JOHN GIBBINS / Union-Tribune
Landmark Theatres operates three art-movie houses in San Diego. At the four-screen La Jolla Village Cinemas, it promotes coming attractions at its Ken Cinema in Kensington. It also owns the five-screen Hillcrest Cinemas.
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Not long ago, seeing an art film was a form of character building – the intellectual equivalent of Outward Bound. Comfortable seats and sight lines were for wimps, as were the movies at the multiplexes that had those luxuries.
Not only is the primitive-campground phase of art-movie theaters long gone, but the evolution into cutting-edge technology and luxurious design is speeding up. Under new ownership, Los Angeles-based Landmark Theatres – which dominates San Diego's art market – has plans so ambitious they could change the entire notion of a first-run movie.
Meanwhile, a new chain with its own innovative philosophy, ArcLight Cinemas, would like to challenge Landmark in San Diego and elsewhere. ArcLight, also based in Los Angeles, is a division of Pacific Theatres.
San Diego greatly benefited from the first generation of art house renewal and expansion. Landmark built the modern, five-screen Hillcrest Cinemas in 1991. It has operated the four-screen La Jolla Village complex, formerly part of the Pacific chain, since 1997. And an older single-screen house, the Ken Cinema in the Kensington neighborhood, has been part of the Landmark chain since 1975.
As a result, San Diego is one of the best markets nationally for Landmark, a towering presence in the art-film business with 57 theaters and 204 screens in 18 markets.
Madstone, an upstart national rival with a presence in San Diego, abruptly shuttered operations this year.
"It's amazingly strong," said Ray Price, Landmark's vice president of marketing. "You'd think San Diego, being a more conservative community, wouldn't be so strong. But the desire for sophisticated storytelling transcends those issues. And it's an affluent, highly educated area. The backbone of our business is a mature audience that's very well-educated. Whenever we go into those communities, we tend to do very well."
Landmark has been known for grass-roots marketing and community involvement, and it has made crusades out of distributing offbeat small movies, such as "Rivers and Tides." And it is a comfortable home for politically leftist documentaries such as "The Corporation" and "Fahrenheit 9/11."
New Landmark owner
Yet Landmark is owned by an ambitious multimedia corporation. In September, Dallas-based 2929 Entertainment purchased the chain from Oaktree Capital Management. While its officials won't reveal the price, the Salem Partners investment firm, which advised 2929 on the acquisition, has listed the cost at $80 million on its Web site.
That's a modest expenditure for 2929's principal owners, Todd Wagner and Mark Cuban, who sold their Broadcast.com Web site to Yahoo! in 1999 for $5.7 billion. Cuban, the colorful owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team and star of an upcoming reality TV show in which he gives away $1 million, takes a back seat in Landmark affairs to Wagner. But together, they have become proselytizers about the possibilities of high-definition video as a sharper, clearer alternative to watching traditional TV broadcasts and 35-millimeter film prints of movies.
JOHN GIBBINS / Union-Tribune
Passing by an assortment of teas, Chrys Seward served up popcorn at the La Jolla Village theater.
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Wagner is trying to integrate Landmark into 2929's other properties: the high-definition HDNet and HDNet Movies cable channels; Magnolia Pictures, an alternative-film distributor whose releases include the documentary "Control Room" and "Bukowski"; two film-production units, one of which releases traditional, medium-budget Hollywood fare and the other specializing in low-budget art films shot in high-definition video; and Rysher Entertainment, whose film and television library has the rights to "Hogan's Heroes" and "Star Search."
Since 2929 purchased Landmark, the company's two top executives – chief executive Paul Richardson and executive vice president Bert Manzari – have departed. Both had long-established roots in art-film exhibition.
Wagner said he respects Landmark's reputation and audience. He also said the company is profitable as is – especially in light of the smashing success of "Fahrenheit 9/11."
Futuristic ideas
But his ideas for expansion are positively futuristic. He talks of "compressing the windows" by which people see an art (or any) movie. "Today, you go to a theater and three months later, the movie is available on pay-per-view, and three months after that it's available on cable, and six months after that it's on network TV," he says.
"In a digital world, we're going to experiment on basically day-and-date releasing, meaning it's available at a Landmark theater, it's potentially available on HDNet, and you can potentially buy the DVD at the same time," he said.
"When a movie comes out, the consumer should be able to decide how to consume that product. You shouldn't be putting in what dates by which they can do it. If you look at sports, I have the opportunity to go to a game live, or watch it on television, or record it and watch it later."
That might also be a way, Wagner thinks, to expand the art-film market to cities too small to get timely theatrical releases of movies like "Bukowski" – a documentary about L.A.'s heavy-drinking writer Charles Bukowski. "Six months later, people may or may not be interested," he said. "But when they're reading and hearing about it, we want to make it available by using technology."
To this end, Wagner said he's weeks away from announcing a deal with a well-known director to shoot a high-definition-video movie that will be released in all media simultaneously. He's also close to arranging with a DVD distributor to home-market such a movie.
Like other chains, Landmark also is experimenting with commercials for additional revenue.
"It's the fastest-growing advertising medium in the U.S.," said Matthew Kearney, chairman and president of the Cinema Advertising Council trade association. "It's a very attractive demographic because 1.6 billion tickets are sold each year, and the audience is typically more affluent, better-educated and younger than average Americans. That's just what advertisers are trying to reach on broadcast TV."
They also are captive, which makes commercials controversial.
"We're going to do a study of people who attend Landmark and the appropriate things they're interested in, and then tailor it for them," Wagner said. "These are our customers; I want them to think it's a great place to watch a movie."
New technology
Additionally, Wagner is close to completing a deal to outfit key Landmark theaters with high-definition digital projectors, which remove the necessity for film prints. The plan is to show movies shot with high-definition digital-video cameras.
"It's a very cutting-edge technology that will draw attention to how great this product looks in hi-def," he said. (At least one theater in each Landmark market will get one, but it will be a "slow, soft rollout," Wagner said.)
Meanwhile, 3-year-old ArcLight has been attracting industry attention for drawing both art-house and commercial-movie patrons to its chic Hollywood multiplex, which features 14 new stadium-seat auditoriums and the restored Cinerama Dome. Charging higher prices, it offers reserved seats, free parking, increased staffing, a gift shop stocked with coffee-table art and movie books, a full-service downstairs restaurant and an upstairs bar, and special alcohol-permitted screenings of selected films.
It is the nation's fourth largest multiplex in total revenue, said Jerry Pokorski, its executive vice president.
"We're going to spread out across the country in the top 20 markets," Pokorski said. "San Diego is high on the radar. It's a very hip market. La Jolla is a very attractive area; Hillcrest does tons of business."
Landmark has no immediate plans for new theaters in San Diego, but it is planning an upscale 14-screen art house complex in West Los Angeles. Initial plans call for it to have at least one theater where patrons can drink alcohol.
"We hope that will be a great adult project for people to see movies in and have the amenities, but done in a tasteful manner," Wagner said.
Steven Rosen, former movie critic of the Denver Post, is a Los Angeles-based film journalist.
