BRITISH filmmaker Justin Hardy, who directed the sequel to his dad’s horror classic The Wicker Man, has died aged 61.
The director’s family said Hardy died on Friday – just weeks before his latest film premiered – after suffering a heart attack.
The filmmaker sadly passed away after suffering a heart attackCredit: PAFilming of The Wicker Man saw dad Robin sacrifice his family life for a film that performed poorly initiallyCredit: PA
In a statement the grieving family said: “Our family is devastated to share that Justin Hardy passed away last night.
“He was so full of life right to the end, and incredibly energised to be working towards premiering his latest film this month.
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“We are all so proud of him and heartbroken he won’t be with us at his premiere.
“He was a man of family, of boundless creativity, and of devotion for everyone he held dear.”
Hardy studied history at Oxford University before going on to study film in Bournemouth and scriptwriting in California.
During his career Hardy directed series and films including The Bill, Princes In The Tower, Trafalgar Battle Surgeon, The Relief Of Belsen, Spanish Flu: The Forgotten Fallen and London’s Burning.
He was also nominated for an Emmy and a Bafta, and in recent years had been teaching screenwriting at University College London.
His brother, Dominic Hardy, said Justin would be remembered as someone “with an incredible appetite for life.”
In 2024 the brothers released the documentary Children Of The Wicker Man.
It covered their complicated relationship with their dad’s hit film, which initially bombed at the box office before becoming a cult classic.
Filming of The Wicker Man saw dad Robin sacrifice his family life for a film that performed poorly initially.
Before his death aged 86 in 2016 the legendary director of The Wicker Man – Robin Hardy – spoke publicly about his desire to complete trilogy after he released The Wicker Tree in 2011.
After he died, the brothers were contacted and asked about plans for the third film, which Dominic said they then saw as the “impetus to close the chapter on the films.”
The brothers then decided to wrap up their father’s film trilogy.
Released this month, Wrath Of The Gods was inspired by a concept discovered in a recently unearthed script written by Robin and stars Game of Thrones’ Francis Magee and Norwegian actress Christiane Schaldemose.
Dominic: “I really love writing projects like this and if I could write things like this for the rest of my career, that would be great.’”
Justin Hardy is survived by his wife Larissa, and children Sam, Ludo, Nico and Summer.
Wrath Of The Gods will premiere at FrightFest in Leicester Square on August 28.
Directed by Alice McShane, “Jared Leto: Hollywood’s Dark Secret,” which debuted Wednesday in the U.K., revealed new claims of criminal sexual conduct by the 54-year-old actor and musician from four women, including a possible instance of statutory rape in California. In the film, a total of 10 women recount allegations of sexual assault, along with inappropriate text messages, phone calls and behavior that occurred from 2002 to 2016. Leto has denied the allegations.
To ensure the integrity of the documentary, the hour-long program was not announced ahead of time.
“Everything came out at once,” says producer Jessica Sartenaer, speaking from London over Zoom alongside McShane on Friday morning. “That was all very much part of the strategy because we didn’t want to leak anything before the investigation came out.”
McShane began working on the film after Los Angeles-based DJ Allie Teilz reshared in April 2025 her Facebook post from 2012 in which she accused Leto of trying to “force himself” onto her backstage at a concert. Teilz described the actor as “Hollywood’s most persistent predator.” About 40 women contacted Teilz with their own allegations, according to Sartenaer. In June 2025, weekly newsletter Air Mail published accusations of impropriety against Leto by nine women, which he denied.
“I began ringing around trying to find the women who’d written into Allie,” McShane says. “When I was speaking to women, I realized there were other journalists on the trail. So I did think there was going to be something published relatively quickly, which we can’t compete with because we have a whole different set of considerations. It takes a lot longer to make.”
Social media was the main resource for finding people willing to speak on the record. The filmmakers say they discovered more than 120 separate allegations online.
“But that doesn’t necessarily mean these are all women who want to speak about their experiences,” McShane says. “They’ve posted anonymously for a reason. It was a lot of hours spent digging through hundreds of people from across Leto’s life and career — people who had worked with the band, people in his acting life, his fashion life. We had an enormous spreadsheet. It was a really in-depth process.”
Ultimately, 10 women agreed to be interviewed on camera. The filmmakers offered each various options of anonymity depending on their level of comfort. None are completely anonymous, although only three used their real names. All of their real voices are heard, which McShane says is unusual.
