Carnage thrives in the open air
They crept forth from across the city last Friday evening -- in Hummers, vintage convertibles and plain old Toyotas -- to huddle together at the Steve Allen Theater in Hollywood for its first ever scary drive-in movie series.
To kick off this 10-week resurrection of that once-ubiquitous L.A. experience, theater artistic director Amit Itelman unleashed "From Beyond," a lurid mid-'80s mad-scientist flick adapted from an H.P. Lovecraft short story about ill-advised experiments on the pineal gland. Itelman had scored a print of director Stuart Gordon's more fully fleshed-out version, complete with a detailed brain-munching sequence originally nixed by the MPAA.
"What I like about this movie is that Stuart treats the human body like Play-Doh," said Itelman, a 33-year-old San Francisco native who opened the Steve Allen four years ago as a place to mix and match carnies, stand-up comedians and live '20s-style jazz.
On that first night, the theater's parking lot was nearly sold out, with cars sprawled four lanes deep, despite little more than an e-mail blast in the way of advertising. It's a modest parking lot, though, holding a modest crowd of horror enthusiasts, drive-in fans and, of course, couples. Alec and Natalie Myers came up from Culver City to burrow beneath a red sleeping bag in the back seat of his '62 Corvair convertible. "She's never been to a drive-in," he said. "The last one I remember seeing was probably 25 years ago. My parents took me to a 'Blade Runner'-'Death Wish' double feature."
It was a night for open windows, the air uncharacteristically chewy with humidity, and laced with beer and smog. Viewers tuned car radios to a designated frequency; the soundtrack bubbled up from beneath dashboards and seemed to pool across the lot. With the theater situated on a residential street just around the corner from Hollywood Boulevard, headlights now and again danced across the wide white wall onto which Itelman projected not only "From Beyond" but also an introductory round-up of singing soft drinks, a stern-minded '50s-era patriarch with a zero-tolerance message for noisemakers, and a plea, set to a swinging '60s tune, for no public displays of affection.
There was also, of course, a full quota of previews, including one for the gem being shown this week: 1977's "Demon Seed." Starring Julie Christie, it's the story of "something more than human, more than a computer. It's a murderously intelligent, sensually self-programmed non-being," at least according to the trailer's voice-over.
