The best movies ever? Well, we live in hope

At the turn of every season they appear, relentless like the Santa Anas and as full of transparent promises as a third-date weekend getaway. They fill magazines and newspapers, including this one, with luscious stills of Technicolor airbrushed beauty and the latest blue-screen wizardry. These are accompanied by bite-sized morsels of text studded with famous names and big numbers, all drizzled over with gossip and soothsaying.

Green light: several movies featuring the miraculous Robert Duvall. Red flag: “Elf.”

They are all about temptation -- the cultural gingerbread house. They are the sneak previews.

At the turn of every season, special “new movie” issues of Entertainment Weekly, Premiere and other publications litter the city’s cafe tables and bus stops like confetti. Gwyneth Paltrow as Sylvia Plath, Nicole Kidman and Jude Law, Diane Keaton and Jack Nicholson, Tom Cruise as a Civil War misfit turned samurai -- won’t it be great, won’t it be grand, won’t it be the best year for the movies since “Rebecca” trumped “The Grapes of Wrath,” “The Great Dictator” and “The Philadelphia Story.”

Just as if the last summer, or winter, or spring, or fall, with its deluge of stinkers and duds had never happened. Just as if “Eyes Wide Shut” or “The Incredible Hulk” had been even watchable. No, this time, we think, as we pore over the seemingly endless lists within lists, it will be different; this time we will not find ourselves on a Saturday night desperately scanning the movie ads for something that is not “Finding Nemo” that we can actually bring ourselves to pay nine bucks to see.

For a few weeks, or a delicious little month, we live in a paradise of suspended animation, untouched by review or word of mouth or box-office scores. It is a place of pure anticipation, and Angelenos can resist anything but anticipation.

In Los Angeles, you can count on any conversation containing at least one of the following: traffic commentary, real estate prices and predictions about movies that haven’t been released yet. Here, sneak previews provide bottom-line-driven service -- this is the Industry’s syllabus, L.A.’s version of the stock report with Cameron Diaz standing in for, say, pork belly futures.

Green light: this year’s top-earning female. Red flag: “Vanilla Sky” and “Charlie’s Angels II” box-office flops.

And over the years, Hollywood has managed to export more than just its product; it has infused American culture with a feeling of personal investment. Nowhere is this truer than in non-Industry-related Los Angeles, which is most of Los Angeles, where even the most jaded outsider still often harbors the secret hope that he/she/her child/his dog will be miraculously “discovered.”

In a way, sneak previews are just another well-placed chink in the wall, a way of fueling interest in the Industry by shrinking the perceived degrees of separation between regular folk and the stars and moguls even further -- not only can we occasionally spy Julia and Reese waiting at a Don’t Walk light, we can also follow their salaries, their negotiations, predict their victories and defeats as if they somehow affected us personally.

True believers

Yet there is something so touching about our genuine and indefatigable excitement over sneak previews. Despite all our alleged local insider knowledge, we still view Hollywood as a limitless horizon to which we can flee when life crowds too close, breathing danger or banality or both. Like cynical children

coaxed to clap for poor injured Tinkerbell, we buy our special issues of Entertainment Weekly and Premiere because we still really do believe.

In 1893, historian Frederick Jackson Turner announced the closing of the American West, which he considered to be an ending as symbolic as it was geographic. Gone was the boundless optimism of the frontier mentality, “that practical inventive turn of mind ... that masterful grasp of material things ... that restless nervous energy.”

He had no way of knowing, of course, that the next American frontier was just beginning to flicker on pale walls in dark rooms. He had no way of knowing about sneak preview syndrome, which has spread way beyond movies into television, music, even business and politics. What are all those “Thirty Under Thirty” cover stories the news mags seem to love so much but sneak previews in disguise?

Amnesiac hope is not new to the movie age -- every culture has its ritual of optimism from chucking a few virgins into the volcano to keep it appeased to our more modern tendency toward perpetual personal reinvention.

Forget Scott Fitzgerald and his “no second acts.” If he had only been able to get sober, he would have discovered that America, and Los Angeles particularly, is all about the do-over. How else to explain the unending wave of immigrants, the cosmetic surgery industry, the recall race?

Like kids running their hands over the snowy pages of their new spiral notebooks each fall, Americans believe passionately in the fresh start. This time, we think, all historical information to the contrary, we won’t nod off during algebra; this time, Mom and Dad won’t have a big fight on Christmas; this time, our presidential nominee will keep his promises and there will be an age of peace and free prescriptions for the elderly.

So how surprising is it that we revel in the prospect of hundreds of potentially great films? This time, we just know that the sequels will be even better than the first ones, Dr. Seuss will work as live action and all that money spent on promoting star vehicles will be worth it because of the absolute magic these movies, these months of movies, these pages and pages of movies, will make for us.

Green light: Hope still springs eternal. Red flag: It usually has to get smashed down first.