Sartenaer adds, “The courage it takes to come forward and come up against a powerful man like Leto is immeasurable. It’s absolutely incredible what these women have done, and the anonymity decision is a very personal one. Right away, [the women had] this gut instinct about the level of anonymity that they would like.”
“You really learn from a duty-of-care perspective how to best look after the women,” she says. “There’s always this balance of wanting to investigate the story, but also understanding these are people who have gone through incredibly painful experiences and they’re sharing very personal things with you. You never want to push. They are in control. You can never make these things happen. It has to come from the women.”
The initial investigation began in London and the filmmakers visited Los Angeles twice in the months that followed. The first interview was with a woman named Alex last fall. In the documentary, the former model recalls being invited to a 30 Seconds to Mars concert at London’s O2 in 2013 (Leto is the band’s frontman). She says his female assistant then brought her to an afterparty at the members’ club Shoreditch House. Although she was 19 at the time, she told Leto she was 17 to protect herself. She says the musician, then 41, replied, “Age is just a number, and, anyway, we’re in Europe.”
Alex was sent by Leto’s assistant to another afterparty at a nearby hotel, but Leto was the only one there, she says. Alex asked for a phone charger and cash for a taxi home, but was denied. When she asked if she could crash on the sofa in the hotel room, she says Leto threatened to rape her.
“Right from when we started investigating and started hearing from these women, [we were] noticing these patterns of behavior,” McShane says. “[Alex] is an extraordinary communicator. The women we were speaking to, all of them, are amazing storytellers, and resolute about telling their stories. Each time we spoke to somebody it reinforced the importance of getting it out.”
An explosive new documentary revealed new claims of criminal sexual conduct by actor and musician Jared Leto.
(Pascal Le Segretain / Getty Images)
Sartenaer says Leto’s seeming fixation with women of a young age was something “we were interested in investigating right off because of the pattern we noticed in the reposts from Allie Teilz.”
“Many of them did mention that they were teenagers at the time of the alleged offenses,” she says. “We knew that was a thread to follow right from the beginning.”
One woman, named Clara in the documentary, spoke about having sex with Leto for the first time when she was 17 and he was 34. The encounter took place at his home in California. In the film, she describes having a conversation with Leto about the age of consent in the state. “He just kind of shrugged it off, like it wasn’t a huge concern for him,” she says.
As the documentary points out, the age of consent in California is 18. An adult having sex with someone underage can constitute statutory rape. The filmmakers can’t comment on the law or whether there will be any legal repercussions for Leto. However, Mike Radford, executive producer at BBC Current Affairs, says what distinguishes “Jared Leto: Hollywood’s Dark Secret” from prior investigations is that the film showcases alleged criminal conduct.
“That’s a different level of potential wrongdoing,” Radford says, speaking on the phone from London. “From that point of view, it becomes a more serious story, and it goes beyond misunderstanding to something more worrying.”
The filmmakers sent a “lengthy right of reply” letter to Leto and gave him two weeks to respond. They followed up several times with his team to no avail. It wasn’t until after the documentary aired that Leto denied the allegations in a statement, which was shared Wednesday with The Times.
“I have never sexually assaulted anyone in my entire life,” he said. “These claims are absolutely and categorically false.”
The documentary combines the interviews with reenactments and archival footage. Sartenaer says they had a “wealth of material” to pull from.
“There is so much content about him,” McShane adds. “And he’s so overtly sexual on the public stage. We’ve got examples in the film of him, like when he’s in the press room at the Oscars. Everything is packed with innuendo. There are examples where he’s being very inappropriate with young women on the stage. All of that placed next to these interviews can be so chilling and there were countless examples of that available to us.”
The filmmakers worked with a limited budget and a small team of three: McShane, Sartenaer and cinematographer Theo Tennant. In total, they spent a year and half working full time on “Jared Leto: Hollywood’s Dark Secret.”
Alice McShane, left, and Jessica Sartenaer interview entertainment journalist Maureen Ryan for “Jared Leto: Hollywood’s Dark Secret.”
(Theo Tennant / BBC)
The biggest challenge was the fact that “Hollywood is an impenetrable world,” Sartenaer says. The documentary features interviews with two people who worked with Leto speaking completely anonymously, but they were difficult to find and get on the record.
