Review

By Scott Foundas for the L.A. Weekly on September 2, 2009

As wildfires scorched Southern California and Angelenos choked on the ocher air, so too did Los Angeles film culture find itself gasping for breath. First, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art decided to suspend its long-running weekend film series. Next came word that the Mann Theatres chain would be vacating its leases on the historic Village and Bruin theaters in Westwood and was also looking for a buyer for the iconic Grauman’s Chinese in Hollywood. Then the Los Angeles Film Festival’s Director of Programming, Rachel Rosen, announced she would be leaving to take a similar job not at Cannes or Sundance or Toronto or New York, but rather at the San Francisco International Film Festival, which everyone in local and national film circles seems to agree is not just L.A.’s loss but Rosen’s decided gain. It was that kind of summer.

Relievedly, LACMA’s film department was not about to go nearly so quietly into that dark night. Faster than a tectonic shift along the San Andreas Fault, word of the museum’s decision rumbled through the L.A. cinephile community and beyond, stirring up an old-fashioned grass-roots protest movement in its wake. By the time I touched down at LAX on the first Sunday in August after two weeks serving on the selection committee for this year’s New York Film Festival, an organization calling itself Save Film at LACMA had already garnered more than 1,300 signatures and impassioned testimonials for an online petition (a number that would eventually double), started an even bigger Facebook group and released a self-produced viral video modeled on the famous “Subterranean Homesick Blues” sequence from the Bob Dylan documentary, Don’t Look Back. In addition, the LACMA brass — chiefly, museum director and CEO Michael Govan — had taken a public drubbing from Los Angeles Times film critic Kenneth Turan, the first in a series of poison-pen letters published by the paper, including a Martin Scorsese op-ed and an outing of Govan’s $1 million annual salary.