Academy Event: This is Widescreen

For those of you who are lucky enough to dwell in the City of Angels, the Academy's Samuel Goldwyn Theater, after laying dormant for about a year, is finally opening its doors for some nifty public events. Recently, the Academy has been holding the majority of its screenings at the Bing Theater. While the Bing is not a bad theater, it's not the Samuel Goldwyn, which is one of the best movie houses in Los Angeles and one of the best kept secrets of Los Angeles. Why a secret? The Academy has never been very adept at advertising their public events. The pity is that the events are actually quite cheap: It's $5 for a ticket--$3 if you have a student ID--and parking is free. The Samuel Goldwyn Theater is located in the Academy's Wilshire building in Beverly Hills.

This particular event will be devoted to the Widescreen format, so the majority of films will be from the 1950s and 1960s. The choices are...interesting. A lot of these films are not what I would personally choose and quite a few of them are not what I would call classics. However, the wisdom of the Academy's screening events has always been to educate and the point of seeing a widescreen film on the big screen is that you are seeing a film as it was originally intended to be shown.

The one thing I don't quite understand is that the Academy is screening one half of those movies at the Goldwyn and the other half at the Linwood Dunn Theater at the Academy's Archives in Hollywood. The Dunn is a nice theater, but it's a tiny theater. It's an odd venue for showing widescreen format films.

If you would like to see the schedule, you can find the lineup on the Academy's website.

The first event is Cinerama Holiday. It's at 7:30pm this Friday, May 1st. I hope to see you all there.

Reading for the Morning

Leonard Maltin on 42nd Street.Take a gander:

Restart

Hello folks,

As my full time job began sapping my free time away, I spent less and less time researching ways to make my blog look fancy. Rather than attempt anything new now, I believe it is time now to just provide some content.

I have added a few things to this blog. First of all, I have added some links to the page to some of the websites that I frequent. Most of these websites are run by historians of film, animation, and really most of what I am interested in. I would also like to mention that most of my posts will contain more anecdotes of my adventures as a young pop culture historian in the pop culture-infested city of Los Angeles. I hope to include a few mini essays here and there. But they will be sporadic at best.

So here's to happy writing.