“It really took a very, very long time to have a breakthrough on the insider front [and] to actually get people to start talking with us,” Sartenaer says. “Hollywood is such a precarious place and it’s difficult to get into Hollywood, and I think once people are in, it’s probably a terrifying prospect. One foot stepped wrong could see them catapulted out of it again. We saw that nervousness in trying to speak with people. There’s a real culture of secrecy.”
Despite that, there are hopes that “Jared Leto: Hollywood’s Dark Secret” will encourage other potential victims to speak out.
“The investigation is ongoing,” Sartenaer says. “What these women have done by coming forward [is commendable]. We think their courage will encourage other women to speak their truth, whoever it is about.”
Radford says the BBC is continuing its investigation into the allegations surrounding Leto.
“We would hope that should our investigation continue we would have enough material to make a subsequent documentary,” he says. “We’re not working on a documentary now because I’m not commissioned to do so. But it is our intention.”
At present, the BBC doesn’t have plans to air “Jared Leto: Hollywood’s Dark Secret” in the U.S. It was offered to the U.S. market while in production, according to Radford, but not picked up for distribution.
“There was no legal reason it isn’t airing there,” Radford says. “In fact, the legal threat is much greater in the U.K. because the libel laws are tougher in the U.K. So there was no fear around putting it out in the U.S.”
McShane and Sartenaer have been heartened by the immediate response to the documentary. But they also hope the momentum will continue.
“I hope we keep seeing the reverberations and I hope the conversation doesn’t die,” McShane says. “Ten years ago at the height of #MeToo this would have really punched through. The general outrage has cooled a little bit when stories of this nature are published. But we hope the conversations stay strong because it’s really important people keep talking about this.”
Resources for survivors of sexual assault
If you or someone you know is the victim of sexual violence, you can find support using RAINN’s National Sexual Assault Hotline. Call (800) 656-HOPE or visit online.rainn.org to speak with a trained support specialist.
“Remake” has a tragic tale to tell and director Ross McElwee wastes no time revealing its grieving heart. Near the start of this funereal documentary, the filmmaker addresses his subject directly: “It’s been seven years since you died,” he says to his late son Adrian through voice-over, “and I still miss you every day.”
Across McElwee’s 50-year career, he has worked intimately without a crew to make sense of his own life by diligently recording it. In the process, he turned his friends and loved ones into the unlikely stars of his acclaimed independent documentaries.
With “Remake,” he looks back at that footage, concentrating on the images he shot of Adrian since his birth in 1989. Adrian died on Christmas Eve 2016 of a drug overdose and McElwee clearly remains shattered. For a documentarian who specializes in personal movies, “Remake” feels especially revealing — both in terms of the glimpses we get of this father-son relationship and of unsolved mysteries that linger just outside the frame.
The film’s title ostensibly refers to a surprising phone call McElwee received about 20 years ago, when he was approached by Steve Carr, the director of broad comedies like “Paul Blart: Mall Cop,” who was eager to adapt McElwee’s 1986 documentary “Sherman’s March” into a movie. That landmark picture features McElwee, then in his mid-30s, as he tries to chronicle the exploits of Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, who laid siege to the South during the Civil War. Except, in the midst of that project, McElwee’s focus shifts, delightfully, to his disastrous love life and the fascinating women he meets in his travels, becoming a deeply humane examination of modern courtship.
Carr doesn’t seem like an obvious choice to oversee a narrative remake, but McElwee decides to sell him the rights anyway. Soon in “Remake,” though, it becomes apparent that this is just one chapter of the story — and hardly the most essential. McElwee’s last film, 2011’s “Photographic Memory,” dealt with his increasingly frayed connection to Adrian, who was already fighting substance-abuse issues. “Remake” retraces Adrian’s childhood while filling in the details of the director’s life after “Photographic Memory,” including brain surgery and the dissolution of his 24-year marriage.
But Adrian is never far from his thoughts or absent from the screen: this smiling, happy boy slowly transforming into an edgy, troubled young man whose sweetness still occasionally shines through.
