Capturing a moment in cinematic time

You see things here from the car that just don’t make sense, or that leave you wondering. Usually the curiosity lasts a few blocks. Then you forget again.

But for the longest time I couldn’t understand why the marquee at my neighborhood art house, the Cecchi Gori Fine Arts Cinema in Beverly Hills, didn’t change. “My Architect: A Son’s Journey,” it said every time I passed.

What was going on? Don’t get me wrong -- I wasn’t plagued, just drive-by perplexed. Like the way you wonder how an empty restaurant can still stay open. I had seen “My Architect,” and I thought it was fine, possibly even moving -- an Oscar-nominated documentary about a son’s search for the father he never really knew, the late renowned architect Louis Kahn. None of this explained why the movie kept playing as I only grew older.

Driving by, I saw no lines snaking around the block a la that Holocaust weepy of a few years ago, “Life Is Beautiful.” I began to wonder if “My Architect” was some kind of front for a popular religion that had colonized the theater. Was my Cecchi Gori being used for Kabbalah spillover from the center on Robertson Boulevard, perhaps?

Then last Thursday night I noticed in the paper that “My Architect” was finally leaving. The very last show was at 9:45. I wondered nevertheless who would be in the theater. Some of us have this kind of free time.

And so at 10:30 I found myself in the parking lot, yelling up at a guy in a window, because the front doors of the theater were locked.

“How long has this movie been playing?” I asked.

“Four months,” he said.

“Why?” I asked.

It seems the movie had never done poorly enough to merit closing, never great enough to be considered a smash. So there I had my answer. The guy in the window said he was the assistant manager and that there were 22 people in the theater right now. “We thought this movie was about to die a month ago,” he said. But then more than 100 people showed up for a Sunday matinee, and it stayed.

In the night, we talked about “My Architect,” this assistant manager and I. As it turned out, the movie had left him cold. I asked him what he’d seen recently that he liked, and he mentioned “Kill Bill Vol. 2” and “Hellboy,” a Japanese anime he’d caught at the Nuart. I found him to be refreshingly free with his opinions for a parking lot conversation.

Eventually it seemed silly to be talking about movies out a window with a stranger, so he invited me up to his office. It was a hovel above a movie house -- no surprise. Casey M. Rocke, 26, was punching box office numbers into a computer to send to the Landmark Theatres people. He looked like what you might expect the assistant manager of an art house to look like: cineaste-type glasses, growth of beard, keys hanging from his trousers.

We went back to “My Architect.” You could hear the projector going in the next room, but “Cinema Paradiso” this wasn’t. “Did I need to see his yarmulke fall off three times?” he said. “No. ‘SNL’ has taught us that redundancy doesn’t equal funny.”

I didn’t remember a yarmulke scene but took his word for it. I asked him how long “Life Is Beautiful” had played. He said nine months. He told me other tidbits. “The last honest sellout was the opening weekend of ‘Talk to Her,’ ” the Pedro Almodovar movie, Rocke said.

He went back to his paperwork. “I was born in Hollywood, at Kaiser,” he said. He described himself as half Mexican and said he’d grown up in the San Gabriel Valley, and that for a time he’d tried writing screenplays. He said he’d been fired from his last job, at a 20/20 Video, for talking to people too much.

By now it was getting to be 11:30; the movie would be letting out. We went downstairs so Rocke could man the doors. After closing he was going to have to pack up the print and take “My Architect” over to the Westside Pavilion, where the movie would continue to live, although in increasingly compromised circumstances: two shows a day, in a sad box at the top of a nondescript mall.

To kill time, we talked about Latino metal heads in the San Gabriel Valley, a subject about which I am considerably less than expert. Any real metal heads, Rocke said, have varied musical tastes. “Ask them if they have a Bjork CD,” he said. “They all do.”

Two young women came through the front door. They were delivering the Cecchi Gori’s next movie, “Springtime in a Small Town.” Rocke and the women exchanged some flirty pleasantries. Minutes later, here came the “ ‘My Architect’ 22” filing out of the theater. I saw mostly middle-aged-looking guys wearing sweatshirts I wanted to buy, guys probably heading to their BMWs.

There were still some stragglers in the theater. “A lot of people stick around and watch the credits,” Rocke said. “There’s like 10 minutes of credits.”

I left, because I could. But on the way home I pictured this guy, driving “My Architect” over to the Westside Pavilion in his car. Funny, I thought, the things you learn.

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Paul Brownfield can be reached at [email protected].