Theaters of the Rich and Famous

So you’re tired of lining up at Century City’s Cineplex on Saturday nights only to confront the ultimate movie villain--the sold-out sign?

Well, build your own damn theater then. Eddie Murphy did at his lavish New Jersey estate, Bubble Hill. Murphy’s private theater has everything your corner Loewe’s used to--from a working refreshment stand to Art Deco touches to a ticket booth. Everything, that is, except a dummy to take the tickets, not even one of the lifelike mannequins favored by the private theater designer. Murphy’s wife, Nicole, put the kibosh on moving in any more permanent residents.

“When it’s dark,” Murphy’s mom, Lillian, says, “they give her the creeps.”

So she said to Brett Anderson in a new coffee-table tome “Theo Kalomirakis’ Private Theaters” (Harry N. Abrams / CurtCo Freedom Group). Kalomirakis is a New York-based designer who whips up plans for personal movie palaces, a recent addition to the can-you-top-this school of home design.

Ninety percent of his clients are in subtle Southern California, natch, among them Dean Koontz, who is bringing new meaning to the word “intensity.” Kalomirakis’ design for Koontz’s new Newport Beach digs is a 3,000-square-foot, 40-seat theater inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright’s Unitarian Temple in Chicago, complete with stained-glass paneling and mezzanine.

That amounts to chump change compared to a $1-million-plus project Kalomirakis is working on for a computer mogul in Reno.

“We’re creating a Tuscan village in the house,” the designer says. “One room becomes the village taverna. There are newsstands, grocery stores. We’re talking 5,000 square feet. At the end of the village, the street leads to the movie palace with foyers, powder rooms, bars. When these guys throw parties for 500 people, they don’t have to leave that environment. It becomes a mini-Disneyland.”

Help.

These aren’t mere media rooms with a lowly big-screen TV, or even screening rooms, which are simply rooms for screenings. They’re fabulous theater-ettes complete with lobbies, going for $40,000 and up--and that’s not even counting electronic equipment.

Kalomirakis says the movie-going moguls’ maw is so huge that his practice has gone from a couple of theaters a year to a couple of commissions a week, from the U.S. to Kiev. There he’s retooling a cement-block screening room used by Lenin to watch newsreels. His client is a Ukrainian American businessman.

Indeed, most of Kalomirakis’ clients are not people in the movie business.

For people in the Industry, “the theater is not a fantasy like it is for the rest of us,” he says. “For other people, everyone wants to be a producer or a movie star, and getting close to the theater is the closest to fulfilling that fantasy.”

Critic Roger Ebert--who has his own mini-palace inspired by his first date with his wife, Chaz, at Chicago’s Lyric Opera--writes of other reasons we mortals yearn to be embraced by the film-going experience. As Robert Mitchum’s wife, Dorothy, told her matinee-idol amour of the hoohah he created among his fans: “Bob, it’s because when you’re up there on that big screen, they’re smaller than your nostril.”

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To the list of Hollywood’s more curious trends, add this: married male actors smooching other men on-screen. Most recently, Kevin Kline and Tom Selleck locked lips in the comedy “In and Out.” Now Bruce Willis joins their ambi-amorous ranks when he busses Stephen Spinella in “The Jackal.”

We don’t mean to suggest that the burly Willis is getting cuddlier. He plays a chameleonlike assassin-for-hire in the new action thriller, and, at the film’s premiere last week, director Michael Caton-Jones said he and Willis cooked up the scene to show you exactly how uncuddly his character could be, how far he’d go to be bad.

“This guy had no ethics,” Willis added. “He could kill a cop, kiss a guy, whatever it takes to get the job done.”

Caton-Jones said the smooch scene made Universal “very nervous. Because in these politically correct times, anything that’s closer to the edge, they treat with kid gloves.”

Caton-Jones said he wasn’t influenced by the current crop of kissers. “You make a film a year and a half in advance. You reflect the zeitgeist.”

As for “Die Hard” hero Willis, he said he relished being a very, very bad boy for a change. “I loved it,” he said. “I got so close to the inherent darkness of the character it’s easy for me to see that for the right amount of money, I could do what he does. Of course, I’m doing all right as an actor.”

Whew!

Meanwhile, Tess Harper did a fine turn as a generic first lady type who happens to have chin-length blond hair, a fervor for children’s causes and an Arkansas accent.

An Arkansas accent? “I’m from Arkansas,” Harper said. “Hillary is really from Illinois, so my accent. . . . Oh, it doesn’t matter.”

OK, OK, so it isn’t the first time someone has told Harper she resembles Hillary Rodham Clinton, whom she met at a Dallas event during the Clintons’ first presidential campaign.

Anyway, Harper was happy to flatter Clinton with her imitation. “I’m a huge fan. She’s great. There’s nothing more dangerous than a blond with an opinion.”

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And what exactly does a 15-year-old actress wear to movie premieres?

Why, Kenzo, of course, judging from Kirsten Dunst’s Kenzoid regalia at the recent opening of his new store on Sunset Plaza. The Paris-based designer is surfing a U.S. comeback, and lest you think his clothing is meant only for people who actually remember the ‘70s, the Kenzo folks present exhibition A--the nubile Dunst.

Of course, the forces of Kenzo are also happy to renew ties with old friends. Witness the still nubile Janice Dickinson, who remembered her first brush with Kenzo-iana as a nouvelle model many moons ago.

“He hired me for my first fashion show which made me a big star in Paris. I couldn’t get arrested in New York, and in Paris there was a big model strike. My sister, Debbie, wasn’t working, and halfway through the show I gave her half my clothing, so he ended up making her a star too. It was a scandal.”

Apparently, les choses Kenzo really are built for the ‘90s.

“I still have a shearling coat from 20 years ago that has held up,” Dickinson said, resplendent in the designer’s strapless tuxedo dress. “The face fell, but the coat still stands.”

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The latest Beverly Hills accessory? Why, a bodyguard, of course, three if you can swing it. That’s how many Kay Siegal, wife of financier Jerry, had in tow along to keep an eye on the $300,000 worth of jewels she wore to the recent Empress Ball at Crustacean, according to the restaurant’s publicist. Socialite June Winkler and restaurateur Elizabeth An invited revelers to dress as members of a 19th century Vietnamese court. But royalty is evidently in the eye of the beholder in this imaginative part of the world. There were a few Cleopatras, one Miss America and one Don King, a.k.a. comedian Bobby Kelton. Martin Landau dressed as another monarch in a dark suit and tie. Said the Oscar winner: “I came as Richard Nixon.”