Out of Print

This docu about the New Bev Cinema in Los Angeles (now under management of technophobe Tarantino who made sure they play everything in 35mm) feels like a elitist whine-fest. It always baffles me that overly nostalgic people are actually demanding they're getting the unintended defects from an archaic medium. A 100 years ago when film was invented film stock and prints was the best thing they could come up with at the time and it did actually work well. But it also had some problems like being sensitive to scratching, wobbly unstable imagery, mechanical projectors who made a rattling sound, loss of resolution with each transfer or duplication. Now technology has advanced and we have digital cameras who can easily match film, digital projectors who give a clean stable image that doesn't degrade with each showing. Now we can actually show the film like it was intended by the director each time it's projected! Now these elitists are saying: it's not romantic, it's to perfect, inhuman. They are actually comparing human flaws (humans indeed aren't perfect) to a medium. To those people I say: the medium is NOT the message. Good films will be made no matter what medium they're on. If they had digital a 100 years ago they would have used that. We don't HAVE to conserve a 100 year old technology because it's important. It had it's time, now we have something better. Let's move on. A typical characteristic that also defines human evolution is that people always try to better themselves and the way they do things. If we didn't we would still be no better then the monkeys we evolved from. Progress is part of the human condition so why fight it?

One giant ad for the New Bev. Does this place play great old movies? Yes. Is it cheap by LA standards? Yes. Is it amazing and retro and cool inside? Noooo. This place is very plain and boring inside. Though they do serve a great hotdog. I like going here when i'm in California but this documentary got boring and tedious after 15 minutes. Skip it.

Interesting and touching documentary about the LA revival cinema the New Beverly which plays double features of classic and not so classic movies every night to masses of ardent fans, many who consider it home.

The people are nice, frequently eccentric and clearly passionate, the place and who it attracts seems great fun and the arguments around digital vs 35mm are well made. What's not to like.

Director Julia Marchese's Documentary does a good job of showing how revival movie theaters shine a light on related issues within the industry. Using Hollywood's famed New Beverly Cinema (where Marchese herself worked at the time) as the focus, she also discusses how the conversion of movie houses from film to digital not only effects how movies are shown, but, the very preservation of the medium of 35mm film. One factoid that is repeated here is that the studios literally bribed theaters by offering digital conversion discounts to the owners if they tossed out their 35mm projectors!

Marchese interviewed the then current staff, along with a number of the Cinema's 'regulars' including actors Clu Gulager and Patton Oswalt. Several filmmakers who have helped curate retrospectives at the theater are also extensively interviewed such as Joe Dante, Edgar Wright and Stuart Gordon. They all speak passionately about both the New Beverly and their love of 35mm film projection. A brief history of the theater and of its founder, the late Sherman Torgan, is detailed (Torgan's son Michael took over upon his father's passing in 2007). Marchese intersperses delightful vintage movie theater intermission clips throughout (some of which I distinctly remember seeing at this Cinema). It's well put-together and makes a persuasive case why 35mm and Revival Houses still have a vital place in the movie-going landscape.

Still, seeing this film a few years later, it comes off as more than a little bittersweet. While the Doc was being completed, Filmmaker Quentin Tarantino took over management of the theater in 2014. Marchese, who had hoped to premiere OUT OF PRINT there, was fired by the new regime. She released this Doc the next day having that opportunity taken away from her. In that way, OUT OF PRINT is really the story of the Torgan's family's run at the theater. Meanwhile, even as the New Beverly has survived, a number of other Revival Houses, 2nd run theaters and other independent cinemas were shuttered because of the expenses involved with converting to digital. And, the studios have increasingly made it more and more onerous to the remaining outlets that can show celluloid to rent 35mm prints. Sadly, things have only gotten worse for these theaters in the six years hence (and that was all before the pandemic).

All in all, OUT OF PRINT is a nice document of the house that Sherman Torgan built, even if it's now comes with very mixed emotions.

If you love old movies, you will fall in love with Julia Marchese's film about The New Beverly revival cinema. Yes, a film about a movie theater, but this is like no other theater. Just think about this: Tarantino loved it so much that he saved it in 2007, and said "As long as I'm alive, and as long as I'm rich, the New Beverly will be there, showing double features in 35mm." Modern consumerism induces the feeling that the only good things are the newest ones. For too many people only premieres matter, and yesterday's movies are obsolete. This leads to a sort of "Fahrenheit 451" situation, where instead of forbidding and burning books, we exile old movies from our lives. The time consuming life leaves you little time to watch an old movie, and to watch it properly, in a cinema, on 35mm. Not digitized, not colored or remastered, not dubbed. When you watch classic movies in their natural habitat you are able to live it and see how creative they were in their means of expression. In many of today's movies these means are predigested and condensed into clichés, voided of any nutrients, like canned food. Shortcut handlers to your emotions, atmosphere based on special effects rather than inner journeys through the minds of the characters. It is true that one way to build new means of expressions is to turn the previous means into concentrated space food. Modern films that use this properly are able sometimes to make you live an entire life in 90 minutes. I am a huge fan of modern movies, but if you love somebody you want to understand their past, to meet their parents and even grandparents, to breathe the air of their childhood place.

I was fortunate that in Bucharest there are for many years three important cinematheques and revival houses, which run old movies since the time they used to be new :), and where I saw a huge quantity of old movies. These are places where you can travel in the past, where movies seem real, you can almost feel the smell and taste of celluloid, live the lives of people who saw the movies when they premiered, but with the eye of someone coming from the future. So my next trip to LA will definitely include the New Beverly. And if I am lucky enough, in addition to watching a couple of good movies, I may sit next to Joe Dante, John Landis, Kevin Smith, Rian Johnson, maybe David Lynch or Quentin Tarantino :)