The passage of time is central to McElwee’s work, but he’s rarely scrutinized the topic as aggressively as he does here. It’s not simply that we watch Adrian age or revisit some of McElwee’s “Sherman’s March” subjects. (“Sherman’s March” is now screening in a new 4K restoration at the Laemmle Royal with “Remake.”) It’s also in the way that McElwee’s formerly wry narration now sounds far more resigned, his voice grown froggy and hushed as he nears 80. McElwee has often pondered the downside of essentially treating himself like a human camera, observing the world rather than fully engaging in it. But in “Remake,” he openly questions his artistic approach and, fittingly, he lets his son be his loudest critic.
As a boy, Adrian is enchanted by McElwee’s filming. In childhood, he paints an abstract picture of God in which the Almighty eerily resembles a movie camera. But although Adrian soon picks up a camera as well, increasingly interested in being a filmmaker himself, he resents how his father intrudes on their time together by constantly shooting their conversations. McElwee’s scenes of them at the Venice Film Festival for the “Photographic Memory” premiere are especially fraught, Adrian’s prickly reaction to a movie about his drug abuse creating tension between the two men at the subsequent press conference.
In “Remake,” McElwee laments that he didn’t do enough to help him navigate addiction and the mental-health issues that exacerbated it. (Adrian was diagnosed with bipolar disorder.) Was McElwee too consumed with his own career to be there for his son? The question haunts “Remake” — he includes an indelible sequence from “Sherman’s March” in which his longtime friend Charleen upbraids him for always having the camera out. “This isn’t art,” she hollers. “This is life!” Did McElwee never come to appreciate the difference?
A eulogy that also serves as an apology, a reckoning and a confession, “Remake” is filled with moments that are crushing because of how understated they are, none more brutal than when McElwee visits Adrian near the end of his life, when he’d moved to Colorado to get a fresh start. “He seemed to be doing OK,” McElwee recalls thinking. “But I always leave knowing I’m probably not seeing the whole picture.”
Even now, poring through his footage, desperately looking for clues, McElwee pines for that larger view — the one that might somehow bring the boy back to his inconsolable father.
Artist Vija Celmins and filmmaker Denis Villeneuve will be honored at Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s upcoming Art + Film Gala, the first to be hosted after the spring opening of LACMA’s new David Geffen Galleries.
Now in its 15th year, the glitzy annual event co-hosted by Eva Chow and Leonardo DiCaprio is set to take place Nov. 7. If the museum follows the blueprint it implemented with its Geffen Galleries opening party, the evening’s festivities will unfold in a posh tent beside the new building with a cocktail hour at the base of Peter Zumthor’s concrete creation.
With LACMA still in the international limelight, this year’s Art + Film gala is poised to be its most high-profile yet, enabling it to further its mission of creating connections between the city’s thriving arts and cinema ecosystems. Celmins and Villeneuve certainly live up to the hype. The former, 87, is a pioneer in photo-realistic paintings of natural settings and objects; the latter is an Oscar-nominated director and filmmaker whose projects include the “Dune” movies as well as the upcoming James Bond film for Amazon MGM Studios.
“This year, we are honoring two icons of visual creativity. Whether in painting, drawing, printmaking or other media, Vija Celmins’ exacting renderings of the natural world blend realism and imagination, resulting in sublimely beautiful works,” Michael Govan, LACMA’s director and chief executive, said in a news release. “Likewise, Denis Villeneuve’s meticulously crafted worlds give his films an unforgettable visual impact, from contemplative and cerebral stories to global blockbusters. It will be a privilege for LACMA to honor both of these artists and their extraordinary careers in November.”
Over the years LACMA’s Art + Film Gala has featured a high-profile list of respected artists and filmmakers, including Simone Leigh, Baz Luhrmann, Judy Baca, David Fincher, Helen Pashgian, Park Chan-wook, Amy Sherald, Kehinde Wiley, Steven Spielberg, Betye Saar, Alfonso Cuarón, Catherine Opie and Guillermo del Toro.
Last year’s event, held in honor of Mary Corse and Ryan Coogler, netted a record $6.5 million in support of the museum and its programs.
Carl Erik Rinsch, the director of the 2013 Keanu Reeves action film “47 Ronin,” will serve more than two years in federal prison for defrauding Netflix of $11 million.
U.S. District Judge Jed S. Rakoff on Monday sentenced 48-year-old Rinsch to 30 months in prison, the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Southern District of New York, announced. Federal prosecutors convicted Rinsch in December of wire fraud, money laundering and other counts. A legal representative for Rinsch did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Tuesday.
