The Key to invigorating the Movie business is prioritizing the theatre-going experience
Summer 2023
Part I: Theaters Don’t Value Customers Who Love Movies — What Gives?!
A few months ago I reluctantly cancelled my AMC Stubs A-List membership - AMC Theaters’ version of MoviePass, a monthly subscription service. Having recently moved to Los Angeles with my partner, I reactivated AMC Stubs A-List and convinced him to sign-up, because unlike San Francisco, our former home city, where it could take upwards of 45 minutes to get to any one of the only three AMC’s in the city. We now have three AMCs within a 15 minute drive from our new home in Hollywood, and more beyond. And best of all, two of the three locations nearest to us are equipped with Dolby Cinema ($26.99/ticket) and IMAX ($25.49/ticket), premium experiences where the monthly A-List membership of $24.95+tax pays for itself with just seeing one movie in Dolby Cinema or IMAX. Moreover, with A-List the only restriction, if you can even call it that, is you can only see three movies a week, no black-out times or screen types. For movie lovers, this plan is a godsend.
Yet just a few months into renewing A-List, I found myself driving to AMC Glendale to see Todd Field’s Tár, because at the time, pre awards buzz, Tár wasn’t screening at AMC Sunset, The Grove, or Universal CityWalk, the three AMCs closest to me. And while AMC Glendale at the Americana, isn’t exactly that much farther than the three closest locations, I was quite perturbed driving home after the film. It wasn’t that I was upset about having to drive a bit farther to see Tár, instead I found it incredulous that such an outstanding film wasn’t given a wider screening. Having only been in Hollywood for a few months, it was already clear to me that AMC Sunset, with it’s more avant-garde lineups and intimate environment was equivalent to AMC Kabuki in San Francisco, the AMC location for less mainstream, indie, and documentary films. While AMC The Grove and AMC Universal City Walk are both family friendly locations, their larger footprint provides space for a diverse selection of showtimes, and even they weren’t showing Tár.
Didn’t I move to Hollywood? Where, I’d presumed, this very type of film would be celebrated by greater accessibility and showtimes? The film stars Cate Blanchett, as the maestro of the Berlin Symphony, in a role so layered and nuanced; directed, written, and produced with such elegant command by Todd Fields, that I could’t stop thinking about its stirring performances and societal commentary. Around the corner was the holiday season, where Tár would certainly be on the roster, not in an in-your-face marketing spectacle sort of way - but with a rooted presence and austerity of Lydia Tar’s aura in film posters and trailers that would absolutely draw in curious movie-goers, accompanied by boldly displayed snippets of praiseworthy reviews. The holiday season came and went, NOTHING.
The day after getting back into town, from Christmas in the Bay Area, I went to a screening of Babylon, followed by a Q+A with the director Damien Chazelle, at AMC The Grove. As I laboriously strained my neck to watch the film in the first row, hoping for an upturn of cohesion and something to say besides the genesis of Hollywood, as told by the History Channel, was just a one-dimensional explosively jarring fiasco of sight and sound. I searched for a reason to care about the characters and their plight, but ultimately surrendered to the unforgiving onslaught, after realizing the film has nothing more to say than what was literally before me. And if I wanted to respectfully stay for the entirety of the film and grasp at any frays of insights that may surface after the screening during the Q+A, I would somehow have to make peace with the aimless chaos before me. The interviewee was, naturally, a fan of the film, and was elated to see it for a second time. To each their own. Sitting in the first row, I had a good view of Damien Chazelle, who came off listless; conveying the kind of humbleness exuded by someone who has been cut down to size. He knows Babylon is not the magnum opus he envisioned, and now with its big holiday season release, it’ll be at least a few weeks before the world moves on, and he can put it in the past. Months later this was only partially true as Babylon’s massive billboard remained atop of Ovation, the shopping center area where movie premieres are held at the TCL Chinese Theatre, and the Oscars are hosted at the Dolby Theatre. I was, and still am, decidedly not ok with the illogic of Babylon getting a far wider distribution than Tár.
