“Sleepwalk With Me” premiere at Music Box Last summer, the folks at “This American Life” launched a kind of grassroots marketing campaign to get more theaters to show their pet project during its opening weekend. The film’s producers, Mike Birbiglia and Ira Glass, made guest appearances at theaters in New York, Chicago and L.A. Lakeview’s Music Box Theatre was completely packed that night. An organist played as moviegoers shuffled in. The film itself was lovely. When it was over, Ira jaunted up to the stage in time with the rampant applause. It’s hard to say which of his antics stole the evening—when he posed for mass cellphone pictures, when he insisted that he and Mike Birbiglia “weren’t banging,” or when he amped up the crowd by saying, in his articulate, NPR-ready way, that the previous audience (a less exuberant group) could go “fuck themselves.”