Federal prosecutors indicted Rinsch in March 2025, alleging the $11 million went into Rinsch’s personal accounts. The filmmaker “quickly transferred” the money from the Rinsch Co. account, where it had been deposited March 6, 2020, by Netflix, through additional accounts until about $10.5 million wound up weeks later in a personal brokerage account. He lost more than half of that money in less than two months via risky investments in the stock market, the indictment said.
Though Rinsch told the streamer that his sci-fi show “White Horse” was progressing nicely, the filmmaker allegedly moved the remaining money into cryptocurrency and profited from crypto speculation over the next couple of years. The streamer had invested around $44 million in the show. Rinsch was accused of spending around $10 million on five Rolls-Royces, a Ferrari, watches, clothing, luxury bedding and linens, credit card bills, attorneys to sue Netflix for more money, and lawyers to work on his divorce.
He was arrested in West Hollywood and released the same day after agreeing to post a $100,000 bond to guarantee his appearance in a New York federal court.
Rinsch never finished the Netflix show.
During his sentencing, Rinsch and his legal team told the court his behavior was a result of mental health struggles and medication problems and they are working to address those issues with a new care provider, the Associated Press reported.
“I failed to recognize the danger of the state I was in,” Rinsch said, though his mental issues were not described in court, and his attorneys declined to provide further detail.
Ahead of the sentencing, Reeves — the star of Rinsch’s most notable project to date — penned a letter in May requesting “leniency and mercy as well as justice” in the filmmaker’s sentencing.
In addition to prison time, Rinsch must serve three years of supervised release, forfeit the $11 million and pay $700 in mandatory special assessments, according to Monday’s announcement. U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton said in the announcement: “Today’s sentence sends a deterrent message: fraud will not be tolerated.”
The Associated Press and former Times assistant editor Christie D’Zurilla contributed to this report.
PARIS — Acclaimed Iranian-French cartoonist and filmmaker Marjane Satrapi, a prominent advocate for women’s rights, has died at 56, the French presidency said Thursday.
“Her passing marks the loss of a leading figure of French culture and an artist devoted to freedom, whose work carried a universal message and earned her immense international acclaim,” the French presidency said in a statement.
President Emmanuel Macron and his wife “pay tribute to a remarkable artist who transformed an Iranian childhood into a universal fable,” the statement said.
News broadcaster BFM TV and other French media reported Satrapi has “died of sadness” a little over a year after the death of her husband, Swedish film producer and actor Mattias Ripa, according to a statement from people close to the artist.
The French Academy of Fine Arts, of which she was a member, expressed its deep sadness in a social media statement, paying tribute to “a passionate advocate for cinema and film education” who earlier this year created a foundation to help international students come to Paris to study film.
Satrapi is best-known for her monochrome autobiographical comic book and film “Persepolis,” a coming-of-age tale set against the Islamic Revolution in her native Iran.
“Persepolis” won the Film Critics Grand Prix at the Cannes Festival in 2007 and the César Award for adapted screenplay in 2008, in addition to being nominated for animated feature at the 2008 Oscars.
The film, which details her life in Tehran as the willful daughter of intellectual Marxists, is a reminder that Iranians are just like everyone else, Satrapi told The Associated Press in a 2007 interview in Cannes.
“What we wanted to say is, if these people scare you, look closer: They have parents, they have lovers, they have hope, they have stories,” she said.
Iranian authorities at the time protested the movie’s inclusion at Cannes, sending a letter to the French Embassy in Tehran.
Satrapi was born on Nov. 22, 1969, in Rasht, Iran, but her parents sent her to Vienna, Austria, in 1983 to finish her studies because of the extremism in their country following the 1979 Revolution that brought Ayatollah Khomeini to power.
But Satrapi, who found Austria hostile and who desperately missed her parents, returned to Iran in 1989 to attend Tehran University, where she earned a degree in visual communications.
By the time she graduated, Satrapi decided she finally was ready to leave Iran and accept the opportunities her parents had been so desperate to give her a decade before. In 1994 she moved to France. She studied in Strasbourg and later moved to Paris.
Her graphic novels also include “Broderies” (“Embroideries”) and “Poulet aux prunes” (“Chicken with plums”), which also was adapted into a film. As a filmmaker, she has directed several works including “La Bande des Jotas” (“The Gang of Jotas”) and “Radioactive” (“Madame Curie”), a biography about the Polish physicist Marie Curie.
