Westwood’s Mann National, a big single-screen house that once played the exclusive runs of The Godfather and The Exorcist, will close at the end of this week. This theatre has been dying for years. We live in a megaplex stadium-seating world, and sagging-at-the-heels behemoths like the National — a once-grand showplace that still has pretty good and projection quality — are all going to be toast sooner or later.
I mentioned the National’s closing to a twentysomething L.A. woman, and she told me she’d never been there. The crowds aren’t going to Westwood any more. I can let the National go but please don’t tell me this is going to happen to Mann’s Village also. If this is in the cards don’t want to hear about it. The same thing that happened in NYC is slowly happing to LA, the single-screen theatres are closing, and what LA will have left will be multiplexes like the Arclight, the Grove, teh AMC Century City and The Bridge.
The National was used last year for a scene in Zodiac. Mark Ruffalo can’t handle watching Dirty Harry and goes out into the lobby for a smoke, and then Jake Gyllenhaal comes up to him and chats him up about the case.
