‘The Man Died Doing What He Loved’

A repository of Hollywood history died Friday night when Laurence Austin, the proprietor of Silent Movie, the only theater in Los Angeles devoted solely to silent films, was gunned down in the tiny lobby of his theater on Fairfax Avenue.

The gunman then fled down an aisle of the theater to an exit, firing randomly over the heads of about 60 movie-goers watching the Larry Semon silent short “School Days.”

It was a regular patron who called 911 when he found Austin lying in a pool of blood by the ticket window. Standing next to Austin was the 19-year-old woman who sold concessions, clutching at her chest where she had been wounded.

“It was like killing a priest in his sanctuary,” said Eliot Goldberg, a film buff who was there. “The man died doing what he loved.”

The woman--who is not being identified because she was a witness to a slaying--underwent surgery Friday night and was reported to be hospitalized in fair condition and improving Saturday afternoon. The gunman got away with an unknown amount of cash.

Stunned film devotees, some returning after living through the grim events of Friday night, brought bouquets of roses and lilies and tuberoses Saturday to leave at the entrance to the neatly painted low-slung stucco building just south of Melrose Avenue. They stood quietly at the makeshift memorial as traffic hurtled by on Fairfax.

These mourners considered themselves aficionados of silent films and of the quirky film collector who showed them: Austin himself was part of the show.

Most of the three nights a week that the theater was open found Austin starting his screenings with a formality long extinct in L.A. theaters.

He greeted patrons at the ticket window, tearing their stubs and handing them a little fact sheet on the night’s film offerings. He always wore a suit, though his taste was less Melrose chic and more from an era 20 years past. And, as the organist played “Pomp and Circumstance,” Austin made his way at a stately pace down the aisle to the front of the theater where he held a microphone and announced, “Welcome to the world’s only silent movie theater.”

Austin would then briefly describe the several shorts and long feature he was about to show. “ ‘We’re going to have “Felix the Cat,” which I’m sure you all will enjoy,’ ” Rick Schmidlin, 42, a filmmaker, remembered Austin saying about one of Friday night’s shorts. “He said that every time he showed Felix.”

“It’s like a whole ritual,” said Mark Gibson, a 33-year-old screenwriter who went every week to the theater and was the one who called the police from the ticket window.

Austin was a child of Hollywood without being famous and rich or infamous and scandalized. His mother, Ethel Austin, had been Cecil B. DeMille’s personal tailor.

His father, William Austin, was a silent film actor who appeared in the then-sizzling movie “It” with Clara Bow. His uncle, Albert Austin, according to Schmidlin, “was Chaplin’s sidekick in most of his movies before 1930.”

Austin had a well-schooled and devoted group of fans--film students and film enthusiasts, editors and writers. A showing of Buster Keaton films was a must-see. A 100th birthday presentation of the works of a film star like Valentino was an extravaganza--complete with free cake and a chorus of “Happy Birthday” in the courtyard behind the theater.

But the man whose taste in silent films was known so intimately to his patrons was otherwise a mystery. It was presumed that he never married. He never had any children. In one interview he gave several years ago, when the theater was refurbished, he was said to have been an accountant.

But movie buff Robert Edwards, 31, said he first met Austin when both were working as temporary staffers at a collection agency seven years ago. “As far as I know, he would take temp jobs on the side,” Edwards said. The theater, his patrons mused, could hardly have been a living.

“I saw this guy every week for four years, and aside from his recognizing me as a patron and me recognizing him from the theater, it never really went beyond that,” Gibson said.

In true Hollywood style, Austin coyly refused to give his age to a reporter in 1993. But most estimated him to be in his 70s.

The theater has stood on Fairfax since 1942, the labor of love of John and Dorothy Hampton, collectors of silent films. Financial troubles and John Hampton’s ill health and eventual death kept the theater closed for 12 years.

Austin, a longtime friend of the Hamptons, vowed to restore the theater and preserve what he could of Hampton’s treasure trove of rare silent films. With labor and money from the community and friends, the theater reopened in 1991, with Austin as its impresario ever since.

In the last six years, more refurbishments were made. Framed poster-size photographs of the silent film greats were mounted on the walls of the theater.

Still, until the seats were reupholstered, Silent Movie patrons could be spotted walking up Fairfax, carrying cushions for the theater’s hard wooden chairs.

The film that everyone was awaiting Friday night was the classic “Sunrise.” “We never made it to the feature,” Goldberg said.

Instead, what unfolded was a surreal experience. Movie-goers all heard two shots from the lobby, some wondering whether they were firecrackers. When the gunman took off down the aisle, many thought it was a stunt for the movies--one of the shorts was “A Golf Adventure,” starring Monty Banks.

The gunman “was almost playacting the way he crouched down and was running through the theater,” Gibson said. “He had this golf hat on backward. Then I saw the flash of the gun as he ran down the aisle.” Wordlessly, the crowd dived for cover and stayed there.

Two movie-goers, according to Gibson, said the gunman had been sitting in the back of the theater until he went into the lobby.

Everyone was detained more than two hours as police officers interviewed the crowd. “Everyone was very cooperative. No one was in a hurry to leave,” said one patron. “It was as if we didn’t want to go outside.”