California Typewriter

I stumbled over this documentary and was soon captured. Perhaps because I recalled 10-year-old me beginning an unwritten novel on mother's new Smith Corona portable and 14-year-old me banging on clunky manuals in middle school typing classes. I suspect that for many of the collectors featured in this show, now-impractical devices trigger nostalgic yearnings for times when life seemed less complicated and more enjoyable.

Filmmaker Doug Nichol offers both recognizable celebrities and little-known folks, each with their own level of interest in, or obsession for, fading technology. Another juxtaposition involves people preserving outdated machines and a sculptor deconstructing them to give machine parts new life in unique art forms.

As the program evolves, it becomes less about machines and more about the people who treasure them.

I saw this film last year at the Cleveland Film Festival and absolutely fell in love with it. It's not so much about typewriters as it is about people & human connectivity in an increasing digital world. I watched it again the other evening on Amazon and fell in love with the characters and their lives all over again. It's a very emotional and beautiful film that just flows over you. Bravo!

Unlikely, but well-done documentary which examines the history and current status of the lowly typewriter via commentary from people having diverse perspectives: the long-established but struggling repair shop operators; the antiquity collectors of the earliest models; the people, some famous, who still use and romantically embrace their antiquated machines; a small group who performs percussive 'music' with typewriters; and a super creative artist who turns unusable typewriters and their parts into incredible pieces of art.

Filming, Editing, and musical soundtrack were superb.

Intelligent and entertaining, a historical, sociological, and philosophical all-in-one study well worth the price of admission.

One of the big reasons that "California Typewriter" showed up on my radar was likely because I happened to be reading a book at the same time called "Revenge of Analog". That book describes a movement back towards things such as records, paper, board games, and other physical (not digital) forms of leisure and commerce. That is the main theme of "California Typewriter" too...only focusing on the device listed in the title.

This documentary basically focuses on a number of different human interest stories involving a piece of technology largely thought "obsolete": the typewriter. From Tom Hanks' typewriter collection to the actual California Typewriter story, to a sculpture artist and and a collector looking for his coup de grace (and even a little history thrown in), this doc attacks the typewriter's story from nearly every angle.

Even above the human stories, though, is the notion present throughout the entire doc of that "return to analog" of sorts. As technology marches on, sometimes we don't stop to evaluate whether the physical experience of creation needs to take a back seat to the ease of creation. Don't get me wrong...I'm not exchanging my iPhone for a flip phone, nor am I turning in my MacBook for a desktop PC. I'm no Luddite. But it is a fascinating idea for me (old enough to remember a time before the Internet and mobile everything)...this notion that sometimes, say, the act of typing something on a physical device might be more satisfying than the ease of a word processor.

So, even though I'm not really "into" typewriters (I can honestly say I've never used one in my life!), I can say that this doc fascinated me and connected with me on a nostalgic, but also intellectual level. A return to analog devices may not be for everyone, but docs like this prove that the newest technology may not be for everyone, either. There is room for both, and even a mixture of both.

I am a typewriter user and also a long time Sam Shepard fan. I found this to be a quite fascinating film. I was expecting it to be an examination of the machine, yet it was more like an examination of our current world and both the good and the bad that comes from the digital/computer revolution. That said it did more than satisfy my lust at seeing so many beautiful machines - some that I would love to own someday. The stories of the characters and especially the repairman were very rich and detailed. I have recommended this film to a number of freinds.