Theater of the Open Mind

They used to change them almost every night. Rummaging through the back room for the right letters and numbers, the evening’s ticket seller would perch on a ladder placed on the edge of busy Santa Monica Boulevard, practically in the shadow of the 405 Freeway. The titles and times on the neon-laced marquee would then be switched for the next day’s new shows.

Though films at the Nuart theater now usually turn over weekly, sending employees up the ladder a little less often, that feeling of hand selection, daring and careful decision-making still permeates. Even as old-fashioned wooden tills have been replaced by cash registers and ticket machines, the movie house remains a film lovers’ paradise and an increasing anomaly as the gaps between independent film and conventional commercial product lessen.

Just a short drive from the power cabals of Hollywood, Beverly Hills and the major movie studios, the Nuart exists outside that world with its eclectic mixture of foreign films, revivals, documentaries and genuinely independent fare. And in a movie landscape where decisions are increasingly defined and driven by economics and the currency of stardom, at the Nuart the underlying forces still favor the idea of film as an art form with edges to be pushed and new filmmakers to be discovered.

Over the years, many films have begun their lives with runs at the Nuart, sometimes to little notice, before becoming regarded as contemporary classics: David Lynch’s “Eraserhead,” Gus Van Sant’s “Drugstore Cowboy,” Jane Campion’s “Sweetie” and Mira Nair’s “Salaam Bombay” among them. It is in the offbeat and the classic that the theater has found its best success, with the biggest box-office hits to date being Larry Clark’s “Kids” and Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez’s “The Blair Witch Project.” Just last year the Beatles classic “A Hard Day’s Night” drew large crowds throughout its run. At a time when words such as “independent” and “art house” often signify films as star-studded or easy to swallow as “Gosford Park” or “Amelie”, the Nuart continues to troll the true fringes on behalf of filmgoers looking for more than six degrees of separation from the mainstream. Running the gamut from Mexican director Guillermo Del Toro’s horror-suspense ghost story “The Devil’s Backbone” to Nagisa Oshima’s “Gohatto,” an exploration of forbidden desire in feudal Japan, perhaps the biggest common denominator among the films screened there is how little they have in common.

“The Nuart does a tremendous job of showcasing new art-house films, both American and foreign, as well as doing classic repertory,” says Dennis Bartok, head programmer at the American Cinematheque. “Along with the Laemmle Sunset 5 [a competitive independent theater chain], they’re really ground zero for art-house programming and exhibition in L.A.”

The theater itself is a throwback to a time before stadium seating and multiplexes. Passing by the small ticket booth and into the lobby, with its dim light and dark carpets, one gets the slight feeling of walking into someone’s den. The no-frills concession counter is flanked by assorted alcoves, one featuring a pair of kitschily painted Greek statues, a whimsical counterpoint to the assortment of posters for upcoming films and a red neon “refreshments” sign. The cramped quarters of the lobby give way to the spaciousness of the theater, and when the feature begins, a stillness falls over the crowd--provided this isn’t one of the rowdy midnight shows.

Originally built in the early 1930s, the Nuart went through a number of incarnations before becoming the first theater under the care of the Landmark Theater Corp. in 1974. “The Nuart is somewhat aberrant within the business of Landmark as a whole,” says Bert Manzari, executive vice president of the Los Angeles-based chain, now one of the nation’s leading specialized exhibition circuits.

What the theater offers Landmark is a testing ground for the rest of the circuit--how well a film plays there is a good barometer for how broad or narrow its appeal will be. And although the Nuart may not be Landmark’s biggest profit center, the theater isn’t a loss leader either, having always shown a positive cash flow, Manzari says. “I’m sure there are pictures we could put in there that would gross more, but it would be abandoning the philosophy of what that theater is about.”

The person entrusted with safeguarding that philosophy is Mark Valen--the final arbiter of what plays at the Nuart. A soft-spoken Los Angeles native who prefers to think of himself as “ageless,” he managed the theater in the late 1970s before his enthusiasm for the burgeoning punk rock scene pulled him to England. Working on the fringes of film exhibition--delivering prints, working projectors, writing a few freelance articles--he eventually landed as a co-programmer at London’s Scala repertory house. He finally returned to Los Angles after some 10 years, partly from homesickness, partly because he never could get used to the English weather, he says. When the Nuart programming position opened up, Manzari tapped Valen based on his Scala programming experience.

Though he also handles bookings for commercial 10-plexes in Seattle and Berkeley, Calif., for the past six years Valen has programmed the Nuart as well as the Landmark’s other “calendar” theaters in San Francisco; Berkeley; San Diego; Austin, Texas; and Chicago. As opposed to the practice of most commercial theaters, where a film plays until people stop coming, a calendar theater locks in individual films for a week at a time, creating a tight turnover of films. Though a successful film may reappear at a commercial theater elsewhere, its time at the Nuart or on other calendar screens is always limited.

“I want to maintain the profile and personality of this theater, and I don’t want to put in something that seems inappropriate,” says Valen of his process for picking and choosing which films to play.

For him, it’s the “too” factor. As he describes it, a film “could be too anything--too commercial, too badly acted--but if it’s not right, I know it. I’m protective of the Nuart’s image, and so I’m very selective of what I put in there. Which means I turn away a lot of films, and some films I would like to have, I can’t get. To the best of my ability I try to put on films which best fit the theater, be it an edgy, offbeat kind of film or something that just needs the nurturing it may not get in the open marketplace.”

“Mark does an outstanding job of keeping their programming fresh,” says Bartok. “They have an amazing range of programming and really great taste.”

