MAGNO SCREENINGS ROOMS - now closing

[Chris Knipp]

Variety
Breaking News
Sunday, June 24, 2018

The Closing of Magno, the Quintessential New York Screening Room

This Wednesday, the famed Magno Screening Rooms in New York, at 729 7th Ave. (near the corner of W. 49th St.), will close their doors for the very last time. They've been there …

See Owen Gleiberman's Variety article about the closing of the fabled warhorses of independent press screenings of new movies, Magno 1 and Magno 2. What he doesn't mention that I liked was that they were on 49th Street, right on the edge of Times Square, and if you went to an afternoon screening, you'd come out into the dark and see the bright lights of Broadway sparkling all around you. It was magical.

See the list of the movies Gleiberman first saw at Magno.

I remember many (but not as many) viewings of movies there. But what I most remember is watching an early screening of Andrey Zvyagintsev's Leviathan in the cavernous Sony screening room, which was then new to me, with maybe one other person there.

Actually, there is nothing like watching a commercial release in a commercial theater of a good movie that is going to be popular on the first night, with a packed house, shoulder to shoulder, silent and rapt. I remember that for PT Anderson's Magnolia at Regal Union Square. I remember that for La conquête (2011), about Sarkozy, in Paris, and also Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom (2012), also in Paris, the night it simultaneously debuted at Cannes. Also seeing Midnight in Paris in Paris, not on the first night, but still to a full house. As you know, the French love Woody, and it was a movie set in Paris, also opening at Cannes and in Paris on the same night. French cinema audiences are, in general, exceptionally attentive and polite, honoring the films and fellow spectators by silence, and sitting still. They rarely bring in food or make any sound eating during a movie. That's not French!

But I digress. . . the not luxurious but iconic Magno screening rooms were a treasure and should not go.

They saved Carnegie Hall. Or Isaac Stern saved it. But some things disappear quietly without champions even being alerted, if there were any.