The Elmwood is a neighborhood theater in the College Avenue section of Oakland. I saw the Paul Thomas Anderson movie, Magnolia, at the Elmwood.
They're showing Brad Pitt and Matt Damon and Muppets tonight. Back in the 1990s, for a couple of weeks, the marquee of the Elmwood read PAULA PRENTISS RETROSPECTIVE.
That made sense, Paula Prentiss was beautiful and talented, and she seemed approachable. I always felt you could say hi to her on the street and she'd actually talk with you. She was in a lot of comedies, but she also did serious. She and Warren Beatty were in the conspiracy thriller, Parallax View, which has become more relevant over the years.
But then the marquee became a puzzle. The Paula Prentiss retrospective had no tickets for sale, it wasn't listed at the ticket window. Actually, the Elmwood may have been closed for remodeling. That only made the marquee stranger. Why bring attention to a nonexistent event?
I discovered the reason for the Paula Prentiss marquee when I drove by later that week. Richard Benjamin -who could have quit with My Favorite Year and called it a successful directing career- was shooting a movie down the block. He was making Made In America, which starred Ted Danson and Whoopi Goldberg, and they were filming scenes in a store at the corner.
The Paula Prentiss marquee at the Elmwood had been assembled just for the movie, Made In America. Director Richard Benjamin had asked for that marquee, and up it went. But why?
Think of it as a giant greeting card to his wife, Paula Prentiss. When moviegoers attended Made In America and watched Whoopi Goldberg ride her bicycle through Berkeley to her shop on College Avenue, they saw the marquee and the name of Richard Benjamin's wife in bold capital letters.
A nice touch, and it looked better than J. EDGAR on the marquee today.
And what does that have to do with a couple of French guys?
The Lumiere brothers were movemakers when nobody made movies. They were in the photo business during the 19th century. When technology allowed the creation of motion picture film and movie making equipment, they experimented.
On this day in 1895, the Lumiere brothers gave the first showing of a movie to the public. The city was Paris, and the venue was a cafe, the Salon Indien du Grand Cafe. These were not movies as we know them. They were short, measured in seconds, and they were primitive. One movie lasted 46 seconds, and it showed workers leaving a factory after work. Another concerned fishing, and another was about a blacksmith. The response was enthusiastic, though, and the movie business was born.
Put differently, what the Elmwood does today is what the Lumiere brothers started today in 1895.
© 2011 by Max Clarke, all rights reserved.
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