http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-et-lacma29-2009jul29,0,1659237.story
Regarding the above story, Mr. Horn and Ms. King's assertion that the availability of classic films on DVD helped to bring about the LACMA weekend film series' demise is a bit too neat--and lets the museum off the hook.
When original series curator/programmer Ron Haver died around 1993, LACMA mostly shifted the focus of the film series from film-as-popular-art to film-as-ART. And museum director Michael Govan and now-part-time-employee Ian Birnie should take some responsibility for the decline in audience and loss in revenue. Ideally, a successful museum film program should find equal room for the works of, say, Alain Resnais (now the closing LACMA retrospective), Kathryn Bigelow, William Wyler, Andrei Tarkovsky and Tsui Hark.
Having said that, I should share some responsibility (as an audience member) for not attending LACMA film programs nearly as often as I did from, say 1988 to the mid-90s. The last time I saw a film at LACMA's Bing Theatre was in late 2004 when there was an advance screening of Martin Scorsese's THE AVIATOR.
[UPDATE 7/30/09: Kenneth Turan offers his opinion--a strong one--regarding LACMA's decision: http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-et-critic-lacma30-2009jul30,0,5900670.story]
[UPDATE 7/31/09: Here's a snobbish pro-Birnie take on LACMA and the film program:
http://filmjourney.weblogger.com/2009/07/30/lacma-jettisons-film-program/]
[UPDATE 8/5/09: A petition to send to Michael Govan re LACMA's film program:
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/save-LACMA-film]
Funny that you should find my post "snobbish." Personally, I'm not threatened by an Art museum with a film program that emphasizes, um, ART films. You've got the Cinematheques and the New Beverly if you want the rest.
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