National Theatre

Here is a 1984 photo from the UCLA collection
http://tinyurl.com/2ejk32

Paris je t aime

I was following the bad movie thread and not the Mann National thread. Sorry about the confusion.

ken mc, you are referring to The Four Seasons which was released in 1981. According to Michael Coate’s exhaustive list posted above, it never played the National. I bet it played at the Regent.

y'know John Steiner the villain in YOR is now a real estate agent in Los Angeles, he’s an old friend of mine. I love the idea that the YOR discussion is taking over the National thread, hehe

I recall seeing a movie in 1980 when I was a freshman in college. Some atrocity with Alan Alda and Rita Moreno. It was a rainy weekday, and I was the only one in the theater, besides the projectionist I suppose. Twenty seven years later and I still remember sitting in the middle row waiting for the movie to end.

Someone recently changed the name here at CinemaTreasures from ‘Mann National Theatre’ to ‘National Westwood Theatre’.

Is this definitely the name the theatre is now using on signs and advertising?

I saw Yor at the Budco Goldman in Philadelphia in the summer of 1983. Funny how bad movies stick in your memory.

Remember, Yor was a Columbia Pictures release.

I’m equally amazed about “Yor,” but I would use my time machine to go back and see “Phantom of the Paradise.”

I also can’t believe how long some of those 70’s titles ran. And they say that the theatre is empty now! It must have been a ghost town in the 11th week of “Lost Horizon” or the 7th week of “I Love My Wife.”

As for the other news, we’ve now got a year to stop it. Does anyone have a plan, beyond kidnapping UCLA students and forcing them to walk the two extra blocks from the Village and Bruin?

Also “Krull” and “Spacehunter” playing a few weeks before that! What a summer!

wow thanks for posting that list, really brings back memories and reminders of a few forgotten films. I worked there from the start of “The Wild Life” in august of ‘84 up through Beverly Hills Cop where a bunch of us transferred over to the Regent at the beginning of '85 to stay with the manager of the time (who’s name i’ve temporarily forgotten but he was a cool guy) When i first started, prior to the 21 year old Mac Carter who replaced him, there was a long time manager (name slips my memory again) who I later heard committed suicide, poor guy. I remember he used to walk up to check us floor staff every now and again to find everyone standing around having a good time (anything but working which we rarely did) and would start screaming at us “Get in there and BAG you fu*@ers..!!” (re: bagging trash in the theatre) lol Those were wild days, concessions was $1000 short a week during Beverly Hills Cop, everybody was dipping their hands in the register, it was total madness, there were firings left and right including management. It was too much fun!
I can remember living on popcorn and nacho cheese which was permanently soiled all over the polyester uniforms, celebrities were always frequenting the place and I’d strike conversations with directors like William Friedkin, Ron Howard, Robert Wise, Peter Hyams and others.
Re: the master list, I’m really surprised to see they installed the showscan equipment in '77, i always thought that came in the early 80’s. Imagine how mind-blowing it was to see Showscan in 1977, too bad it didn’t fly and Trumball ultimately sold the company. Btw, regarding the above link to the upcoming demise of the National, which is a travesty, did you notice the one comment someone left on that page? This is what i’m talking about, they want to erase or change our memory of a time when things were better, for the new generation anyway. It’s over. Just look at how things shifted in the late 80s, how bad movies got around '90-91-92—-and all the way to the present. The last 7 years in partuclar have been a new downslope that keeps sloping lower and lower.

ps, Lost Horizon played there for 3 months in ‘73? wow i thought that one flopped big time on it’s release, must’ve been a booking contract, I personally love the film though.