DATELINE: THE CITY : Once Upon a Time, There Was a Village With Many Screens

If seismologists kept track of movement along Los Angeles’ primary moviegoing fault line--an arc from Hollywood’s hills to the Pacific Ocean--they’d detect a major shift.

There’s been strong movement in Universal City and Century City. And there’s a whole lot of shaking on the far Westside of the city--notably in downtown Santa Monica and Marina del Rey.

According to Exhibitor Relations, a company that tracks box-office grosses, the weekly ticket sales at Westwood’s 17 theaters are off by 15% to 20% from a year ago. And it has become the norm for ticket sales at the 18-theater Universal City Cineplex Odeon complex to equal or surpass the totals for Westwood, even though the Universal City theaters have fewer seats.

Only five years ago, that would have been unthinkable.

But slowly, competition from newly built theater complexes all over the region began siphoning off business, and the once untarnished image of Westwood began to suffer from two disturbances this year and the usual Los Angeles malady of traffic and parking congestion.

Indicative of Westwood’s diminished stature are the Los Angeles movie grosses for the last four weekends. Each time, the smaller theaters at Universal City have outgrossed those in Westwood, according to Exhibitor Relations’ John Krier.

Westwood is also getting a run for its money from the theaters in nearby Century City--the 14-theater AMC Century City and the four-screen Century City Cineplex Odeon--where weekly grosses combined are barely trailing those in Westwood.

In the city where movies are an industry as well as a way of life, Westwood had it all. The concentration of so many theaters in a few small blocks, a pedestrian-friendly environment, plus restaurants, trendy shops and nearby UCLA made it unrivaled since the time it replaced the Hollywood district as numero uno in the 1960s.

No other movie theater district in the nation, with the possible exception of Manhattan’s Upper East Side, could boast a similar draw.

Directors such as Francis Ford Coppola and Woody Allen insisted that their films debut there. When studios wanted to give their prestige films a week’s run in Los Angeles to qualify for Oscar consideration, Westwood was the chosen locale.

With that kind of status, plus grand-style theaters and lofty box-office revenues, the theater owners in Westwood (primarily the Mann chain with nine of the 17) could command exclusivity for first-run movies.

But Westwood’s lock on the L.A. market was broken in 1987, when AMC opened its 14-plex in Century City, according to Krier. It provided distributors with a nearby alternative to Mann’s principal large Westwood theaters--the Bruin, the Village and the National--that still are coveted locations for opening films but no longer the exclusive sites they once were.

William Hertz, Mann Theaters’ director of marketing and public relations, acknowledged the competition and said his company has even joined it by building in suburban sites, as well as six theaters in nearby Santa Monica. But he said Mann “continues to have a tremendous amount of faith in the Westwood market. . . . The public is there when we have the product, and on paper, we feel particularly good about what’s coming into the market this summer.”

New to the scene in the last year is Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade, with 24 screens in a few-block area--17 opened in the last year alone.

A comparison of last weekend’s grosses:

Universal City (18 screens): $171,852.

Westwood (17 screens): $121,302.

Santa Monica (24 screens): $108,809.

Century City (18 screens): $106,263.

Marina del Rey (13 screens): $71,391.

Hollywood (11 screens): $55,510