Please Take Your Comfy Seats

They’re called Director’s Halls at the Bridge: Cinema de Lux, and they are the ne plus ultra of L.A. moviegoing: Roomy leather seats, stadium seating, reservations required, assigned seating, ushers who don’t just clean up the popcorn after every show but escort you to your seats.

Of course, it’s not cheap. Top ticket on weekends is $14, but to a certain segment of the audience, it’s worth it. Plus the snack bars serve frozen cappuccino, personal pizzas and boneless hot wings. There’s even a lounge where alcohol and sandwiches are served before, during and after the movie.

The Bridge, which is part of the Promenade at Howard Hughes Center off the 405 Freeway in West L.A., opened July 13 promising to “break the mold of the traditional trip to the movies,” in the words of Paul Heth, president of CineBridge Ventures.

The three Director’s Halls are the most elaborate and priciest of the 17 theaters at the 106,000-square-foot Bridge. The other 14, however, also feature stadium seating and similarly state-of-the-art projection and Dolby Digital Surround-EX sound. One has a live, pre-show comedy act before the movie on weekends.

My wife and I tried out the Director’s Hall experience on a recent Friday night. Having no clue what the crowds would be like or how difficult it might be to get good seats, I started by calling for reservations on the Tuesday afternoon before.

No voice answered the Director’s Hall hotline, not even a recorded one, which was a little disconcerting. Instead, I heard hold music (Mozart, at that). Within two minutes a friendly voice answered. She identified herself as Jennifer and explained the process, telling me which movies were playing and when.

Of the three (“Training Day,” “Serendipity,” “Bandits”), I chose the 7:20 p.m. show of “Serendipity,” which to me seemed the obvious “date night” movie. Jennifer asked our seating preference, and because I had called so early in the week, we pretty much had the run of the place. I asked for something in the middle; Jennifer assigned us Row H, Seats 9 and 10.

The cost was $13 per seat, plus a $1 processing fee per ticket, for a total of $28. Being a thrifty sort, I asked if the steep price included food, drinks or parking. Jennifer patiently explained that it did not and that we were paying for the “plush” environment and “courteous staff.”

I was assigned a reservation number and advised to arrive 20 to 30 minutes early to get decent parking, although Jennifer made clear that with advance reservations, we wouldn’t have to stand in any lines. We could march straight into the theater complex, stop at the white Elite Services counter and pick up our tickets.

The entire process, including the two minutes on hold, took about eight minutes. That Friday night, as instructed, we arrived early and had no trouble finding a spot in the self-parking section of the garage. We could have valet-parked, but that seemed unnecessarily extravagant. A short walk through the Promenade later, we were at the Bridge, a cylindrical, glassed-in structure on the second floor of the open-air shopping and dining complex.

We bypassed the lines at the ticket booths and walked in. We were greeted at the door and shown to the Elite counter. There, two smartly uniformed young people wearing headphones were handling reservations. We were handed our tickets and told that Director’s Halls 1 and 2 were on the “upper concourse.”

It sounded like an airport, and in fact the decor seemed more “Jetsons” than anything else: video monitors in the hallways, curvy Space Age-style seats (for waiting between shows) built into the walls, ultra-modern chairs and tables at the two snack bars on either end of the upper floor.

The restrooms were not only clean, they were staffed by attendants who handed us towels after we washed our hands. (This necessitated a tip, of course, but I’m sure that most moviegoers would be so startled to see a men’s or women’s room attendant that they would forget to do so or simply flee, not knowing what such a friendly person was doing hanging around the bathrooms.) The restrooms got additional points for the fact that Tchaikovsky was playing over the speakers.

The snack bars featured a broad mix of the traditional (popcorn from $3 to $5; the usual candy and sodas) and nouveau movie cuisine, including those personal pizzas ($4), frozen cappuccino ($4.50), chicken tenders ($4.75), fresh-fruit smoothies ($3.50) and a six-item “pretzel depot” menu that included an apparently popular deep-fried fritter called “funnel cake” ($3).

