If you drive down Crenshaw Boulevard in Gardena, you might see the marquee for an old movie theater. We’ve become accustomed to assume that such landmarks are abandoned — a bittersweet reminder of a forgotten era when going to films was the national pastime. But Gardena Cinema is alive and kicking. At least if Sean Baker has anything to say about it.
It’s noon in early October, and the 53-year-old filmmaker has selected this theater, built in 1946, as the spot to do his interview and photo shoot with The Times. When he arrives, he hugs owner Judy Kim, whose family has operated the venue since 1976. The writer-director has become part of that family in a sense, one of the loyal customers extolling Gardena Cinema’s sturdy, weathered charms.
“I’m interested in any single-screen or just independently owned mom-and-pop theaters,” Baker enthuses as he looks around the empty 800-seat venue, which in keeping with the spooky season, would be featuring upcoming revival screenings of “The Silence of the Lambs” and “The Lost Boys.”
In person, Baker is boyish and down to earth, his clothes a comfy, unpretentious combo of sweatshirt and nondescript jeans, the familiar wardrobe of this most unassuming of America’s new wave of indie auteurs. But the acclaimed filmmaker behind pictures such as “Tangerine,”“The Florida Project” and “Red Rocket” is also among the great champions of the art house theater experience. He’ll exuberantly tweet about going to the New Beverly or rave about the latest heralded world-cinema offering, like Catherine Breillat’s “Last Summer.” But Gardena Cinema was a relatively new discovery.
“I came down here maybe three to four years ago — it was late COVID because they were still showing films out in the parking lot,” he recalls. “They tried to stay open during COVID and were struggling. I made a little money on ‘Red Rocket,’ more money than I usually make, and I [made] a charitable donation just to keep them on their feet.”
As we grab seats down the left aisle, Baker allows himself to fantasize. “I think this could be a draw like the Vista and the New Bev,” he says. “I could see people coming down from Hollywood — especially if there was 35mm every night. Retro repertory stuff? Oh, my God.” But he laments that he hasn’t had much of a chance lately to catch a movie here. “It’s been so busy,” he says. “Maybe when everything calms down with ‘Anora.’” He knows that won’t be happening anytime soon.
His eighth feature and his third to premiere at Cannes, “Anora” is both an excellent introduction for those unfamiliar with Baker’s aesthetic — intimate, nonjudgmental portraits of characters trying to hold on, a mixture of comedy and drama — and an exciting culmination of what has come before. Set primarily in Brighton Beach, the film stars Mikey Madison as Ani, a 20-something sex worker at a Manhattan strip club who meets Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn), an adorably immature Russian playboy with endless money and an opulent home. A lap dance turns into private house calls, and Ani is soon hired by Ivan to be his girlfriend for an impromptu trip to Las Vegas, where they impulsively get married.
“Anora” is a Cinderella love story — until Ivan’s father, an oligarch, finds out about the nuptials, dispatching his gruff consigliere Toros (Karren Karagulian) to have the wedding annulled immediately.
Part screwball comedy, part one-crazy-night romp, “Anora” won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, making Baker the first American to claim the prize since Terrence Malick did for “The Tree of Life.” It’s an honor he’s coveted since graduating from film school at New York University — a lofty aspiration for someone who knew what he wanted to do with his life, he says, when he was 5.
Sitting here now at Gardena Cinema, Baker reflects on how movies — and the joy of movie theaters — helped inspire “Anora.”
“I got rejected from McDonald’s and Burger King,” he says, laughing in a sweetly nerdy way, remembering applying for summer jobs in New Jersey as a teen. Finally, he got hired at a flailing single-screen theater in Manville. “It was a mom-and-pop. It was a smaller theater [than Gardena Cinema], but not that much smaller. Within a week, they were like, ‘OK, we’re going to train you to be a projectionist.’ Within three weeks, I was manager. I was managing a theater at 17 years old and being the projectionist at the same time, which was insane. It was such a weird, motley crew of people — Jersey Shore-type guys.”
