Ray Pride

Is "The Living Room" coming to a theater near you?

While much ink’s been spent on the changes that no one can predict in the weeks and months to come in the movie industry, less has been written about how exhibition—from the multiplex to the rare, preserved movie palace—can survive and subsist in a world of broadband Internet and handheld devices with wireless connections and downloads, legal and not. Is it worth building bricks and mortar anymore?

For years, Robert Redford’s Sundance Cinemas (affiliated with the not-for-profit Sundance Institute and Sundance Film Festival, but not tethered to them) has mooted plans for movie theaters across the country, and the litter of corporate initials on the press releases for a Chicago entry plotted for 2009 suggest how complicated it’s gotten. Plans are for a spring opening of a 40,000-square-foot eight-screen complex on the Near West Side, anchoring a retail and residential combine on the site of the former Fannie May chocolate factory. So who is Sundance Cinemas LLC working with? In the words of Crain’s Chicago Business, "two low-profile Chicago development firms, IBT Group LLC and Structured Development LLC." (A New York money manager, BlackRock Inc., has reportedly kicked in since.) In the May press release for Chicago’s Sundance entry, which follows a newly built Madison, Wisconsin site that opened in mid-May and the acquisition and ongoing refurbishing of San Francisco’s down-on-its-luck Kabuki 8 art-house, Redford is said to have said, "Chicago’s longstanding embrace of artistic, creative and innovative endeavors make this an incredibly exciting community for Sundance to join." But that’s only so much blah blah blah. More importantly, as the Sun-Times’ David Roeder reported the day after the release, is the residential component on the almost-four-acre site. When Roeder asked one of the developers how tall the building would be, he answered, "Don’t go there." Roeder quotes Eric Sedler, president of the West Loop Community Organization, as having gotten wind of a twenty-five-to-thirty-story building being planned for the plot. In other words: it’s an "amenity" for a glossy brochure to sell real estate in the "West Loop Promenade," as it’s currently dubbed, as much as a temple to all things indie and progressive movie-wise. Greenwich Village’s IFC Theatre, one of New York’s best movie-food-liquor edifices, also functions as a kind of loss-leader, fronting the brand name of IFC Films and the IFC cable channel in the middle of Manhattan while also providing a decent restaurant and a handsome bar-lounge for moviegoers.

The movie, it seems, is no longer the main attraction. We’ve begun to perceive the content of our entertainment choices like a house with water spigots as plentiful as electrical outlets. It pours out everywhere, and all forms of information tend to bleed together. It’s all "content," and it’s provided left and right from morning to night. The movies were once something epic and titanic, large and bright and out of this world: now they’re an advertisement for an imminent DVD release you can chart the date of, place into a NetFlix queue or advance-order on Amazon.

And these are the changes of only the past several years. In the back of the minds of most of the people who run the industry is the old-fashioned edifice complex. Cue Roger Ebert’s name-checking from a 2005 reminiscence about downtown Chicago moviegoing: "Just for the sake of nostalgia, let me name the theaters I remember: the Chicago, State-Lake, Oriental, Roosevelt, United Artists, Woods, McVickers, Clark, Monroe, Michael Todd, Cinestage, World Playhouse, Loop, Bismarck Palace and, oh, a place called the Shangri-La that materialized out of a Chinese restaurant, showed some porn and disappeared."

All these are from the days when theaters were not an amenity -for real estate development—they were the development. That era has disappeared, but what replaces it? Who’s the visionary who’s going to keep the lights on for the communal experience of joining strangers in the dark to dream another stranger’s dream? Much of the money seems to be running in the other direction; the New York Times this week has already run several breathless articles about the potential for "content" on the iPhone, being introduced on Friday, the same day as Disney-Pixar-Apple’s "Ratatouille" hopes for record-breaking grosses theatrically.

As Mark Cuban, Maverickpreneur co-owner of Landmark Theaters, Magnolia Pictures, HDNet Films and other outlets, blog-of-consciousnessed last year, "Portable media devices... iPods... phones with all their features... have solved what has been a generations-old nuisance for all of us, boredom. We have our little devices and now we are never bored. We don't find ourselves staring off into space unoccupied, wondering what to do. We don't find ourselves muttering about how bored we are sitting on the train, or on a plane, trying to do anything to make the time go by more quickly. Our little mobile devices are so popular because they are the ultimate, continuous distraction. Portable video will be successful not because it will siphon off viewing from traditional TV. Portable video sells and will sell in increasing numbers because it’s a better cure for boredom... Daydreaming and zoning out aren't dead and gone, but they now have a soundtrack and a video." (The goosebumps that gives me are not the pleasant kind.)

The newest burst of capital investment from Cuban’s corporation just opened in Los Angeles. When I read about last month’s opening of Los Angeles’s Westside Pavilion art-house under the Landmark banner, with a dozen screens, it sounded good for moviegoers in that city, where the last of the big-screen Westwood theaters are closing. But when I read the name of the trio of small theaters at the top of the complex, my heart sank. The Landmark Living Room. Even if, as the Los Angeles Times put it, the rooms include "sofas and side tables as well as overstuffed love seats and ottomans by the high-end French furniture company Ligne Roset," they’re still calling it… the Living Room?

All the comforts of home for $12? What immediately comes to mind is my living room. An apartment on a city block, nice couch, decent-sized TV screen, OK stereo, coffee to-go downstairs, twenty-four-hour diner food on the corner. No, no, no. That’s not what we’re supposed to think. As a sort of showroom for the home-theater boom, it makes me want to upgrade my house, not leave it, an upgrade to the HD plasma screen self-cinémathèque. But of course, that is much closer than we’d like to think to the nickelodeon, the porno booth, the toilet stall where advertisers have attempted to place video screens to sell to the most captive of audiences. The pictures get smaller, indeed.