Without Valen’s taste, what is seen at the Nuart would certainly be different. Each year he hits the Toronto and Sundance film festivals, as well as such local events as the AFI Fest and the Los Angeles Independent Film Festival, looking for new voices and unseen gems. He regularly speaks with other programmers and distributors, sometimes making the case for why a given film should come to the Nuart, other times fending off things he doesn’t like. There is always a stack of tapes waiting to be watched.

Part science, part strategy and largely instinct, Valen’s mission in programming may be to bring new work to a wider audience, but his job is to bring ticket buyers to the theater. His understanding of what Nuart audiences want is constantly evolving, as evidenced by a new series of Friday night midnight movies, which feature such oddball commercial films of the 1980s as “Buckaroo Banzai,” “The Dark Crystal” and “Adventures in Babysitting.”

“This current midnight series comes from the reaction to when we showed ‘The Goonies’ a while back,” he says. “It was fun to see an audience respond ... and it gave me inspiration to try some other titles. There’s a younger audience looking for their own cult midnight movies, that’s interested in seeing them on the big screen. This new series is very much an experiment for me.”

Despite the best of intentions and even positive reviews, predicting if a film will find an audience is always difficult--as was the case with Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang’s mystic comedy-romance “What Time Is It There?” The director is widely considered to be among the most exciting filmmakers working today, but you wouldn’t know it by the Nuart ticket sales.

“That was a disappointment,” says Valen. “The reviews were good but used the word ‘challenging,’ and sometimes that seems anathema to even our audiences more than it used to be. The Nuart especially is profiled as a theater that’s either discovering new filmmakers or nurturing filmmakers with a particular--though I wouldn’t say, limited--audience.”

It is that very audience--small perhaps, but fiercely loyal and incredibly varied--that made the spot next door to the Nuart an ideal one when a group of disgruntled video store clerks decided to open its own shop in 1999. As Cinefile co-owner Hadrian Belove explains, “We chose the location based on the Nuart; that was very consciously done. When we opened the store, we thought we’d get a certain amount of crossover, but we very quickly became aware that it was like having a free advertisement. Pretty much every day we would reach exactly our market just by being here.”

On a recent Saturday night, the Nuart buzzes with crowds coming down to see the science-fiction epic “Metropolis,” the latest achievement in the popular Japanese anime animation style. Matching the offbeat mixture of films shown at the theater, the glow of the marquee adds a garish glamour to a crowd full of unlikely pairings. A single father polls passerby as to whether the PG-13 film is appropriate for his two young daughters, while a solitary comic-book fan tries hard to avoid personal interactions.

An astounding assortment of fashionable eye-wear passes by, and expensive spike-heeled boots wait in line behind scuffed sneakers. Some leave the theater for the open doors of Cinefile, while others head to a small coffee shop around the corner, where they will discuss the film’s continuation of themes from the anime masterpiece “Akira.” Especially since the arrival of Cinefile, the Nuart has become a nexus for those hopelessly enthralled by the movies--the type of person who will stay up until early in the morning to see a screening of “Red Dawn” or hunts with dedication for a rare samurai film. And then there is Marc Heuck.

An assistant manager at the Nuart, Heuck has taken a step beyond personal obsession by offering his for public consumption. He has appeared on Comedy Central’s “Beat the Geeks,” where contestants pit their trivia knowledge against a panel of self-styled experts, since its premiere last year. Heuck is its resident movie geek.

Unshaven, with a bedraggled mop of hair and a shabby black overcoat, Heuck has an intense yet slightly distracted demeanor and is clearly among his own as he tears tickets and periodically checks on the ticket booth or concession stand. With a Bartleby-like inscrutability, he declines to be interviewed, sending out as a proxy Chris Luessmann, a UCLA theater and film student and the evening’s projectionist.

Having started up the 10 p.m. show, Luessmann relaxes just outside the theater’s glass front doors during the momentary lull and talks about the regulars--the “Diet Coke Guy,” for one--before mentioning a 1932 Nuart program he recently bought off EBay. (“It was just a few dollars,” he says and shrugs. “Who would care but one of us?”)

Though he has only worked at the Nuart for a couple of years, he knows the theater’s history, its legends. That comedian Andy Kaufman made his last public appearance at the Nuart for a screening of his film “My Breakfast With Blassie” is one. Another is “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” DVD, which features the live cast that appears at the Nuart for a midnight show every Saturday.

Luessmann stumbles for a moment on the title of a popular cult film that used footage from a cast and crew reunion at the Nuart on its DVD. Suddenly from the other side of the glass Heuck leans in, speaking through the crack of the door: “Spider Baby,” he says to no one in particular, before returning to his look of studied disinterest.

Having been the first theater in Los Angeles to show work by directors ranging from John Waters to John Woo, the Nuart is for many a de facto film school and a vital part of their personal film education. “It was where I saw my first Pedro Almodovar film, ‘Law of Desire,’ ” recalls Ernest Hardy, a film critic for the LA Weekly and onetime Nuart employee. “It completely blew me away, one of those moments where you realize all the possibilities of what cinema can be. Not to say I wouldn’t have eventually seen it somewhere, but the Nuart was where that really happened for me.”

Valen is well aware of the importance the theater plays in the city’s cultural landscape and the personal connections often created by the films he shows. “I always look at the theater as a part of a community. I try to pick films that will be a discovery for audiences.”

American Cinematheque’s Bartok believes the strategy is working: “Every time I look at the Nuart calendar, it makes my teeth hurt, because they show such great stuff.”

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Mark Olsen is a Los Angeles-based freelance writer.