A Carnival of a Party --Hollywood-Style

The Scene: Tuesday’s premiere of Warner Bros.’ “Eraser” at Mann’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood. It was a carnival. Two blocks of Hollywood Boulevard were blocked off. The sidewalks were lined by what the Fire Department estimated as roughly 3,000 fans. (One held an inscrutable hand-lettered sign that read: “Arnold is the bomb.”) Plus enough film crews to cover the Olympics. There were five from Japanese television alone. Five. Finland had to struggle through with just one.

The Venue: “ER’s” Anthony Edwards described the party this way--”Hollywood is like high school and this is the prom.” A parking lot was transformed by Along Came Mary into two areas keyed to the film’s big action scenes, New York’s Central Park and a Baltimore shipyard. Between them were a dozen prop trees hung with live pepper tree branches, parrots, animal-shaped topiaries, cargo containers, shipping cranes and corrugated metal warehouses that spewed fire during the pyrotechnics display. Keenen Ivory Wayans surveyed the surroundings admiringly and said, “I’m just waiting my turn, that’s all. I’m just waiting for my circus.”

Who Was There: The film’s star, Arnold Schwarzenegger, with wife Maria Shriver; co-stars Vanessa Williams, James Coburn and James Caan; director Charles Russell; producers Arnold and Anne Kopelson; plus 1,100 guests including Oliver Stone, Jason Alexander, Tom Arnold, Sinbad, Jackie Collins, Jim Belushi, Marvin and Barbara Davis, Lou Pitt, Al Ruddy, Herb Ritts, Herbie Hancock; and studio execs Bob Daly, Terry Semel, Lorenzo DiBonaventura and Rob Friedman.

The Buzz: They loved it for what it was--a movie in which Arnold “gets to carry big guns and blow things up and be a total hero,” as one guest remarked. Russell Simmons, the CEO of Def Jam Records, said, “As fun as ‘The Rock’ was, this makes me forget ‘The Rock’ exists. This makes the ‘The Rock’ disappear.”

Quoted: “When you do an action movie with my name on it, then it has to have unique action and I always have to outdo myself,” said Schwarzenegger. “The expectations on action movies are now very high. People want to have them topped. It’s like a sports competition--the records are there to be broken.”

Glitch: During the screening, something went wrong with the sound and for about two minutes there was no dialogue. James Cameron’s line on this was, “Every great film has an intermission.”