"Birch trees line the hallways, the seats are upholstered with wool, and customers can enjoy the in-house bistro," The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel describes the Sundance 608, as well as, wouldn’t you guess, Sundance-branded retail. (Why does the word "enjoy" always sound so forced in sentences like that?) The complex’s seasonal Rooftop Bar, however, sounds like the kind of get-out-of-the-house amenity that provides spectacle along with movies, a kind of diverse showmanship that replaces the selling of the movies themselves.

Going to the movies, as opposed to watching them on a personal-entertainment device like a television or a PDA, has long been about the social, about the communion. In many smaller cities, theaters akin to Chicago's Brew & View are commonplace, such as Orlando’s Enzian and Austin’s storied Alamo Drafthouse (which is presently relocating from its past, grotty location). Urban legend used to hold that Chicago moviehouses couldn’t get a liquor license, but, among other venues, the now-defunct Three Penny sold beer and wine and the Siskel Film Center has beer and wine upside its cappuccinos.

Inquiries to the business and licensing branch of the City of Chicago suggest that there’s nothing on the books that would prevent a theater from having a liquor license, and in fact, a reading of the standards makes it sound much simpler than opening a tavern nowadays. An even more complicated, more relevant issue may be the leases that theater chains sign with property developers, which prohibit various kinds of behavior, which can include a prohibition against liquor, unrated movies and other such works of the devil. A company like AMC might not want to be in that business, but would work to make sure that a major investment like the River East 21 would open in a complex that included a bar and restaurant nearby, like the Lucky Strike bowling alley one floor down.

The Pacific Northwest, however, has a chain of which I’ve only visited one location, but it was a knockout. Last fall, I was invited to be a juror at a film festival in central Oregon in a city called Bend, population around 60,000, which I knew only as the country’s fastest-growing region with the most explosive real-estate price boom as well. But right around the corner from the downtown’s beautifully restored Tower Theatre is The Old St. Francis School, a 1936 Catholic boys’ school which now houses classrooms-turned-hotel-rooms, a brewery, a bakery, a Turkish-style soaking pool, a two-screen movie theater, a pub with a dozen house brews and several of their own regional wines on tap, and out back, four cottages, a winding, foliage-embraced patio and in what was once the facility’s garage, O’Kane’s, a one-room schoolhouse-sized, wood-stove-heated pub. There’s more to the place than that, and word of the other regional locations’ facilities make the head spin, such as a remote hotel with a rooftop bar that seats fewer than ten guests. Just looking at their Web site makes my eyes water. And why? Showmanship. Tradition and innovation: it’s not about real estate deals and liquor restrictions and digital projection or the birth of media aborning and media that’s dying.

It's not even off-putting to read that a craft ale called Firefly Kolsch is named after a quote from Blackfoot warrior Crowfoot, whom they cite as having said, "What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset." (Which I have to compare to the beauty of a flickering image on a movie screen just to bring all the metaphors into alignment.)

What McMenamin’s, the company of brothers that operates the Old St. Francis School, has managed to create in its own wooly way is a destination, a non-mall destination, an imagined, confected, constructed playground that draws on tradition and preserves regional architecture, a playground for grownups that shows movies, and you’d want to see movies there just so you can hang out afterwards.

One bright light in Chicago's movie-exhibition experience has been the spectacular success of the Chicago Outdoor Film Festival. Each Tuesday in summer, thousands tote blankets to Grant Park to watch "classics" on an immense screen that evokes warm memories of the drive-in, to see movies they've likely watched many times alone in bouts of boredom aversion. Community and spectacle: the two essential ingredients in moviegoing and both antithetical to the microdigitization of "entertainment content."

But how do you bottle that firefly light, that hum across the low grass of the park just past dusk and just into that shared second bottle of wine? How can that lightning flash each time you join friends and strangers at movies small or huge?

(2007-06-26)

Also by Ray Pride

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Michael Winterbottom’s fifteenth or so feature, with a reported $16 million budget, distributed by Paramount Vantage, the carthorse arm of the larger company, is a star vehicle for Angelina Jolie, and also not a star vehicle at all
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Nothing Else Matters
Forty-three-year-old comics artist Joe Matt, whose comics include "The Poor Bastard" and "Peepshow," is promoting his new hardcover collection, "Spent," at Quimby’s
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Tip of the Week
"You Kill Me," John Dahl’s seriously grown-up comedy about an alcoholic hitman from Buffalo trying to dry out walk the straight and narrow, is a smart, profane lark
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Over the past several weeks, any number of monumental tributes to longitude, latitude, endurance and duration have been on display, including the almost three-hour "Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End"; the U.S. premier of the restored, 1968 Oscar-winning "War and Peace," an eight-hour canvas that would cost a billion dollars to make today; Jacques Rivette’s once-lost masterpiece, "Out 1" (1971), an immersive twelve hours and twenty-six minutes, as well as his tidier 1991 "La belle noiseuse" (pictured), which charts the starts and stops of painting a female nude, with Michel Piccoli studying the form of the usually nude Emmanuelle Béart. And of course, then there’s Sunday night’s final episode of "The Sopranos"
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Tip of the Week
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One Dish
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Only Disconnect
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Tip of the Week
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Mommy, I Googled Murder
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Summer Guide 2007: June Movies
(2007-05-22)

Summer Guide 2007: July Movies
(2007-05-22)

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