Billy Wilder Theater The Red Shoes Sunday 8/2/09, 11:00 am
Price: Free with my badge. Concessions: None, and none allowed, it seems. Audience: Full, at least 250 of their 295 seats (one of which is brown, while the rest are pink, marking Billy’s favorite spot in other theaters). Trailers/advertising: A videotaped introduction to the film, and an acknowledgment of the preservation work, by Martin Scorsese. Projection: 35mm changeover.
The Billy Wilder opened just a few months after we moved to Los Angeles, and replaced the Bridges Theater on the UCLA campus as the main theater for UCLA’s public programming, an integral part of the Los Angeles archival and revival movie scene. I haven’t been to many films at the Wilder, maybe a half-dozen over the last three years, but it’s always been a fine place to see a film. The sight lines are great, with a every seat affording a good view, and a nice distance between even the front row and the screen. The sole brown seat, “Billy’s seat,” among a sea of pink seats, is a nice touch. The speed lines of neon light zooming from the screen back to the rear of the theater don’t seem like they’re going to age particularly well, but they’re less distracting than I thought they were the first time I saw them.
If I were looking for the theater according to the street address, not knowing where it is, I think I’d be pretty confused, and probably wouldn’t think to go inside and up the stairs of the Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Culture Center looking for a movie theater. But, there it is, with its own little open-air courtyard and giant stills from Wilder films on the wall. I still get a kick out of attending a movie, no matter what it is, at a theater named after one of my favorite directors.
With helpful confirmation from my film journal, it seems I saw fifteen Michael Powell or Powell and Pressburger films during my semester in the U.K. fourteen years ago, one of which was The Red Shoes. I watched it on a dubbed VHS tape on a small TV in the basement of the rented room belonging to the fly-by-night Cambridge exchange organization that was affiliated with Amherst. I remember it, but only dully, and seeing the film today was a revelation. It’s a great, compelling story, but beyond that, I was struck dumb by the absolute beauty of the image, looking better after the recent preservation than it probably did when it was released. The quality of the work, when seen in a brand-new print, projected in an excellent theater, was something to behold: vivid Technicolor photography, with the smallest detail, down to individual strands of hair, clearly visible. The theater, which was packed nearly to capacity and ridiculously hot when the movie began, was full of quiet, appreciative filmgoers and ballet enthusiasts, all of whom seemed to be enthralled by the film’s story and imagery.
