Where's Sid When We Need Him?

The 7 o'clock showing of "The Dukes of Hazzard" at Grauman's Chinese Theatre was lightly attended. As I handed over my 14 bucks for large buckets of empty carbohydrates, I asked the kid in the red tunic behind the concession stand why more people weren't there. "Could be the movie," he said. Wow. Here at the funnel's end of the movie industry, the river of hype and happy boosterism was squeezed down to a single drop of honesty. I almost choked up.

You couldn't blame the attendance on the theater. I've been to Grauman's three times now, and every time it feels like eating a ripe, succulent peach after a steady diet of sawdust.

I know it's set dressing, all this forbidden-palace chinoiserie whipped into a lather, and I reckon that the more sensitive multiculturalists among us might find the 78-year-old Grauman's vaguely insulting. Should Grauman's Irish Theatre be a sod house? But I appreciate the effort. There's even a faux-for-faux's sake obviousness to it that makes it comfortable, that keeps it light. Movie theaters are, or should be, places of illusion. The great and unappreciated insight of America's old movie palaces is that, with their suffused Orientalism and vaulting spaces, they invited patrons to dream.

Grauman's auditorium always stops me in my tracks. What seems like endless rows of red-mohair seats, 1,162 in all, fan out like the ridges of a scallop shell. Light pours through the enormous carved-wood starburst on the ceiling, with a spoke-and-wheel chandelier in the center. The proscenium arch, like the recovered timbers from a sunken Chinese junk, frame a shimmering curtain. Much as an old cathedral does, Grauman's invites you to lose yourself in its sheer scale.

Old Sid Grauman knew a thing or two about showmanship.

Or at least about the psychology of theaters. As Hollywood tries to understand the dramatic drop in box-office revenue--it's the films, it's the ticket prices, it's the motherless mongrels on their cellphones--someone might stop to consider that it might be the theaters.

I call them theaters but they are really more like self-storage units with stadium seating--raw, rough, charmless voids cut out of the dark. Amusement bunkers.

You may choose to attribute teenagers' appalling behavior at the movies to a decline in civility. I think the reason they behave like they're at a school assembly is because the theaters themselves are carpeted gymnasiums. What signal do they have that theaters are someplace special?