When the Los Angeles County Museum of Art said earlier this summer it was suspending its 40-year-old weekend film program because funds had run out, LACMA's director Michael Govan was besieged by criticism -- even from luminaries like Martin Scorsese.
It's a little bit of human nature. But it's better that more people got involved in the discussion than were actually going to the theater. This shows me there's a larger potential audience. Maybe I'm being hopeful there, assuming that if people sign petitions, we can convince them to actually join.
To what do you attribute you drop in audience?
I don't want to get stuck on that point. You can't have no patrons and no audience, and we have patrons. Obviously, it's a question of balance. I think we can do better if we run some fun outdoor programs, that kind of thing. All we were seeing were negative trends -- less audience, no money, and costs rising. Not one positive uptick. Now we've got money coming in, and we've got more people coming to the theater.
But why try to expand things now, during tough economic times?
I actually thought it was a good time to confront it, while the economy is down, because we had postponed our bigger building projects.
Film is becoming more important and the city is becoming bigger. That's why we need a bigger program. And we really just didn't have the money to run the film program the way it was. Everyone was saying, "You only need $150,000." But the trend line was the issue. $150,000 was the minimum we needed to run the program.
Staff. A film coordinator and a second person, a projectionist. Lots of people are involved if you run a theater. And you have the costs of film rentals. So let's get the right budget -- instead of $360,000 a year, it's $500,000 a year.
What happened during last week's "popcorn summit" meeting between you and the members of the L.A. film community?
The meeting was extremely productive in terms of sharing creative ideas. What I tried to communicate was what I've tried to communicate from day one: You won't see LACMA without film.
