“What a day, boys. Marty Supreme.”
I had been in Los Angeles for less than fifteen minutes when I overheard a film bro (a rare female film bro) say that to her friends. Up until that point, I could hardly tell I was in L.A.. My girlfriend and I had driven in after dark, taking a long and winding route south around a mountain I didn’t know was there. From there, the 5 felt like a tunnel, hemmed in on all sides by traffic and the impending sense of doom that only comes from double digit lanes condensing to three. The hotel looked like a Hilton anywhere and the neighborhood could have been Arlington, Virginia or Beacon, New York.
But that sentence, said behind me while I waited to cross a street to what turned out to be a subpar Asian restaurant, rattled around in my head like Lewis Black losing his mind over “If it wasn’t for my horse, I wouldn’t have spent that year in college.” That was when I knew where I was. I wanted to turn and ask, What does that mean? What is contained in Marty Supreme that requires no answer from The Boys, who I presume were nodding along reverentially? I should have turned around and asked, instead of staring at the crosswalk waiting for traffic that wasn’t coming.
I have a healthy disdain for Timothy Chalamet that comes with age. A wariness that if young people are telling me something is good, it probably isn’t. I didn’t even know what Marty Supreme was about. But I became obsessed. Whether I was standing in the ocean in Santa Monica, looking at imports in Little Tokyo, or otherwise trying to enjoy myself, I was thinking about how there was a theater on the same block as me showing a movie that no one else could see for another week.
In my small town in Upstate New York, seeing a small film is an adventure. The only real way is to go to the local arthouse theater, the one that smells like mildew no matter the weather. The one with the pockmarked parking lot without lines. Next to the mashed potato restaurant that will be gone in two months. The alternative is to take the pilgrimage to New York City from the Amtrak (or the new Metro North line that finally makes everything on the Hudson part of The City and not Upstate) to the subway to someplace showing an auteur film.
Otherwise, it is dire. The local Regal is three showings of Zootopia and a Bollywood film at 5 PM on a Tuesday. The AMC is those same three showings with worse seats. We just don’t get the same movies as L.A. or NYC, and if we do, not for very long. Meanwhile, during my after-dinner walk, still having only been in L.A. for an hour or so, I realized the film bros I’d been eavesdropping on had probably been walking back from a nearby multiplex. The difference between that AMC and mine was this one had hourly showtimes for Marty Supreme, yet to release nationwide, and all of them were sold out.
When we first planned the trip to the west coast I had said I wanted a quintessential L.A. experience. The equivalent of cheese steaks in Philadelphia, Rockefeller Center in New York, the world’s worst pizza in Chicago. We had done a few – Hollywood sign, David Lynch’s grave, two hours of gridlock. But what I really wanted was to see a movie. To feel like Christian Slater in True Romance, or to feel whatever it is Nicole Kidman is trying to make me feel in those AMC ads. To be in (jazz hands) Hollywood.
Plan A was a trip to Quentin Tarantino’s New Beverly Theater on Christmas Eve to watch Die Hard. In hindsight, I couldn’t have picked a more normie option to summarize “the L.A. experience”. Fate intervened, along with an utter lack of planning, as all three showings sold out ahead of time. I consoled myself with “Well, QT is a Zionist and also he was mean to Paul Dano” but those grapes were more sour than Willy Wonka’s worst Warheads. The easy answer would have been to see Marty Supreme but it felt empty – why was I paying to see a movie I was ambivalent about? Just to do it? What kind of person was I?
My girlfriend’s sibling, a filmmaker, sensed my frustration. At their urging, we booked tickets for a showing of Park Chan Wook’s No Other Choice at the Vista. Now here was the actual thing I was after. A glorious old filmhouse, with red curtains and strange art deco decor on the walls. Also apparently owned by Quentin Tarantino but I just kind of ignored that. No reserved seats – people left newspapers to mark where they were sitting if they went to the bathroom. No stadium seating – my petite girlfriend missed half of every subtitle trying to peer around people’s heads. But it was pitch black, the audience was silent (aside from the couple next to me, who got vigorous at some weird moments but hey, at least they weren’t texting), and at the end, everyone applauded.
Fitting for a Christmas Eve experience, akin to “it was inside you all along”, I had discovered the thing I was actually after. Wook is a filmmaker whose work I enjoy because it defies genre and expectation. The film was simultaneously bleak and hilarious. It was something I would have enjoyed in my living room. But here I was, surrounded by people who cared enough to go out to the theater and to sit quietly for two hours, focused entirely on the art on the screen. It helped that I was seeing it before most of the country, although the film had already made the festival circuit and premiered in South Korea. But that was barely a concern by the time the lights came back up. I returned home on a flight that somehow left at 6 AM from Burbank and didn’t get to LaGuardia until 9 PM, happy and feeling fulfilled.
I never did see Marty Supreme. I might – by the time I got home, it was at the local Regal in both standard screen and whatever “laser projection” is. But the allure is gone.
