LOS ANGELES – On a warm summer evening, Miles Villalon stood in line outside the New Beverly Cinema hours before showtime.
The 36-year-old already had tickets to the Watergate-themed double feature of 1976’s ‘All the President’s Men’ and 1999’s ‘Dick’. But Villalon braved Los Angeles’ infamous rush hour traffic to snag front-row seats at the Quentin Tarantino’s historic theater.
This level of dedication is routine for the Starbucks barista and aspiring filmmaker, who typically sees up to six films a week in theaters, and almost exclusively in independent theaters in and around Los Angeles.
“I always say it feels like church,” he said. “When I go to AMC, I just sit there. And I can’t really experience that communal thing here, where we’re all just worshiping at the altar of celluloid.”
Streaming — and a pandemic — have radically transformed cinema consumption, but Villalon is part of a growing number of mostly younger people contributing to a renaissance of LA’s independent theater scene. The city’s continued, if diminished, role as a film industry mecca still shapes its residents and their entertainment preferences, often with newfound appreciation post-pandemic.
A revival in the City of Angels
Part of what makes the city unique is its abundance of historic theaters, salvaged amid looming closures or brought back to life in recent years by people with ties to the film industry. Experts see a pattern of success for a certain type of theater experience in Los Angeles.
AP/Chris Pizzello
Kate Markham, director of Art House Convergence, a coalition of independent cinema operators, said the people who run these theaters are a key factor.
“They know their audience or their potential audience, and they curate programs and an environment that allows them to have an exceptional experience,” she wrote in an email.
Tarantino pioneered this trend when he purchased the New Beverly in 2007. After Netflix purchased and restored the nearby Egyptian Theater, which first opened as a silent movie house in 1922, the company reopened it to the public in November in partnership with the nonprofit American Cinematheque. . It is now a vibrant hub, regularly welcoming A-list celebrities to premiere their projects, as well as film buffs looking to spend hours watching marathons, such as a recent screening of four Paul Thomas Anderson films.
Further east lies Vidiots. Vidiots previously existed as a video rental store in Santa Monica before closing in 2017, but five years later Vidiots reopened in the city with the addition of a 271-seat theater, a bar and a new class of devotees.
“It’s literally my favorite place to be outside of my own cozy home,” says filmmaker and actor Mark Duplass, a backer of Vidiots among dozens of other high-profile names, including Aubrey Plaza and Lily Collins.
What brings people in?
What draws people to independent theaters can vary, from older programming to increased food and drink offerings to lower prices. But above all, many agree that there is one commonality that chains cannot match.
“The bigger places obviously have premium formats and things like that. But I think there’s a lot less commonality,” said Dr. Michael Hook, who along with an employee from Children’s Hospital Los Angeles attended a matinee of “Seven Samurai” Vidiots attended. “You don’t just walk around with people who have also chosen to see a three-hour Japanese film from the 1950s.”
Chris Pizzallo / AP
While the pandemic was a blow from which the box office has yet to recover, it also served as a pruning that made the cinema landscape more sustainable for the streaming age, said Janice O’Bryan, senior vice president of Comscore.
“COVID has taken away some of the things that had to close anyway,” O’Bryan said of the more than 500 theaters that closed nationwide. “I think it has made everything healthier.”
The theaters that have survived have found niches, sometimes purposefully eschewing the chain’s 4DX, reclining seats and dining service.
“For the kind of movies we’re showing, I definitely don’t want waiters walking around, bringing things to people and hearing the scraping of cutlery on plates,” laughed Greg Laemmle, co-owner of the Laemmle Theaters, a mainstay of independent cinema in Los Angeles for almost a century.
But Laemmle recognizes the importance of offering the public options beyond just popcorn and soda, especially as an additional source of revenue. Embracing food and drink can sometimes make the theater a unique destination.
“When I normally go to a movie theater, I get there two minutes before the movie starts,” Duplass said. “I’ll go to Vidiots 45 minutes before the movie starts so I can get my chilled Junior Mints, have a drink at the bar, see some people. I’ll walk around the video store.”
In February, more than thirty filmmakers — including Jason Reitman, Steven Spielberg, Denis Villeneuve and Christopher Nolan — purchased Westwood’s Village Theater in an effort to preserve it. Are you also coming to the red carpet premiere? A restaurant, bar and gallery.
Not without challenges
Like the rest of the country, LA movie theaters have had their share of pandemic-induced challenges — some exacerbated by last summer’s strikes — including fewer films to show.
And not all theaters have found their Tarantino or Reitman. The closure of the iconic Cinerama Dome was a blow to the city’s cinephiles. Although it was owned and operated by the ArcLight Cinemas chain when it closed in April 2021, the Dome was something of a singularity in Hollywood, a mainstream premiere spot memorialized in films and a symbol of the city’s place in the industry.
Its fate remains in limbo, with reported delays to the targeted reopening date, despite parent company Decurion Corporation, which could not be reached for comment, receiving a liquor license for the cinema in July 2022.
The venues that have been preserved have often done so through some form of grant or assistance, such as the $16 billion federal Shuttered Venue Operators Grant program, which Laemmle used during the pandemic. He said the money was a necessary connection in June 2021. But a full recovery is slow.
“It provided some stability. How much remains to be seen,” he said. “The water is still muddy.”
Alone in Hollywood?
In some ways, thanks to the city’s history, culture and abundance of theaters, this renaissance is most evident in Los Angeles, admits Bryan Braunlich, director of the National Association of Theater Owners Cinema Foundation.
It’s less likely that Tarantino, who declined to be interviewed, would buy a dying revival house in Peoria, Illinois. But, Braunlich argued, that doesn’t mean this trend can’t have an impact there.
“Hollywood and filmmakers are saying, ‘Hey, movie theaters are important,’” he said. “There are great independent theater owners doing well all over the country. And I think they get a confidence boost of, ‘Yes, this is a great company to be in. This is a great company to invest in. And we’re not the only film nerds doing this.'”
As Duplass reflected on his own introduction to cinema growing up in the New Orleans suburbs, he recalled a trip to Vidiots to see “Raising Arizona” with his parents.
“I realized I was her age now when we first saw it together in the cinema. And I got to hold my dad’s hand as we cried in that last scene,” he said. “We shared that movie, but we shared the passage of time in our favorite church, the movie theater.”
