Community protests are growing

Articles and podcasts are appearing daily, registering the dismay so many Angelenos are feeling regarding LACMA's decision:

• FilmWeek's host, KPCC's Larry Mantle, shockingly advocates staying home and watching DVDs, but film critics Lael Loewenstein and Claudia Puig communicate the severity of the loss for our city (about 2/3 of the way into the program).

• Kenneth Turan discusses his excellent Los Angeles Times op-ed on KUSC's Arts Alive podcast (about 16 minutes into the program).

• Tales of a Cinesthete decries "A New Low for LACMA."

• Variety's Todd McCarthy joins the chorus: "A generation ago, Los Angeles had an abundance of revival houses and institutions devoted to showing older, foreign and specialized fare: the Nuart, Fox Venice, Sherman, New Beverly, Vagabond, UCLA Film Archives, frequently USC, the Tiffany on the Strip and others that came and went. . . . But LACMA has always had the most central location and a certain cachet as a high art venue that set it apart."

• Variety's Anne Thompson notes: "LACMA said the program lost $1 million over the last ten years and had failed to build an audience. Sorry, I thought the room was usually packed when I attended. I loved the programming, but it was arcane and eclectic, as a museum's should be, not designed to 'build an audience.'"

• Marshallastor.com asserts: "I’m still incensed by LACMA’s decision to maim its film department under what seem like increasingly flimsy reasonings."

• Kino Slang's esteemed Andy Rector vents at Girish Shambu's discussion site:

Did anyone do the basic math on that? LACMA Film Program = 1 million dollar "loss" over a 10 year period. Nix the worthless 450 million dollar Renzo Piano re-design and that would pay for 4,500 years of the LACMA Film Program. No, Govan wants the ice age NOW. I put loss in quotes because that's how the discovery of cinema (not artfilm) by hundreds of thousands of people is being described. I can't tell you how devastated and outraged I am about this. LACMA was as close as I and many others had to a Cinematheque in Los Angeles - steady, reliable, sincere, mixing classical and modern cinema, without elitism, without superfluous commentary, without the disgusting ceremonies of spectacular contemporary art and museum practice, or the groupie-ism of cult houses. Incidentally, it was a place where you might meet a bunch of teenagers (urged, maybe even required, to attend a film there by their teachers, but still) from Ingelwood who really liked WOMAN IN THE WINDOW and discussed it. . . .