Earlier this month, I had the urge to rewatch Wong Kar-wai’s masterpiece In the Mood for Love. With its rain-soaked Hong Kong alleys, cheongsam dresses sculpted on Maggie Cheung’s body and Tony Leung’s angst-fueled cigarette smoking, the 2000 movie now struck me almost as affected as it had once seemed romantic. But one thing stayed the same. I remembered where I first watched it, scratching out notes to review it for the daily paper: Lefont Garden Hills Cinema.
A few days later, George Lefont passed away at age 85. For decades of my life, the theaters he operated in Atlanta clung to me like a second skin as tight as Cheung’s dresses. Long before I was paid to write about movies — as soon as I was able to drive myself — I made what seemed like very adult sojourns from Northwest Georgia to the big city of Atlanta. I drove just to catch movies at theaters Lefont owned because his theaters were the ones with the movies worth watching.
A high schooler, I caught Volker Schlöndorff’s phantasmagoric World War II epic The Tin Drum at The Screening Room in the old Lindbergh Plaza. Cautiously edging toward the closet door, I traveled with friends for that midnight station-of-the-cross — The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
Later, yes, I was one of the drunken college kids who bought a ticket for Caligula at the Tara. But it was at Lefont’s Screening Room at Peachtree Battle that I began an informal education that put me on track to write with some knowledge about films — the newest titles but also the treasury of classics made in the first seven decades of film history.
As a shy nerd growing up in the woods, I’d tried to connect to the wider cultural world any way I could. As alien as it seemed, I subscribed to The New Yorker. Pauline Kael’s film reviews — passionate, belligerent, often wrongheaded but persuasive – taught me about a long-ago film world ruled by directors I’d never heard of: Lubitsch, Renoir, Varda, Kurosawa, Clouzot, Fellini,…
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