Making moviegoing an event again

“You haven’t lived until you have been in the Los Angeles Theater,” says film historian Leonard Maltin, rhapsodizing about the 76-year-old movie palace on Broadway in downtown Los Angeles. “This was the last one built, and it’s the most lavish and ornate. Its debut film was Charlie Chaplin’s ‘City Lights.’ They even have a photo in the lobby of Chaplin and Albert Einstein at the premiere.”

Though the Los Angeles is no longer a working theater, it opens its doors every year for the Los Angeles Conservancy’s “Last Remaining Seats” series, which presents vintage films in the movie palaces of long ago, accompanied by shorts, newsreels, live performances and special guests.

The 21st edition of “Last Remaining Seats” begins next Wednesday at the restored Orpheum Theatre with Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 classic “North by Northwest,” hosted by Oscar-winning screenwriter and director Curtis Hanson (“L.A. Confidential”) and featuring such guests as the thriller’s leading lady, Eva Marie Saint.

Maltin will be holding court at the Los Angeles on May 30 with a screening of William Wyler’s 1953 “Roman Holiday,” starring Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn in her Oscar-winning performance.

“The Los Angeles has so many features,” says Maltin, who has been an audience member and host for “Last Remaining Seats” for the last two decades. “It has a crying room, which they could use today” for squalling children, he says. “And it has a device whereby when you went downstairs to the men’s or ladies’ lounge during the show, you could still follow the movie because they would not only pipe the sound down there, they had a viewing screen, which was essentially done with a periscope and mirrors.

“Every time I bring people there, I say, ‘You have to walk all the way upstairs and all the way downstairs. Don’t cheat yourself out of seeing the whole thing.’ ”

Maltin recalls two magical moments at the Los Angeles. “One was when our daughter was about 9 years old,” he says. “They did an evening of Laurel and Hardy films. She had never seen them with this kind of an audience, and I doubt that many young people had ever had the experience of sitting with 2,200 people all screaming with laughter. It was the most amazing experience -- the kind of thing you could wrap and unfurl at will.”

Then there was the night he hosted the screening of Douglas Fairbanks’ silent classic “The Thief of Baghdad.” Maltin was worried that Fairbanks’ deliberately outsized performance would be misconstrued by the audience.

“I feel it’s one of my responsibilities to put the film in a historical context, especially silent films. I hate when people laugh out of ignorance. Robert Israel, who was conducting the orchestra, was just as fearful as I was.

“I said [to the audience], ‘Don’t watch with a feeling of superiority. Pretend you are watching it in the 1920s and meet it on its own terms.’ And when [the movie] came on and Robert took up his baton and began conducting the score, a magical spell came over the audience.”

Hanson has been on the advisory board of the conservancy for the last decade and has been attending screenings for 20 years.

He also spent a lot of time in the downtown movie palaces as a kid. “There used to be those theaters where on the marquee it would say ‘Three Big Hits for 50 Cents!’ In fact, that is where, believe it or not, [Sam Fuller’s classic] ‘The Naked Kiss’ had its first L.A. run. I went down there to see it.”

Hanson had his night to remember a few years ago as host of a “Last Remaining Seats” screening of the 1953 Oscar-winning best picture “From Here to Eternity.”

“Before the movie I interviewed [screenwriter] Daniel Taradash,” he says. “He was a great guy. He was so funny and irreverent.” Hanson’s “L.A. Confidential” had recently come out, the filmmaker adds, and someone asked which film noir had influenced him. “In fact, it was none of them,” Hanson says. “What I was influenced by was [Taradash’s] great adaptation of ‘From Here to Eternity.’ ”

susan.king@latimes.com

*

‘Last Remaining Seats’

Where: Alex Theatre, 216 N. Brand Blvd., Glendale; John Anson Ford Amphitheatre, 2580 Cahuenga Blvd. East, Hollywood; Los Angeles Theatre, 615 S. Broadway; Orpheum Theatre, 842 S. Broadway

When: Next Wednesday to June 27

Price: $15 for L.A. Conservancy members, $18 for nonmembers

Contact: (213) 623-2489 or go to www.laconservancy.org

All screenings at 8 p.m.

Orpheum Theatre

Next Wednesday: “North by Northwest”

June 6: “Flesh and the Devil”

Los Angeles Theatre

May 30: “Roman Holiday”

June 13: “Yankee Doodle Dandy”

Ford Amphitheatre

June 20: “La Balandra Isabel Llego Esta Tarde”

Alex Theatre

June 27: “Scarface”