Out of Print

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.

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.

Out of Print (2014)

*** 1/2 (out of 4)

This here is an extremely entertaining documentary that takes a look at revival cinema and why 35mm prints are so important. The main focus of this documentary is the New Beverly Cinema in California, which has become a cult favorite since they show double features on 35mm.

John Landis, Kevin Smith, Seth Green, Patton Oswalt, Edgar Wright, Richard Kelly, Stuart Gordon, Lloyd Kaufman, Clu Gulager, Joe Dante, Fred Dekker and Tom Holland, are among the people who are interviewed as well as people who work at the theater as well as those who religiously attend it week after week.

There's one thing for certain, if you're a film buff then you'll certainly want to visit the New Beverly Cinema after watching this movie. This documentary does a brilliant job at selling this theater and explaining why it is so popular to film buffs who want to enjoy these old classics and not-so-classic movies on the big screen. The second portion of the documentary talks about the importance of 35mm film and why it is slowly going away in favor of digital files. From here we also hear more about the theater including the various famous faces who go there and show off their favorite movies.

OUT OF PRINT is certainly a highly entertaining film and it's one that any film buff is going to love. The documentary does a masterful job at getting to the bottom of why people love movies as much as they do and this theater is basically shown as a Heaven for film buffs. I really liked the various stories told and especially since I've never been to this place.

The one thing the film doesn't really hit upon is how 35mm prints simply can't be shipped all over the country. It's brought up many times that this theater isn't making a great amount of money and I'm going to guess that the majority of prints shown there are from L.A. so there's not too much of a cost. Getting prints shipped to countless theaters across the country with dwindling crowd numbers is why so many have gone over to digital. With that said, more and more mainstream theaters are showing classic films on the big screen and this here wasn't happening when there were only 35mm prints going around.

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.

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?