Back in the late 1980s, Baker didn’t have as much access to independent cinema. (“Spike Lee’s films made it into all the big multiplexes,” he says, “but I had to drive to an art house to see ‘Mystery Train’ or something like that.”)
Which explains why, when he applied to NYU, he saw himself making mainstream movies. As part of his application process, he wrote a “sappy, cheesy” personal statement, the memory of which embarrasses him now.
“The essay was really wish-fulfillment-manifestation stuff,” he says, shaking his head. “I can’t even believe I was accepted. It was me talking about my Oscar acceptance [speech] and having made the new big action ‘Die Hard’ thing. In the next four years, that changed completely — by the time I graduated, I was fully embracing world cinema and independent film. Cannes became the end-all, be-all. It became the zenith.”
His college years exposed him to Pedro Almodóvar, Eric Rohmer and Hal Hartley’s “The Unbelievable Truth.” But his late teens were also a period in which his buddies decided he needed some real-world experience, too. At age 18, he was dragged to Jersey’s notorious Frank’s Chicken House. “It was a famous place that Howard Stern used to talk about all the time,” recalls Baker. “It was the one full-nude [strip club] in the tri-state area.”
For many straight men, their maiden journey to a strip club is an obligatory rite of passage, but for Baker, the incident was more fraught. “I looked so young,” he says. “I was suddenly everybody’s younger brother through high school.” Waving his hand over his chest, he confesses, “I had no hair — I didn’t even start thinking about girls or sex in general until 17. That was my introduction to Frank’s Chicken House.”
The evening did not turn Baker, who radiates a gentle, laid-back vibe, into a strip-club regular. “To this day, the images I have are looking at this dancer’s face, because she was looking at me like, ‘Is he even old enough to be in here?’” he says. “It was a very explicit, all-nude place — I just remember looking at her eyes and her [thinking], ‘OK, this is probably the first time you’re seeing this.’ Then, I’m looking at the guy next to me who is the quintessential sleazy, greasy guy smoking a cigarette, eating his chicken, with the sunglasses on inside and the greasy mustache. I was just like, ‘Oh, wow. I’m in it.’”
Over time, maybe he’d go to other clubs, “but I immediately saw past the facade,” he says. “I never bought into it. I always found it so interesting that my friends would be swept away spending hundreds and hundreds of dollars thinking that the dancer was in love with them.”
That fascination with the artifice — short-term intimacy for a cost — paired with his appreciation for the legitimate work being done spurred Baker to make a series of films that, in different ways, have examined the industry. Sex workers populate his movies, their lives treated with dignity without patronizingly reducing these characters to flawless angels. In “Anora,” Ani is no hooker with a heart of gold. She’s realer, funnier and more nuanced than that and not about to go quietly once her fairy-tale romance ends and Ivan makes a run for it.
“I think he is really interested in telling stories about marginalized people,” Madison suggests in a separate phone interview. “He’s also dedicated to trying to help destigmatize that kind of work. There are so many different kinds of people who live in that world, and he has a lot of love and respect for that community. For whatever reason, he’s pulled in that direction to tell these stories.”
Simon Rex, who played the blissfully self-absorbed faded porn star Mikey in Baker’s 2021 “Red Rocket,” wonders if the director’s interest in sex work stems from shattering taboos.
“I think he likes to deal with the hypocrisy of America,” Rex says over the phone. “We’re so wound up about sex — I love how he’s normalizing things that really are not that big of a deal. Go to other cultures, go to South America or Europe. Sex is just no big deal.”
Like Madison, who performs several dance numbers in “Anora,” Rex had to bare not just his soul but also his body for “Red Rocket,” including a scene where he runs down the street naked (albeit while wearing a fake penis). Baker’s stars are willing to take such risks because they’re so attuned to his sensibility, which is about locating the vulnerability and the humor in these characters — even if the audience is sometimes shocked by their behavior.
