Happy Thanksgiving!

...All right, Wavers, the packing and traveling, she must be done. So I and my evil-doers bid you goodbye for a few short days. To send you off, I thought I'd post a missive from my friend Hadrian at the Silent Movie Theater on Fairfax here in Los Angeles.

Wait - stop - I can read your mind: her friend? She always says that! What does she think we Wavers are, idiots? How insincere can she be? She can't be friends with everyone!! - Okay first of all, sit down, you there over on the left, before you get a cupcake where the sun don't shine. Remember this: whenever I refer to someone as a friend, dear friend, drinking buddy, pal or former cell mate - I mean it. No gratuitous friend-calling on the Rouge Wave. The Wave-inatrix is, as a dear friend recently said (Hi Peter) "pathologically nice". Whatever.

Anyway, so this is an excerpt from the latest Cinefamily newsletter that my former cell mate Hadrian, the program director at The Silent Movie Theater sent out to his mailing list, of which, of course, the Wave-inatrix is an honorary member. All right, all right, we were never cell mates. What happens in Tonga stays in Tonga. Right Hadrian? You PROMISED!!

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Every day on the way to work, I pass by the writers striking in front of the CBS building. I usually feel terrible that these guys are out of work, but still have to get up before me in the morning. If you don't get to sleep in when striking, when do you? I only get up that early when I'm picking someone up at the airport. I also feel terrible, cause I like writers--without whom we wouldn't have very many good movies, and I found myself thinking about them throughout my day, and how I should bring them the extra cupcakes we're gonna have to throw away, even though that's something you do for homeless people, not striking writers, who may look similar, but are actually quite different breeds. Well, I may still go down and give 'em some cupcakes, but I've got something better to offer.

Free movies.

This is for you, writers. The Cinefamily will house your huddled masses for the length of the strike, for free, at least for the length of a movie. Just show your WGA card at the door, and c'mon in to as many movies as you like. I'm sure you've got a lot of time on your hands, and you're not really working on the personal script you've been putting off, and I've got a new theatre with some extra seats. C'mon by, I say. Sit down for a minute! Use those handy sidetables to take notes. Eat a cupcake.

But you got to pay for the cupcake.

Speaking of writers, we're showing a particularly fine adaptation of Ian McEwan's novel The Cement Garden this weekend, written and directed by WGA member Andrew Birkin. This film is rarely screened, and was incredibly difficult for us to locate, and folks who've seen it scream ecstatically when they see it listed in our calendar. This is because it's so good.

You see, one thing you should understand when looking at our calendar is that the more obscure and uncommercial a film appears, the more you scratch your head and wonder why we're showing it, the more your eyes scanned past it to more familiar ground, the better it probably is. Because that means we're showing it because we love it. We're showing it for us, numbers be damned, and those that show when they're really in for a treat. The Cement Garden is a quintessential example.

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