Films Introduced Me to Myself
The journey I took to seek out Tár, and the discombobulation thereafter, brought me back to the 90s, my early teenage middle school years, when if I wanted to see the buzzed about indie films and documentaries I learned about on the World Wide Web, I had to patiently wait for them to arrive at Blockbuster for rental, around — insert gasp — six month after their theater run. Growing up in the suburbs of the Bay Area, it wasn’t uncommon in high school to take a train into San Francisco with friends to see a blockbuster movie at the then state-of-the-art Metreon. Or once armed with a driver’s license, the agency to drive a few towns over to a larger theatre chain for a more diverse selection of mainstream and critically acclaimed films. Our town had, and still has, a single screen mom-and-pop owned theatre, that I once found embarrassingly behind the times, that I now perceive as having a patina of charm, which good be objective reality or the romantic nostalgia that comes with time. As a 90s kid, the movies of my childhood were predominately pre-digital Disney; The Lion King, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Homeward Bound was my favorite movie, the only film I recall watching repeatedly. I enjoyed movies as entertainment, just like any other kid, but it wasn’t until I started watching and exploring the exciting films and documentaries burgeoning during the 90s and early aughts, that the nuanced characters and individuals I met started the motion for articulating the dormant identity that felt both inextricable and impalpable, all at once, within me.
I’m proud to share that I still have my laminated Blockbuster card :)
As an only-child to immigrant parents with jarringly different personalities, who never seemed to be on the same wavelength, my sense of self from infancy was an outward one, I observed others. Intuitively, or conditionally, I understood staying in the background was for the collective good and to be in tune with the emotional frequency and temperature of the room to counter being an inconvenience to my parents. I wasn’t a planned pregnancy, and from the information I’ve gathered across time and into adulthood, their relationship was mismatched from the start and evolved into something casual, respectfully, before solidifying when I was born into consciousness. At the time, my mother was divorced and believed she was infertile after unsuccessfully trying to conceive with her ex-husband. She also had a rough bout of hyperthyroidism in her late 20s, that metamorphosed her physically into a gaunt and energy zapped version of her former vibrancy. The photos captured the difference. The version of her before I was born — and the few of her pregnant and in maternity ware — lacked genuine joy and presence. It’s common for women with hyperthyroidism to have sporadic or even non-existent menstrual cycles. I arrived two months early, so with my mother not knowing she was pregnant until she began to show around month four, I was born around 10 weeks after they were conscious of my existence. When her water broke, she walked herself across the street to Kaiser Permanente. I wouldn’t leave the womb for another full day, making it a very painful delivery. After being presented to her at 4 pounds 4 ounces, I was promptly taken to an incubator, where I lived for my first month of life. My Mom famished from the ordeal, devoured what she recalls as the “best hamburger and 7-up ever”. I’ve always wondered about the fellow preemies in the ward I lived in. I imagine our collective presence was comforting for one another as we laid fragilely naked, separate but together, notched up to tubes in our respective clear bins. I often wonder about who they now are, curious of their story. And of the nurses who looked after us all, for whom I’m eternally grateful for their care and attention.
And so began my journey and the journey of my parents. Mine began with observing their dynamics and individual struggles, becoming aware and vigilante to not introduce additional stress to their equation from my end, and to keep my formulating equation from disturbing them. Films opened my eyes to introspection. The earnestness and nuanced emotions of the characters and people who captivated me in movies and documentaries, turned my gaze inside out, from observing the people around me to observing the composite of myself. Through the reflection of characters and people in films and documentaries, I would recognize glimmers of commonalities; in feelings, struggles, and humor. I felt, for the first time, the warmth of acceptance, the kernels of validation, and the peaceful sense of genuine connection — camaraderie. The pervasive something I didn’t know existed — but knew was missing — once I encountered it — face to face. I bestow films with sowing the seeds of my formative years, germinating my identity, and vitally connecting my inner self with the external world.
