he said the theater also attracts large numbers of teen-age punks, college kids, music fans, and gays and lesbians, many of whom are drawn by special series.

Despite the theater’s obvious following, though, some wonder how much longer the Nuart and other single-screen theaters can survive.

Single screens “are the dinosaurs of exhibition,” said Bob Laemmle, owner of the Laemmle Theatres, a chain that competes with Landmark for bookings and viewers. Two years ago, Laemmle opened the Sunset 5, an art cinema multiplex in West Hollywood that has successfully combined first-run art movies at night and classic revivals on weekend mornings.

“You really need to spread costs over a multiple number of screens to continue to function,” Laemmle said.

Gilula admits that a multiplex has certain advantages over the Nuart. Meyer, who still does most of the theater’s booking, has very little margin of error because a flop movie cannot close before the ending date posted in the calendar. Sometimes distributors want their pictures to have time to develop an audience instead of being locked into a fixed run. Sometimes audiences just aren’t interested in certain pictures.

Gilula explained the disappointing results of one special series this year by noting, “I’m not sure people wanted to see films about human rights.”

But Gilula says that, despite the odds, the Nuart has stayed profitable and grown into a cultural institution with formidable staying power.

“The theater really has its own reputation,” he said. “It provides an outlet for films people could see nowhere else. It’s raised the consciousness and broadened the taste of a whole generation of filmgoers.”