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In the two years Elliot Lavine has shown classic movies on Saturday mornings at Cinema 21, he never drew a crowd larger than 250 people. That is, until January, when Lavine programmed a quartet of Alfred Hitchcock pictures. At 11 am on Jan. 11, the theater’s cavernous main auditorium was jammed with 376 people (80% of capacity, counting the balcony) for Rear Window. Attendance for Saturday Morning Classics hasn’t dipped below 300 since.
“It surpasses anything I’ve ever seen,” says Lavine, a film studies instructor at Oregon State University who programmed repertory cinema for two decades in San Francisco. He says the tipping point was a screening of Casablanca, with its portrayal of French resistance, two weeks after the presidential election. “From that week on,” he says, “the crowds kept escalating and escalating until it broke all records imaginable.”
Management at Cinema 21 is delighted but tells WW that with so many people attending morning shows, it’ll need to brew more coffee.
