My Movie Theater: Ariel LeBeau

My Movie Theater is a new series from Dirt x MUBI in which our favorite writers pay tribute to their hometown theaters. 🍿

Ariel LeBeau on the theater that makes LA feel like home.

Los Angeles isn’t my hometown, but over the past seven years it has become my home—a process that has been shaped, more than anything else, by moviegoing. People who know me (and people who don’t know me but follow me online) know that moviegoing is my primary “hobby”—though I bristle at this word. Even “pastime,” which is technically accurate, feels diminutive for what I prefer to think of as a practice—to which I comfortably devote a majority of my time. On a good week, I make three or four outings to the theater. On a really good week, I’m there every day. 

I’ve visited cinemas from Tokyo to Milan to Amsterdam to Rochester, New York (my hometown, a city with film prominently in its DNA), but the theater that I see myself in when I close my eyes is the Los Feliz 3, which has been a cherished haunt of mine since long before I moved to the neighborhood. In fact, I moved to the neighborhood with the specific goal of living within walking distance of it.

Los Feliz 3, or LF3 for short, is one of the more modest theaters in LA: all three of its screening rooms combined total about 250 seats, which is roughly half the capacity of its sister theaters, the Aero in Santa Monica and the newly renovated Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood, or an even tinier fraction of the hulking 900+ seat IMAX auditorium at TCL’s Chinese Theatre. It feels so cozy and personally intimate that I tend to think of it as an extension of my living room—which is also why you’ll never find me there with anyone I don’t have genuine affection for. 

LA’s most beloved independent programmers American Cinematheque oversee most of the screenings in LF3’s main auditorium, as well as at the Aero and Egyptian, where they curate a vast array of new releases, repertory series, and special events showcasing independent auteurs, emergent filmmakers, and Hollywood A-listers. While the larger theaters are obvious hubs for splashy occasions like sold-out Q&As with Michael Mann or Leonardo DiCaprio, LF3 functions as an annex for quieter curiosities and hidden gems. 

The Aero is where you might see Paul Thomas Anderson present the premiere of a new 70mm blowup print of Boogie Nights, but LF3 is where you could catch an old 35mm print of The Fortune Cookie, a Billy Wilder deep cut from 1966 that PTA personally selected. Both are exciting, certainly, and typify the embarrassment of riches that the Los Angeles repertory scene has to offer  (take a glance at Revival Hub’s aggregated calendar of rep screenings on any day of the week and tell me LA moviegoers aren’t the most spoiled in the world) but it’s precisely these sort of smaller scale events at LF3 that loom largest in my memory.

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Because LF3 is comparatively stripped of ceremony, nor does it cater to a cultish crowd like Quentin Tarantino’s New Beverly Cinema or the scene-y Brain Dead Studios, its relative vibelessness often sets the stage for my most evocative viewing experiences. That 150-seat auditorium enrobed in green velvet is where I experienced my first Apichatpong Weerasethakul film, my first John Cassavetes; artists that radically and permanently augmented my cinematic grammar. It’s where I was introduced to the work of writer/director Elaine May, who became a more indelible idol to me with each of her rarely-screened films I was lucky to see there. LF3 is where I am continually introduced to new favorites from filmmakers I already love—I wept at Hirokazu Kore-eda’s After Life, cackled at Gus Van Sant’s To Die For—and was dumbstruck by discoveries for which I had no prior context at all, such as Nancy Savorca’s Dogfight or William Friedkin’s Sorcerer. During American Cinematheque’s recent Edward Yang retrospective, it felt appropriately monumental to watch his masterworks Yi Yi and A Brighter Summer Day at the Egyptian, but a late weeknight showing of the lesser-known A Confucian Confusion at LF3 was the one that impressed upon me the most. 

Hal Ashby’s 1971 classic Harold and Maude was formative for me in my adolescence; one of the first films I can remember falling in love with as a young person. When I was 15 or 16, a kind and perceptive teacher lent me the DVD, correctly intuiting that I’d see myself—an artsy, awkward outcast—in the characters. The film and his gesture were profoundly comforting and affirming, and have remained significant to me ever since. When I got to watch Harold and Maude on a big screen for the first time in 2022, with a packed crowd at Los Feliz 3—my first time revisiting the film in many years—I was overcome with recognition and gratitude. It felt like a spiritual communion with my past self; as though she was sitting right beside me.