BOB FOSSE AT THE BILLY WILDER | 10899 Wilshire Blvd.
Already underway and running through August at the Billy Wilder Theater is a generous retrospective dedicated to celebrated film director and theater choreographer Bob Fosse. The Chicago-born Fosse began his career on the stage, as a dancer in the mold of Fred Astaire. Following bit acting roles in a few early-1950s musical comedies, followed by an extended stint on Broadway, Fosse deftly transitioned to cinema, first as a choreographer, then as a director, where his skills in theater production led to a run of musicals in the 1970s unequaled for their craft and dramatic ambition. The UCLA Film and Television Archive’s monthlong series touches on all of these eras, with 11 films in total screening in their original 35mm format. Highlights include an Aug. 10 screening of the 1969 Neil Simon adaptation Sweet Charity, which Fosse, having previously brought the production to Broadway, based on Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria; an Aug. 12 double bill of the Oscar-winning Cabaret, starring Liza Minnelli in perhaps her most notable role as an aspiring dancer in Weimar-era Berlin, and the little-seen companion film Liza With a Z, originally broadcast on NBC; an Aug. 17 pairing of two of Fosse’s non-musicals, the bleak Lenny Bruce biopic Lenny, featuring Dustin Hoffman in the title role, and the director’s troubling final film, Star 80, inspired by the notorious murder of Playboy playmate Dorothy Stratten; and, finally, on Aug. 25, two of Fosse’s early films as an actor, 1953’s Kiss Me Kate and 1955’s My Sister Eileen, which Fosse choreographed under the direction of Richard Quine.
Related Stories
NEW RESTORATIONS AT THE EGYPTIAN | 6712 Hollywood Blvd.
The American Cinematheque will host this month the Los Angeles premieres of two brand-new digital restorations at their flagship Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood. First, from Aug. 10-12, the one and only feature directed by Barbara Loden, Wanda, will screen in a restoration sourced from the original 16mm materials. One of the key independent films of the 1970s, and a crucial work in the development of feminist cinema, Wanda follows its newly divorced title character (played by Loden herself, who also wrote the screenplay) through a series of hardscrabble situations as she crosses paths with a number of male suitors, including a low-rent criminal, who only perpetuate her vagabond existence. Equally under-seen, the late Dennis Hopper’s infamous follow-up to Easy Rider, The Last Movie, arrives Aug. 16 in a 4K restoration. With seemingly endless funds at his disposal and barely a trace of studio interference, Hopper’s 1971 feature took the notoriously volatile actor-director to a remote Peruvian village, where he would mount a meta production about a troubled film crew attempting to make a Western in unfamiliar surroundings. Equal parts indulgent and transcendent, it’s just about the antithesis of Loden’s modestly scaled drama. Together, the films speak to many of the issues that killed the New Hollywood movement, which could have used more of Wanda’s quotidian insight and nuance. Note: The restoration of Wanda will also screen at the Aero Theatre in Santa Monica on Aug. 4.
THE EXILES AT THE AUTRY MUSEUM | 4700 Western Heritage Way
On Aug. 4 at the Autry Museum of the American West, Kent Mackenzie’s landmark 1961 feature The Exiles will receive a special 35mm showcase. One of the great documents of mid-century Los Angeles, Mackenzie’s first feature was shot in and around the Bunker Hill region of downtown and employed Native American locals who had moved to the city from surrounding reservations in hopes of finding economic opportunity. Shooting on 16mm in a documentary-derived style inherited from the Italian neorealists of a generation prior, Mackenzie follows a group of young people, largely by night, around downtown’s rapidly developing urban ecosystem, which was slowly pushing minorities out of their adopted neighborhood. Preceding the feature will be the short film Legacy of Exiled NDNZ, a reflection on and response to Mackenzie’s film, made by Navajo filmmaker Pamela J. Peters in 2014.
FIRST WOMEN FILMMAKERS AT LACMA | 5905 Wilshire Blvd.
Occasioned by the upcoming release of Kino Lorber’s new boxed set, “Pioneers: First Women Filmmakers” — and following a late July weekend of restorations at the Egyptian Theatre — the Los Angeles County Museum of Art will present four afternoons of little-seen features by some of cinema’s earliest directors, all of whom happen to be female. Screening on consecutive weeks throughout August as part of the museum’s Tuesday Matinees program, the series moves chronologically, beginning on Aug. 7 with Julia Crawford Ivers’ 1916 film Call of the Cumberlands, the story of an aspiring painter who leaves the South for New York, only to find himself forced back to keep peace between his and his lover’s families. Following on Aug. 14 is Elsie Jane Wilson’s romance The Circus of Life, from 1917, and, on Aug. 21, Lois Weber’s 1921 couples comedy Too Wise Wives. And finally, closing things out on Aug. 28 is actress-turned-director Dorothy Davenport-Reid’s Linda, a late Hollywood silent melodrama that rejected studio sets in favor of location shooting. Davenport-Reid would go on to find success in Hollywood as a writer and producer, but, as with most female filmmakers of the era, this would prove to be one of the few opportunities she’d be given to direct.
CINECON AT THE EGYPTIAN | 6712 Hollywood Blvd.
Los Angeles’ annual festival of silent and early sound films, Cinecon, returns to the Egyptian late in August for a special five-day series of cinematic rarities. Opening Aug. 30 with a new restoration of the 1924 silent Helen’s Babies, starring Baby Peggy, Clara Bow and Edward Everett Horton, the fest runs for but five days, through Sept. 3, but packs in an impressive amount of films — a majority of which will be presented on 35mm. Other notable titles include Todd Browning’s Outside the Law, featuring Lon Chaney; Benjamin Stoloff’s Goldie, with Spencer Tracy and Jean Harlow; Lewis Milestone’s Seven Sinners; Norman Foster’s Scotland Yard; Marcel Varnel’s Infernal Machine; William Wyler’s The Shakedown; and the 1926 silent Western Wild Horse Stampede.
