Filmforum 50, program 15: The Decay of Fiction in 35mm and the World Premiere of a new Pat O'Neill film!

Los Angeles Filmforum and Brain Dead Studios present

Filmforum 50, program 15: The Decay of Fiction in 35mm and the world premiere of Skies

Along with the DVD-Rom Tracing the Decay of Fiction: Encounters with a Film by Pat O’Neill

Thursday June 17, 2026, 7:30 pm

At Brain Dead Studios, 611 N Fairfax Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90036

NOTE THE CHANGE IN DAY AND LOCATION

Tickets: $15 general, $10 students/seniors, free for first ten Filmforum members. 

https://studios.wearebraindead.com/movies/the-decay-of-fiction/

World Premiere of a new film by Pat O’Neill!
Pat O’Neill in person!

In tribute to Marsha Kinder
Special Thanks to Kristy H.A. Kang, Martha Colburn

Filmforum continues its 50th anniversary screenings with a rare 35mm screening of Pat O’Neill’s classic feature film The Decay of Fiction, a multi-layered reverie of the abandoned Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, of ghosts of old Hollywood, and film noir.  In addition, we’re hosting the world premiere of Skies, a new Pat O’Neill film!

We’re also going to have the DVD-Rom Tracing the Decay of Fiction available, in tribute to the late Marsha Kinder, who was behind the Labyrinth Project that created it.

Filmforum continues its 50^th anniversary screenings with a rare 35mm screening of Pat O’Neill’s classic feature film The Decay of Fiction, a multi-layered reverie of the abandoned Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, of ghosts of old Hollywood, and film noir.  We’re also going to have the DVD-Rom Tracing the Decay of Fiction available, in tribute to the late Marsha Kinder, who was behind the Labyrinth Project that created it.

“The Decay of Fiction is an intersection of fact and hallucination in an abandoned luxury hotel. The hotel is in Hollywood. The walls of the Ambassador are cracked and peeling, the lawns are brown, and mushrooms grow in the damp carpets of the Cocoanut Grove. The pool is empty, and the ballroom where Bobby Kennedy died is shuttered and locked. A tall, elegant blonde stands transparently on the terrace of her bungalow, smoking and watching the sunrise. Voices and tinkles waft across the lawn. A contingent of vaguely sinister men arrive and ask for Jack. Jack is expecting trouble, but not this kind of trouble. Louise, a guest, replays a nightmare in which she drowns Pauline so that she can marry Dean. The sun sets and rises again. Two detectives seem to turn up everywhere, searching for Communist literature and telling one another pointless stories of underworld intrigue. In the kitchens and behind the scenes the daily routine continues, individuality melts, and workers fuse with their jobs. Winter passes, and then another summer, and finally it is Halloween, and there is a costume ball which claims the life of Rhonda the evasive soprano. And then the building comes down in a clatter of Spanish tiles and concrete, and fact has finally become fiction, once again.

“I scribbled the words The Decay of Fiction on the back of a notebook almost forty years ago, tore it off and framed it fifteen years later, and have wanted ever since to make a film to fit its ready-made description. To me it refers to the common condition of stories partly remembered, films partly seen, texts at the margins of memory, disappearing like a book left outside on the ground to decompose back into the earth.

“The film takes place in a building about to be destroyed, those walls contain (by dint of association) a huge burden of memory: cultural and personal, conscious and unconscious. To make the film was to trap a few of its characters and some of their dialog, casting them together within the confines of the site. The structure and its stories are decaying together, and each seems to be a metaphor for the other.” – Pat O’Neill

Pat O’Neill was born in 1939 in Los Angeles. Long known as a pioneer in experimental film, O’Neill has also produced a distinctive body of sculpture using post-war industrial materials like fiberglass, plexiglass, resin, and aluminum. Recent solo exhibitions include The Reef, Los Angeles (2025); Mitchell-Inness & Nash, New York (2021, 2015); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA (2019); Philip Martin Gallery, Los Angeles (2018); Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, CA (2016) etc. Group exhibitions include Made in LA, Hammer Museum (2025), Philip Martin Gallery, Los Angeles (2023); The Fowler Museum, Los Angeles (2021); Martos Gallery, New York (2019); Villa Arson, Nice, France (2018); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2016, 2008).  O’Neill earned his BA (1962) and MA (1964) from the University of California, Los Angeles.