We loaded up--popcorn, a smoothie, a cappuccino and that funnel cake--and headed for our Director’s Hall. An usher checked our tickets and showed us to our seats, which as advertised were wider and more comfortable than in any other public movie theater we had visited (private studio screening rooms are another matter, but that’s off limits to the average moviegoer).

The pre-film music, unfortunately, was the usual loud and obnoxious Top 40 that is a massive turnoff to anyone over 25, but that was our only negative impression. Stadium seating ensured that our vision wouldn’t be obscured by someone’s head or hat. There was plenty of leg room, and as it turned out, plenty of room in the theater too, because “Serendipity” was far from sold out that night.

It all felt downright decadent. And maybe it was, considering the $28 for tickets and another $14 for snacks. Luckily, parking was just $1 for four hours, so the evening’s total tab was $43.

We revisited the Bridge a couple of weeks later, after the Nov. 7 opening of the lounge--the only full bar and mini-restaurant serving a movie theater in the L.A. market. Open from 11:15 a.m. until midnight during the week and till 2 a.m. on weekends, the facility can accommodate about 100 and, Heth says, is “family-friendly” during the daytime but becomes adults-only after 8 p.m. (when those under 21 are admitted only with a parent or guardian). The decor is similarly 21st century modern, with a wide-ranging menu that features appetizers, salads, sandwiches, gourmet pizzas, desserts and specialty coffees.

A recent, informal poll of other Bridge moviegoers turned out to be a nearly unanimous thumbs-up. Gregory Dixon of Los Angeles found the experience “the best of everything. The best seating--every seat is a good seat. Even the theater food is not your typical theater food. This is one of the few places that you can go and you don’t have to have lunch first. You can come straight to the movie theater and have a wide selection of everything.”

Susan Gray of Playa del Rey agreed that “it was absolutely worth the extra money. The comfort of the seats, the feeling of ‘Hey, I’ve got my seat reserved’--it just felt more comfortable.” Anthony Gaggino of Sepulveda found it “just a much more pleasurable experience for the extra three bucks. The quality of the sound; it’s new, it’s clean, [there is] assigned seating.”

Said Jennifer Warwick of Los Angeles: “I think it will be really nice when they get the bugs out. They’re new, so they haven’t gotten quite organized yet with the assigned seating.” She cited problems during an early showing of “Harry Potter” in which people were sitting in the wrong seats and needed to be moved to make room for latecomers. But, added her husband, Steve: “It’s nice to have a little bit of extra space.

“If you’re into the movie experience, I think it’s worth it.”

A follow-up interview with Heth revealed that the designer of the Bridge was Dayna Lee, the high-profile designer of the trendy W Hotels.

Heth likens the theater interiors to that of “a great sports car,” the walls adorned with racing stripes in oranges, greens and golds.

Plans for the future include an eight-story Imax 3-D theater opening Jan. 1 (with Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast”); possible digital projection on a limited basis when it becomes available; a weekday reading-promotion project in which children can bring a book report and see a movie; and an expansion of its “Silver Screen Classics” program, now a once-a-month show that includes a classic movie, popcorn and a soda, all for $1.

Heth, however, stresses the wide-ranging nature of Bridge offerings, beyond just the upscale experience. “That’s why we called it the Bridge,” he says, “a place where everyone could come from different economic strata and different ethnic groups as well as different age groups. We give everyone options that might appeal to them.”

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The Bridge: Cinema de Lux, in the Promenade at Howard Hughes Center, 3081 Center Drive, Los Angeles. Information, (310) 568-9950; ticket purchases, (310) 568-3375. Ticket prices for regular seating: $10.50, Friday-Sunday; $9.75, Monday-Thursday, and $7 before 6 p.m. For Director’s Hall seating: $13, Friday-Sunday; $12, Monday-Thursday, and $10 before 6 p.m.