Deja Vu or Something Else?
It is this deeply sincere portrayal of human beings, the nuanced psychological compositions, influenced by foregone interactions, thoughts, and experiences that become haunting memories manifesting in the present, that ignites introspection within me and expands my capacity for understanding fellow humans, as well as myself. It is altogether enigmatic, revelatory, rewarding, and cathartic. Moreover, these intervals with films pay dividends. They stay with you. Sometimes, rewardingly, they take on more texture and depth when revisited. Sometimes they serve as anchors in your memory of past chapters. The rewarding wellspring is why I search for and seek out great films. Tár was so resoundingly magnificent, neurons continued firing and dots started connecting as I dreamily exited the theatre, meandered to my car, and drove home suspended in the aftermath; dissecting Lydia’s psyche and the unspoken in the final stages of the film. Lydia storming the stage and mauling the conductor to reclaim her rightful place, to only be swiftly dethroned and incisively removed from both the stage and the nation of Germany. Lydia, cancelled by her peers, but never licking her paws in shame, reminiscing her formative years as a prodigy through artifacts in her childhood bedroom, where awards and VHS tapes of the symphonies that inspired her are arranged in the only way one’s own mother can. To the voice and brief interaction with her brother that gave the audience a few more puzzle pieces to the identity, and creation, of Lydia Tár. And then the visceral reaction of Lydia simultaneously startling and darting out of a spa in Thailand, as if escaping a horror house, throwing up and ejecting what exactly metaphorically, after being presented with an array of young Thai women, nameless, awaiting to be selected by their numbered tag, having arrived at the spa for a massage.
My thoughts on Tár deserves a dedicated piece as to not diverge too far off my objective here, which is the discombobulating upside down reality of Tár not screening in Hollywood theaters, albeit pre-awards buzz, or seen on billboards as large as Babylon, to generate visual intrigue. Here I was in the present / future, experiencing a reality warping deja-vu of myself as a teenager in the late 1990s, alone at my parents’ house in the mono-culture suburbs having just watched an illuminating film I was still high on, heart and mind bursting with excitement, desperate to dissect and understand it more in conversation with other people. Or simply to feel that validating and “I feel seen” communal buzz after you stand up along fellow movie patrons, who like you had also respectfully stayed through the credits, to marvel and take in the film, together. I really thought it would be different in Hollywood. I really thought going to the movies here would feel like a wholly different experience. I would stand up after a more auteur driven film to see and feel discernibly more people. This was not the case after Tár. There weren’t many fellow film-goers as I stood up on a weeknight at the AMC, Americana Brand, Glendale.
So if seeing Tár takes real effort in this town, does it mean even in Hollywood non-mainstream films are not expected to draw interest and greater attendance by the very people who dream up, finance, and make movies in the town that is the entertainment economy? Or are people not going to the movies because the experience of watching films at home these days has become significantly comparable to the theater experience; on large HD/UHD television screens, where the sound can be improved remarkably with the investment of a few hundred dollars on a sound bar, and can be enjoyed in accordance to your schedule versus the showtime schedule. Moreover, with the influx of streaming service options, and thereby the aggregate endless horizon of quality content, combined with movies landing on streaming just 30 days after its theatre premiere, the cost of high speed internet, and the likelihood of adding more and or bigger screens to the household — plus the necessary accessories and gadgets such as noise-cancelling headphones, better sound, extra controllers if you’re a gamer, the total cost is not only comparable to the corded cable era, it’s likely more if you consider that the habits we adopted during the pandemic have become ingrained lifestyles. Entertainment, socializing, and family time collapsed into one, revolving around a series of screens, primarily at home. Add in inflation, surging gas prices, and becoming more accustom with conducting our lives at home, its going to take more and better to get people excited to what is now perceived as out of my way to see a movie in theaters.