Fiddlers on the Roof: The Laemmles Bring Art-House Movies to Angelenos

Motion picture buffs probably know something about Carl Laemmle (1867-1939), the German-born Hollywood producer who helped found and run Universal Studios.  In 1915, he opened the world’s largest movie production facility in what has come to be called Studio City, just over the Cahuenga Pass from Hollywood, California. As a producer he was chiefly known for classic silent and early sound horror flicks, among them Dracula and Frankenstein (both 1931). As everybody’s “Uncle Carl,” he was later revered for saving scores of family members and one-time Jewish neighbors from the Nazis by sponsoring their emigration to the U.S.

 There’s a venerable movie theatre on Santa Monica Blvd. in West Los Angeles that devotes one lobby wall to memorabilia from the life and career of Carl Laemmle. That’s not surprising, because the Royal is the flagship of the Laemmle theatre-chain, known throughout the L.A. area for presenting independent and foreign-language movies that might well be overlooked by big multiplexes where the Hollywood studios have box-office clout. (The official Laemmle Theatre motto is “Not afraid of subtitles.”) The Laemmle chain was founded in 1938 by Kurt and Max Laemmle, cousins of Carl and themselves immigrants from Germany. In the early 1970s, when my boss Roger Corman decided to distribute Ingmar Bergman’s extraordinary Cries and Whispers and Federico Fellini’s delightful Amarcord to American audiences, I remember Max and his son Robert showing up at a local screening-room to check out the films and help make plans for their local and national release. No question: these guys really loved films by European masters. Over the years they introduced to L.A. audiences such super-hits as La Cage aux Folles, as well as offbeat films by Martin Scorsese and other American talents.

 The Laemmle chain is still very much an all-in-the-family venture, now headed by Robert’s son Greg. He has presided over the theatres in a difficult era, coping with the challenges posed by streaming and (yes!) the pandemic, a time when public venues like movie houses were closed for over a year. Probably to raise everyone’s spirits, Greg and company kept updating the Royal’s pandemic-era marquee, using actual movie titles to comment on the situation. Films that were supposedly “now playing” included Mask and Requiem for a Dream, while among the promised films that were “coming soon” was The Awakening.    

 Today Greg Laemmle, who just prior to the pandemic had seriously considered selling the theatre chain, continues to run it. Which means that art-film lovers across the L.A. megalopolis can still feast their eyes on foreign movies, quirky movies, and the occasional revival of a golden oldie. Following some pandemic-related adjustments, there are now seven locations throughout SoCal, including my beloved Monica Film Center, where the Laemmles annually screen Fiddler on the Roof on Christmas eve. (Costumes are encouraged, and everyone is invited to sing along.)

 A fairly new feature of Laemmle World is a video podcast, “Inside the Arthouse,” which offers an insider’s perspective on today’s art cinema. It’s co-hosted by Greg Laemmle and veteran actor Raphael Sbarge, who has recently turned to directing. (His 2019 documentary, Foodways, was nominated for an Emmy.) Sbarge’s 2022 documentary, Only in Theaters, chronicles the story of the Laemmle Theater chain, with special attention to those tough pandemic years. For me there’s a quiet personal joke in Sbarge’s deep involvement with the Laemmle theatres. Back in 1993, he starred for Roger Corman in a gory but lucrative creature-feature, Carnosaur, which was explicitly designed (how well I remember!) to beat Spielberg’s Jurassic Park into theatres. That’s one Corman movie I suspect never played on a Laemmle screen. 

 

"Jurassic Park” and “Carnosaur”: When Dinosaurs Galumph Down Memory Lane

Thirty years ago this month, the nation held its collective breath, wondering how Steven Spielberg would bring to the big screen Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park, a  bestselling novel about dinosaurs running amok in the modern world. And what was I doing around that time? Along with other members of Roger Corman’s creative staff, I was patting myself on the back, overjoyed that we at Concorde-New Horizons had managed to scoop Spielberg. Not in terms of lavish production values, of course. Hardly endowed with Spielberg’s access to CGI technology. we had managed to come up with only a single tyrannosaurus. Roger decreed that it be eighteen feet tall, thus out-Spielberging Spielberg. But the ceiling of our rather make-shift Venice studio was only sixteen feet high, so the height requirement had to go.

 It all began while the Crichton novel (first published in 1990) was being transformed into a motion picture. Always quick to sense the national pulse, Roger set aside a project dramatizing the bloody L.A. civil uprising of 1992 in order to bring his own dinosaur movie to the screen. Our mandate: to get our film into theatres before Jurassic Park opened, thus luring in viewers who couldn’t wait a moment longer to watch rampaging dinosaurs First, of course, came the script. Roger purchased a novel by the Australian sci-fi novelist, John Brosnan. A man who knew how to make a buck, Brosnan had published back in 1984 a novel called Carnosaur, under the nom de plume Harry Adam Knight. I  read it in the line of duty, looking for plot ideas, but didn’t find them in the book’s turgid pages. We at Concorde noted that the initials of Harry Adam Knight could certainly stand for “hack.” This novel was hack-work, pure and simple. Without question, we needed to start from scratch. All we kept from Carnosaur was its title . . .  and maybe that chicken farm set-up.

 Roger hired a bright but spelling-challenged USC film school grad, Adam Simon, to write and direct our dinosaur movie. Perhaps influenced by the opening of Brosnan’s novel on a chicken farm, Adam concocted a story about a mad scientist, working for the mysterious Eunice Corporation, who manipulates chicken embryos into future dinosaurs, the better to undermine the human race. The plotline allowed for lots of gory footage, and we hired a big-name actor for the key role of Dr. Jane Tiptree. While in Jurassic Park young Laura Dern was running from dinosaurs, we had her mother, Diane Ladd, playing the scientist who stirs up all the chaos. I don’t know if Ladd was the first-ever female mad scientist in the movie world, but she was outstandingly creepy. It was largely thanks to her vivid performance that TV reviewer Gene Siskel gave our movie an enthusiastic thumbs-up. (His boob-tube buddy, Roger Ebert, called Carnosaur the worst film of 1993.)

 Carnosaur still leaves Adam Simon with a bitter taste in his mouth. When Roger asked Simon to write and shoot his quickie dinosaur epic, Simon took the difficult assignment because he was guaranteed a $3 million budget. Then, three weeks before photography commenced, the budget suddenly shrank to $850,000, a figure Simon is now convinced was part of Corman’s plan all along. To make matters worse, when Roger (on the strength of Carnosaur’s success in video stores) spoke to the Hollywood Reporter, he bragged he’d laid out $5 million.  A humiliated Simon felt Carnosaur looked particularly shoddy if judged by the industry’s 1993 expectations of what $5 million can buy. So Simon now regards Carnosaur as a cautionary tale for fledgling filmmakers everywhere.