"Largo" the movie is a lot like Largo the club. The lighting is low, its attention is 100% on the performers and it doesn't make things easy for its customers.
"I don't really know what the audience would be," says the film's producer and co-director, Mark Flanagan, mulling the prospects for this unadorned, black-and-white series of performances shot at the tiny Fairfax District music and comedy mecca that he ran for 12 years before moving to a larger location this month.
"People either get Largo or they don't," the Belfast native adds. "You've got the people that are like, 'Oh, my God, no texting?' Yeah, really, no texting."
No texting, no electronics, no talking -- Flanagan runs a tight ship in service to the artists and an appreciative community of musicians and comedians -- Aimee Mann, Jon Brion, Fiona Apple, Brad Mehldau, Patton Oswalt, Sarah Silverman, et al. -- made the room a uniquely intimate and spontaneous laboratory for experimentation and expression.
But there are no whys or hows in "Largo," which screens at 4:15 p.m. today at the Landmark and at 9:45 p.m. Wednesday at the Mann Festival Theatre as part of the Los Angeles Film Festival. Flanagan, working with first-time director Andrew Van Baal, chose not to illuminate his enterprise with interviews or behind-the-scenes material.
"The movie that I really love was 'Jazz on a Summer's Day,' you know, the Bert Stern film?" Flanagan says. "It's from the '50s and it's the Newport Jazz Festival. Mahalia Jackson, Chuck Berry, Louis Armstrong, Chico Hamilton -- it's a really great collection of artists, and there's no real explanation, it just goes from one song to the next. I love that."
Instead of answering questions, the 112-minute film aims to capture the experience of a night at Largo, putting the viewer ringside for an all-star lineup of the club's standard-bearers.
Flanagan's vision of simplicity and minimal movement coincided with the supper club's physical restrictions, as freelance film editor and Largo habitue Van Baal discovered when Flanagan enlisted him to shoot some shows for the club's website three years ago. That initial footage led to more documentation, and, after accumulating 120 hours, they were ready to turn it into a film.
"It was almost like still photography in a way," Van Baal says. "You can't really move around in there, so I felt the best thing to do was just settle down and watch someone in a straightforward way. . . . But to have a whole movie be that way would be very tedious. I think we probably pushed it as far as we could in terms of testing people's patience in that way."
