HOLLYWOOD — For most of the year, the revival houses along and near the Boulevard survive on double bills, repertory nights and the loyalty of people who still prefer film to a living-room screen. For about six weeks in the dead of winter, they fill up completely, because the studios need somewhere to show their contenders and voters need somewhere to be shown.
Awards season, whatever it does for the people onstage, quietly reanimates a slice of the neighborhood’s working economy. The campaign screenings — free showings meant to put a film in front of the members who hand out the trophies — book the old theaters night after night from the new year through the end of February. With the bookings come jobs.
“January is when I hire back everyone I had to let go in the fall,” said Teodora Vance, who manages one of the older auditoriums and would not let its name be printed, citing the studios’ preference for discretion. “Extra ushers, a second projectionist, someone to run the will-call table. For a few weeks I have a full staff again. Then March comes and I don’t.”
The season supports a whole tier of specialists who exist for it. There are the Q&A moderators, who make a living in these weeks steering conversations with directors. There are the caterers who lay out the lobby spreads. There are valets working corners that have no valet the rest of the year, and the drivers who ferry talent from screening to screening across a few congested miles.
“I moderate maybe twenty of these in six weeks, and it’s most of my year’s income from that kind of work,” said Rashaan Ilesanmi, who hosts on-stage discussions after the films. “You learn to read a tired audience at ten p.m. You learn which director will talk for forty minutes and which one you’ll have to gently rescue. It’s a craft, and it has a season, like farming.”
The theaters themselves benefit beyond the rental checks. A house that spends the fall half-empty gets six weeks of packed rooms, and managers say the exposure sometimes converts. A voter who has not sat in a real balcony in years remembers that he likes it, and comes back in the spring with his kids.
Not everyone romances the season. The screenings are private, closed to the public, and the neighbors who see the searchlights and the double-parked town cars are not invited in. Some residents grumble that their theaters, for these weeks, belong to the industry rather than to them.
There is also the shadow the season cannot quite outrun. The campaigns are as busy as ever, but the year-round work that once surrounded them — the shooting, the crews, the steady production that kept the same theaters and caterers employed in the off months — has thinned. The winter rush lands, this year, against a slow twelve months on either side of it.
Vance is not complaining about the crush while it lasts. She spent the fall watching a nearly empty room. “Ask me in March how I feel,” she said, unlocking the doors for a nine o’clock screening as the line stretched toward the corner. “Tonight I feel like I run a movie theater again.”