Studios Snub Valley on First-Run Art Films

“Magnolia” is a movie set and filmed almost entirely in the San Fernando Valley. It’s named after a North Hollywood street and is the work of a bona fide Valley Boy, 29-year-old filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson, who grew up in Studio City hoping to make “the epic, all-time great San Fernando Valley movie.”

But if Valley residents want to see “Magnolia,” they’ll have to go to the Westside. Like many movies aimed at sophisticated audiences, the three-hour “Magnolia” won’t land in the Valley until weeks after it’s created a buzz on the other side of the Hollywood Hills.

Other suburban areas also have to wait for first-run flicks, but the Valley takes pride in being the movie studio capital of the world, home to Walt Disney Co., Universal Studios and Warner Bros.

Even so, “the studios consider the Valley almost like Middle America,” said Robert Bucksbaum, president of ReelSource, a box office tracking company. “It’s not true, but the perception is that the Valley is more conservative and less sophisticated than the Westside. Just imagine how people feel in Nebraska.”

If there’s ever a time when Valley film buffs get treated as hayseeds, it’s Christmas weekend. Just consult the list of studio-coddled projects playing now: “Angela’s Ashes,” “Snow Falling on Cedars,” “The End of the Affair,” “Boys Don’t Cry,” “The Emperor and the Assassin,” “Mansfield Park,” “Cradle Will Rock” and “The Cider House Rules.”

All are “exclusive engagements” in West Los Angeles, Santa Monica, Century City, Beverly Hills or even Irvine. None is playing in the Valley, though “Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo,” a comedy about a newly minted hustler, is being shown on 17 screens Valleywide.

“It bugs the daylights out of me that after all these years, we still have to drive over the hill to see a decent film,” said Ernie Schroer, a Northridge resident who prefers subtitles to submachine guns in his movies.

Schroer and other Valley film buffs insist that limited release movies would do great in the Valley, if given a chance. A look inside the distribution deal for recently released “Liberty Heights” suggests they may have a point.

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As Warner Bros. prepared to distribute the film about coming of age in a Jewish community, Bob Laemmle, owner of Laemmle Theaters, pressed the studio to let him in on the opening weekend. Laemmle wanted to show “Liberty Heights” at his Encino Town Center 5, known in the Valley as a steady venue for artsy movies and located in an affluent area with a large Jewish population.

Barry Levinson, who wrote and directed the film about his own youth in Baltimore, said a director can influence where a movie opens.

“Encino does seem like a good territory for this film, and I could have asked why we weren’t doing it there,” said Levinson, who directed “Rain Man” and “Diner.”

But it was news to Levinson, who lives in Marin County, that a theater owner was pushing to open the film in Encino.

“You have to trust the distribution people will find those areas where there’s a heart of an audience,” Levinson said.

In the end, executives at Warner Bros. decided Encino was too suburban to warrant a first run of “Liberty Heights,” said Daniel R. Fellman, president of Warner Bros. distributing. The film debuted in Century City on Nov. 17 and expanded to Beverly Hills and Irvine the next weekend.

“These are very, very delicate films that we open in densely populated areas so we can pack people in and do really well,” Fellman said. “That way many people can’t get in and want to see the film even more.”

To be sure, the Valley draws large opening-weekend crowds for wide-release movies. In the summer months, multiplexes from Burbank to Chatsworth are swarmed by candy-gobbling teens streaming in to see the latest blockbusters--typically star-driven action flicks and teen comedies.

But for year-end projects that are less commercial, more artsy and riskier than blockbusters, studio executives like Fellman say the Westside is the most reliably sophisticated area to generate the buzz needed to take the film to the next stage of distribution.

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Opening a film in the Valley, Fellman added, would make about as much sense as opening a film on Long Island, New York, instead of Manhattan. The Westside and Manhattan, and to a lesser extent the downtowns of San Francisco, Boston and Toronto, are the top spots for exclusive engagement screenings.

But despite all this, when “Liberty Heights” came to Encino on Dec. 10, it grossed $11,704, according to ACNielsen EDI Inc., which tracks box office results. That was more than any other theater on the West Coast for the film that weekend.

Many of the exclusive engagement films are being rushed into theaters this weekend to qualify for a 1999 Academy Award. The Westside is thought to be home to the highest concentration of voting members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and therefore the best area for an Oscar-driven screening.

And the Westside has more art houses. From Laemmle’s Sunset Five in West Hollywood to Landmark’s NuWilshire in Santa Monica, the Westside hosts a concentration of theaters that specialize in offbeat, less-commercial movies. The Valley has one--the Encino Laemmle theater.

Often artsy movies don’t fare well at the megaplex, where they run the risk of getting shoved off the screen by the likes of “Pokemon: The First Movie.”

“It takes a lot of time and energy to nurture a film that doesn’t have big names,” said Tom Sherak, chairman of 20th Century Fox Domestic Film Group. “The last thing an art company wants is to have their film get bumped before the buzz has had a chance to build.”

“American Beauty” is a study in how adeptly an exclusive engagement can build buzz. The film opened Sept. 15 in 16 theaters, and fueled by word of mouth and flattering reviews, expanded city by city to a peak of 1,528 theaters six weeks later. The film, which was considered too edgy to go wide immediately, has grossed nearly $70 million and is a contender for several Academy Awards.

But it didn’t open in the Valley. DreamWorks SKG, which produced the film about suburban life gone bad, chose to start “American Beauty” in Century City, Santa Monica, West Hollywood and two theaters in Orange County.

“People in the Valley can drive to the Westside, but you can’t expect that from folks in Irvine,” said Jim Tharp, president of distribution for DreamWorks.

Flick through this weekend’s paper and you’ll see that many of the films not showing in the Valley (“Boys Don’t Cry,” “Cradle Will Rock,” “The Cider House Rules”) are available in Pasadena or Orange County--just as suburban as Woodland Hills or Studio City and therefore doubly irksome to Valley dwellers.

On a recent night at the Laemmle theater in Encino, many moviegoers, when asked about the Valley’s lack of exclusive engagement films, sounded defeated.

“Nobody in the Valley wants artsy-fartsy,” said Ralph Zaichik, a physiology student at UCLA living in Encino.

“There’s no culture here,” said Allan Chalme, who’s lived in Sherman Oaks more than 20 years. “This is the Valley we’re talking about, right?”

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But change is just over the hill, so to speak. This week, Columbia Pictures opens “Girl, Interrupted” at six theaters in the L.A.-area, and two of them are in the Valley (Chatsworth and Woodland Hills).

“The Valley has become a very important commercial market for us,” said Jeff Blake, president of worldwide distribution for Columbia.

So even if Valley moviegoers have to schlep across town to see a movie about the Valley, they still play a big role at the box office. Week after week, one of the most successful theaters on the West Coast is the 6,000-seat Winnetka 21 in Chatsworth.

This month’s top show: “Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo.”