Satrapi in 2023 coordinated the book “Femme, vie, liberté” (“Woman, Life, Freedom”) together with a group of artists and academics to illustrate the revolts that occurred in Iran after the death of Mahsa Amini in 2022 at the hands of the so-called “morality police.” The work denounces the repression and lack of human rights that Iranian society, especially women, suffers at the hands of the Iranian regime, the foundation said.
Satrapi was elected member of the French Academy of Fine Arts in 2024. She also was offered France’s highest award, the Legion of Honor, that same year but declined it, arguing France was not doing enough to support Iranian people fighting for democracy.
“Supporting the women’s revolution in Iran cannot be reduced to photos or speeches,” she wrote in a January 2025 letter to French authorities. “When people are fighting for democracy, we should support them.”
In 2024, Satrapi won the Princess of Asturias Foundation award in Spain for communication and humanities. The organization said she was “an essential voice in the defense of human rights and freedom.” The judges described her as “a symbol of civic engagement led by women.”
Satrapi’s husband, Ripa, died in April 2025 at 53. On her Instagram page, only one message was left in a series of posts: “Because I have lost the love of my life.”
Brooke McCree, a 22-year-old recent UCLA graduate, is the first to admit she’s been going to the movies a lot less.
Back when Regency operated the local Village and Bruin theaters in Westwood Village, she would often take advantage of the student discount and see as many movies as possible. But in the two years since the theaters closed, she said moviegoing for many UCLA students has become inaccessible.
“At UCLA, it’s been rough because I’ll have to walk really far or take the bus [to the movies]. There’s nothing really nearby,” said McCree, who recalled fond memories of seeing movies like “Madame Web” and a “Hunger Games” prequel in a dense crowd of excited college students. “I was pretty devastated when it initially closed.”
There is still hope for the Village Theatre, which recently received a breath of new life thanks to some of Hollywood’s biggest names.
The event was reportedly the first of a limited number of premieres and screenings planned for this summer to support a 12-month renovation set to begin this fall.
A representative for Reitman declined to comment on the plans.
Nissan GT-R NISMO sports cars are seen outside the Fox Westwood Village Theatre, promoting the “Gran Turismo” movie in 2023.
(AaronP / Bauer-Griffin / GC Images )
The $25-million restoration, which organizers previously told The Times would be completed next year, includes plans for a restaurant, bar, gallery and a multipurpose space in the lobby for filmmakers and hosting premiere-related events.
Last year, the coalition of directors announced that American Cinematheque would operate the theater, hosting special screenings of new releases and repertory titles and conversations with filmmakers. The film non-profit already runs Santa Monica’s Aero Theatre and co-programs both the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood and the Los Feliz 3.
Historically, the neighborhood has been a tricky market for businesses, said Jonathan Kuntz, a former lecturer at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television. He worked in the area for nearly 40 years and saw much turnover among local businesses due to high rents and inadequate parking.
“We’ve had some great things, like bookstores and eateries that have flourished sometimes for a decade or two, but it faded out,” Kuntz said. “[The theater] will certainly help Westwood if it is a success.”
For that to happen, Kuntz said, 1400-seat theater will need to screen a regular supply of films to a diverse customer base, including nearby students that have long been among its most frequent customers.
Many current UCLA students are already eagerly anticipating the theater’s reopening, said Ingrid Fan, a senior at the university majoring in public affairs.
“It’s been a bummer to have it closed for so long,” said Fan. “My friends and I always talk about how we just wish it opened sooner.”
While the theater’s renovation timeline won’t be complete before she graduates, she’s certain that other students will make good use of it when it reopens.
“Westwood is a college town, and we are always looking for a new source of community. It’s a space a lot of students would definitely flock to,” Fan said.
Broxton Avenue in Westwood Village during one of UCLA’s First Thursdays community events.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
A historic movie hub
The university and its surrounding village, including the theater, were developed simultaneously throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Designed by Percy P. Lewis, the Westwood Village Theatre originally opened as a part of the Fox Theatres chain in 1931.
Despite launching during the Great Depression, the Westwood Village Theatre had a prime location working in its favor.
