The Bing Theater at LACMA 5 Fingers Friday 7/31/09, 7:30 pm

Price: Free with my badge. Concessions: None, though I did grab some tacos at Baja down the street beforehand. Audience: Surprisingly full, maybe 200 out of 600 seats Trailers/advertising: None. Projection: 35mm changeover.

I made a last-minute change to my movie-going plans for the week and decided to go to LACMA tonight, rather than UCLA, as I wasn’t really in the mood for a packed house and a long film with an introduction, after a long week of work. Besides, I was interested in seeing what it would be like at the first screening since the news came out that their regular film program would be ending in October. And sure enough, there were folks outside the door to the theater handing out flyers titled “You can help save film at LACMA,” with email addresses, Facebook and Twitter and other contacts.

The theater is a quick drive from work, a pretty central location to many parts of the city. As I walked through Chris Burden’s Urban Light, a jazz group was playing and families with picnic baskets were streaming into the museum campus.

I’d only been to one screening at LACMA before, not for lack of good programming, but it just wasn’t my go-to place, in a town where you can be spoiled for choice as far as film goes. The Bing is a big, if rather strange place to see a film; it reminds me, in a good way, I guess, of a nice high school auditorium, the kind that gets used by a lot of community groups as well. Maybe it’s just that era of auditorium design, I don’t know. There’s much of a rake, it has fairly typical seats, with generous legroom, but the sound isn’t great; it’s fairly small and insufficient to fill that large a space. In addition to the fairly quiet sound system, the clientele often tends to be made up of loud talkers, question askers, whispering recappers, and conspicuous yawners. Their various noises carry pretty well in the theater, so there always seems to be a din of non-movie noise. Oh well.

I saw some familiar faces, including the guy who always sits in the front row at the Goldwyn, making his way un-subtly to the front row, after the film had started, carrying some boxes. Who brings boxes to a movie? Not to mention the two people in my row who walked by me wheeling backpacks, but that’s just movie nerds for you, I guess.

The theater provided some helpful film notes, with credits and an essay cribbed from TCM, about both films playing tonight (I only stayed for one). As everyone got settled, there was a lot of talk of protest and attendance and outrage and so on among the regulars. I enjoyed the film, more than I expected, actually; not only did we get James Mason, but a very witty script from Michael Wilson, with a lot of good laughs. Looking into the true story behind the film on Wikipedia, I see that the ambassador, whose name in the film was “Sir Frederic,” was really named Sir Hughe Montgomery Knatchbull-Hugessen. Impressive.