As Rex recalls, “When ‘Red Rocket’ was made, he goes, ‘The academy is going to run the other way from this movie. There’s male full-frontal nudity, there’s having sex with a teenage girl. They are going to run the other way’ — and he was exactly right.”
“It wasn’t as if I was like, ‘I’m going to be making five sex-worker films,’” Baker says when asked about his constant returning to this particular milieu. “It was never intended. Suddenly, I found myself making the next one.” With “Anora,” the original idea was portraying the Russian gangster community in Brighton Beach and a young woman who finds herself marrying into the mob. “But then sex work worked in, because I started to realize that there was some allegory there, and there was a lot to be explored that I haven’t explored with the other films, and it just made sense. Each one has come very organically.”
At Cannes’ closing-night awards ceremony, where Baker took home the Palme d’Or, he dedicated the prize to “all sex workers, past, present and future.” But the glow of winning the Palme — an honor he’d dreamed of for more than 30 years — lasted about two days. “I was basking in it, just being like, ‘This is it, I don’t have to worry anymore. Everything else is gravy from now on.’ But I remember being on the flight [home] and I turned on my Wi-Fi, and all of a sudden, Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.”
That avalanche of well-wishing texts overwhelmed him, in ways both good and bad. “Many of them were congratulating me, but most of the texts had to do with ‘Get ready for the Oscars’ or ‘Campaign, here we go’ or ‘You’re not going to be sleeping for the next six months.’ I almost had a panic attack on that flight, because it was honestly the last thing I ever thought about with this film.”
Baker is no stranger to awards talk — Willem Dafoe received a supporting actor Oscar nomination for “The Florida Project” — but he tends to want to put the spotlight on his cast and crew. “Honestly, I don’t really think of my films in a commercial way. Maybe I should.”
His exuberance about movies both big and small, foreign and domestic, is evident when you watch YouTube videos of him geeking out in the Criterion Closet or in Paris’ Video Club. He talks about movies not with a know-it-all territorialism but rather an inclusive camaraderie. (He’d make a good critic.) And he eagerly shares that passion with his stars, who have maintained a friendship — and an ongoing conversation about cinema — with their former director.
Brooklynn Prince, now 14, who played the quietly observant budget-motel kid Moonee in “The Florida Project,” says over the phone: “My family will sit down for a movie night, and I’ll be like, ‘What do you want to watch?’ and they’re like, ‘Text Sean.’ Sean always has the best, most interesting, most random movies to watch. And then after the movie, we will send each other five-minute-long voice memos on what we thought.”
Prince herself made a short film this summer, and she turned to Baker, whom she considers a friend and mentor, for advice. “The entire time, we were communicating,” she says. “He told me about the pros and cons of shooting on an iPhone, what would be best for sound, what would be best for lenses. Everything.” She was only 6 when she made “The Florida Project,” still astounded how much trust Baker put in her as a collaborator. “He really likes experimenting and communicating with his actors — he is just amazing at that,” she says, although she confides, giggling: “But make sure he is caffeinated first. He needs his coffee in the morning.”
He’s already started thinking about what film he wants to make next. Yes, it involves sex work. But although his new project, centered on a brothel, may return him to familiar terrain, it could be very different in another regard.
“I don’t think I’m going to go and make something as raw as [my early movies] just simply because I would have more money and tools,” Baker says. “I’m actually interested in plot-driven stuff right now — also, because Hollywood isn’t doing it anymore.”
That’s all he’ll say about this new film. “It’s just making me smile when I think about it,” he adds. “The last thing I want people to do is roll their eyes going, ‘Oh, OK, here comes another one — we’re sick of Sean telling these stories.’”
But then another thought crosses his mind. “If I’m making a really good movie and I’m entertaining people, won’t they forgive me if I cover the subject again?”
A great roller coaster — like a great movie theater — never gets old.