Westwood was imagined as a satellite town in West L.A. that would eventually support the growing UCLA campus. The neighborhood became known as the third major movie theater hub, behind downtown and Hollywood. In the 1920s, when the Chinese and the Egyptian theaters opened on Hollywood Boulevard, Westwood was next in line as a booming premiere destination.
“It was much more convenient to those folks than going to downtown Los Angeles, or even to Hollywood,” Kuntz said.
This was an era of moviegoing when premieres were essential to a movie’s box office success, drawing substantial marketing opportunities. The volume of films being produced at the time made it necessary to have multiple premiere-ready theaters around L.A., Kuntz said.
A “Terminator” poster is unveiled at the world premiere of “Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines” in 2003.
(Robert Mora / Getty Images)
Over its 95-year history, the venue has been remodeled a handful of times, including in the 1950s when television became a mainstream medium. Soon, multiplexes emerged, which put the Westwood Village location at a disadvantage. To this day, the theater can only show one film at a time.
In the 1970s, the venue joined the Mann Theatres chain, and in 1988, it was designated a historic cultural monument.
The ticket booth at the Regency Bruin theater in Westwood Village all boarded up, as seen on the afternoon of Nov. 3, 2020.
(Carolina A. Miranda / Los Angeles Times)
Regency continued to operate the two locations until its lease ended in 2024. Although the group of Hollywood directors was quick to bid on the Village (the Bruin was not included in the deal), the theater has remained closed since then, with the exception of the recent Billie Eilish premiere.
“A lot of people in Hollywood want to preserve at least some of what made classic Hollywood successful, like the big screen experience,” Kuntz said. “These folks are the ones who could afford to buy a movie house or two, program it and keep that tradition alive.”
L.A. Times staff writers Josh Rottenberg and Meg James contributed to this report.
CANNES, France — Greeting from the Croisette, where the 79th Cannes Film Festival is underway — and where the Envelope has its inaugural Cannes issue.
I’ve been hard at work since before the Oscars assigning and editing stories about the global film industry and this storied event’s role in it, albeit with an L.A. twist. And with this special edition of the newsletter, you too can be a part of the “Entourage,” at least vicariously. Read on for more highlights from the issue, and be sure to check out Amy Nicholson and Joshua Rothkopf’s conversation about the Cannes films they’re most excited to see before you block out your schedule.
Cover: Almodóvar, uncensored
(Shayan Asgharnia / For The Times)
You know you have a juicy interview on your hands when you wake up to it being aggregated by the trades, and I can’t really blame them: Columnist Glenn Whipp’s cover profile of Spanish auteur Pedro Almodóvar, in competition here with his new film “Bitter Christmas,” is chock full of pungent quotations.
At 76, the filmmaker is unafraid to speak his mind, whether it be about the apolitical Oscars or the decline of American democracy. But his metafictional treat, in which an acclaimed filmmaker falls out with an old friend over pilfering real life for inspiration, shows that he’s equally willing to turn that critical lens inward. It’s the film, he says, “where I’ve been cruelest with myself.”
Digital cover: Cannes kid Diego Calva
(Ian Spanier / For The Times)
In one of those serendipitous intersections editors dream off, it’s Almodovar that our digital cover star is most amped to meet during the fortnight: “If Almodóvar shakes my hand, I can die in peace,” Diego Calva tells contributor Carlos Aguilar.
With two films at the festival — Jordan Firstman’s “Club Kid,” playing in Un Certain Regard, and Nicolas Winding Refn’s highly anticipated out-of-competition title “Her Private Hell” — Calva, who appeared earlier this year in “The Night Manager” Season 2, may be hard for Almodóvar to miss. But the actor isn’t letting the auspicious moment go to his head. “My friends don’t care whether I have seven Golden Globes or if I’m not working at all,” he says. “To them, I’m just Diego.”
What’s next for Nollywood
(Photo illustration by Stephanie Jones / For The Times; photos courtesy of Anthill Studios, African International Film Festival)
I admit I didn’t know much about the Nigerian film industry beyond the term “Nollywood” before reading Daron James’ deep dive on how the West African country is charting a new course after its recent streaming boom went bust. Now I’m eager to see if its embrace of theatrical exhibition — including, gasp, building more cinemas — can rub off on its American namesake.
Nollywood may produce “the second most movies globally after India,” as James writes, but “creative hustle… is still as important as ever.”
