Twenty-six invitees will join first lady Michelle Obama in her box to watch tonight's speech.
By the time the club opens, the three founders estimate, several thousand people will have called and will have been winnowed to five hundred invitees.
The US secretary of state, John Kerry, who is also in Vietnam, later confirmed at least three invitees were stopped by local authorities from attending.
Several hundred invitees did laps from one room to the other, backslapping the film's stars, including Mr. Langella, Michael Sheen and Kevin Bacon, and squeezing past well-wishers that included Brian Williams, Tina Brown and Steve Kroft.
An audience of a hundred and fifty invitees — students, lawyers, a city councilwoman, Bronx Defenders staff and clients — waited in a nearby reception area for the Q. & A. session.
The other six invitees did not respond.
A couple of hundred invitees were waiting in anticipation behind a curtain, as the volume slowly went up.
"There's a 'frozen yogurt' exercise, where there's one 'invite' and four invitees who get asked out to froyo, and each of them have different mindsets," Talukder explained.
Six hundred three invitees responded with valid questionnaire data.
