I'll see your penguins and raise you an oral history... NATO president John Fithian bets on Now Showing! (Photo: NATO)

A friendly reminder from your friends at the National Association of Theater Owners: The sky is not--we repeat, not--falling on the multiplex. Rather, a new era of garish P.R. pleas assures American moviegoers at least another few years of its prolonged, graceless demise, symbolized today by something called, Now Showing! America Goes to the Movies.

According to Variety's Gabriel Snyder:

"Our membership recognizes this opportunity to celebrate all of the fun and excitement that makes going to the movies one of America's favorite pastimes," said MaryAnn Anderson, NATO [VP] and exec director. "Through this exciting documentary, we look forward to sharing our passion to entertain with audiences around the world."

"The grandeur of the movie theater and the excitement of moviegoing is a story that can be best told through the medium of motion pictures itself," (co-director Ross) Melnick said. "We look forward to capturing this exciting story through contemporary interviews as well as historic documents and photographs, ephemera, newsreels and oral histories, to share a part of film history with audiences that most documentaries about Hollywood leave out."

Of course! It all makes perfect sense: Those other documentaries suck compared to "newsreels and oral histories"--if only filmmakers would just leave that stuff in their movies, theaters would be buzzing again. I mean, any halfwit studio hack knows that $10.75 "ephemera" outduels free PlayStation 10 times out of 10.

Oh, all right?make that no times out of 10, wrote The Times' Sharon Waxman on Saturday:

In a survey of 2,000 moviegoers by OTX, a Los Angeles-based online research company, men under 25 said they had seen 24 percent fewer movies this summer than they did in the summer of 2003, when the same study was conducted. The drop in moviegoing was much smaller for women and for other age groups. ...

In the study's other major finding, a majority of respondents - 68 percent - said they had attended fewer movies because it had become too expensive. That reason was cited far more than other factors, like the decline in quality or a preference for waiting for the DVD. ... While disputing that there was any serious decline in moviegoing, John Fithian, president of the National Association of Theater Owners, said the industry needed to emphasize that moviegoing remained inexpensive compared with other activities outside the home, rather than reduce its costs.

"Ticket prices in movie theaters have increased by a slower percentage than any form of out-of-home entertainment in the last 10 years - take plays, music concerts, bowling," he said. "It is a conundrum for us, needing to educate patrons more about the value of going to movies, and we're working on that."

Hence, the Earth-shattering Now Showing! documentary, I guess.

Anyway, you have to admit: For a man up to his chin in bullshit, Fithian maintains a stunning dexterity and optimism about all this. Waxman added that a "befuddled" Fithian wants naysayers to view the slump from a more, um, macro level: "Looking at moviegoing patterns over three decades, and not just the past few years, he said, 'the basic assumption that people are going to the movies less often is not true.' "

Riiiiiight. And if you do not believe him, wait for Now Showing! (which, in a lush, butter-soaked irony, probably will only be available on cable), with its documentary proof of Jaws, Star Wars and E.T. saving cinema from the Internet. I mean, 1982 was not that long ago, was it?