California Typewriter

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!

This is a fully engrossing movie that uses a portrait of a small business in Berkeley, CA to examine the unique mind set of collectors, the history of the typewriter and its impact on the culture as well as being a meditation on the cost of technological progress. We meet a wide range of people who collect typewriters, including Tom Hanks. He is very charming and is very clearly passionate about these machines. It's fun to listen to him explain what he likes about his typewriters and he has a compelling philosophical outlook. The other collectors are equally interesting and diverse, though, as noted in the film, mostly men. California Typewriter focuses on a very particular segment of society, but manages to say a lot about American culture in general.

I think it's inexcusable for a documentary that features a lot of talking head interviews not to identify the speakers on camera. We all know who Tom Hanks is, and maybe John Mayer. But the other notable people interviewed are not household names or faces, even Sam Shepard, RIP. The names are listed "In order of appearance" in the end credits. Are we supposed to memorize who appeared in what order? If it weren't for this creative choice, I would have given 10 stars.

I am a Tom Hanks fan and happened on this one by chance on Hulu. The film drew me in right from the beginning and I was captivated by the amazing cast of characters and the world of typewriters - something I never really knew about. What impressed me most was the emotion in this film - I really felt for the family and their shop and hope they can keep it going. We need more people like this in the world. Beautiful!

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 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.