LA film fades out...and in (w/ THE STUDIO's Evan Goldberg)

The film and TV biz defines LA—so what's it look like as the biz moves abroad? Host (and longtime Angeleno) Rico Gagliano takes a tour of a changing city, from the Hollywood sign to a new crop of booming rep cinemas. Guests include THE STUDIO co-creator Evan Goldberg, indie icon Charles Burnett (KILLER OF SHEEP), and Sean Fennessey, host of THE BIG PICTURE podcast. 

Part travelogue, part deep-dive storytelling, the latest season sees host Rico Gagliano jet off to Ireland, Amsterdam, Mexico City, Los Angeles and Istanbul, to learn about their cultures through the lens of cinema. Season 8’s guests include actors Gael García Bernal (AMORES PERROS) and Fiona Shaw (HOT MILK), writer/directors Rich Peppiatt (KNEECAP), Evan Goldberg (THE STUDIO) and Halina Reijn (BABYGIRL), producer Ed Guiney (POOR THINGS), production designer Eugenio Caballero (ROMA) and a host of other filmmakers, programmers, academics, cinema owners, critics, tour guides, and festival directors.

LURKER is coming to theaters in the US & Canada. Check out mubi.com/lurker for showtimes and tickets.

To stream some of the films we've covered on the podcast, check out the collection Featured on the MUBI Podcast. Availability of films varies depending on your country.

MUBI is a global streaming service, production company and film distributor dedicated to elevating great cinema. MUBI makes, acquires, curates, and champions extraordinary films, connecting them to audiences all over the world. A place to discover ambitious new films and singular voices, from iconic directors to emerging auteurs. Each carefully chosen by MUBI’s curators.

Transcript

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Heads up, this episode includes adult language and spoilers. You might not think the Rust Belt town of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, has anything in common with Los Angeles, California. But let me tell you a story about when I moved to Pittsburgh, age 12, at the tail end of an era.<i>Every day after joyful day, hundreds of thousands of men lay down the tools</i><i>of their work and come together for that one supreme moment:</i><i>the beer after work.</i> It was the mid 1980s. And there was evidence everywhere of Pittsburgh's proud history as the center of the US iron and steel industry. From the name of the local beer.<i>Iron City Beer after work.</i> To the name of the city's beloved football team, the Steelers, to longtime steelworker haunts like Kyoto's, a restaurant with a back patio that overlooked the Homestead steel mill, and where a big metal US steel logo, like five feet high, hung on a wall.

<i>Iron City: 0:58

once you get there, you'll never want to leave.</i> But actually... the steel industry was almost gone. Competition from countries with super cheap labor, U.S. Factories failure to modernize, all sorts of causes. But bottom line, around 120,000 steel jobs had just gone away. That mill behind Kyoto's was empty. In fact, there were empty mills and boarded up industrial infrastructure all over the place. One night, some friends and I snuck into an abandoned train station. I remember barren loading docks and an office stripped bare, except for like, 50 ancient Underwood typewriters just piled in a corner, like bones. I remember wondering what it must have been like to live in Pittsburgh when the decline started. Watching a booming industry that gave your whole city its identity fade out. Well, it feels that way right now in my adopted hometown of Los Angeles. Except the industry is the movies. I'm Rico Gagliano, welcome back to the MUBI Podcast. MUBI's the streaming service that champions great cinema. On this show we tell you the stories behind great cinema. This is season eight, we're calling it Traveling Shots. Every episode I'm taking you along on a tour through the film culture in a different city to meet its best filmmakers, learn about the ways people there make and watch movies, and try to understand why they do it that way. And yeah, this week it's Los Angeles, a gorgeous, cool, infuriating, ridiculous city that I've called home for actually 30 years this month, where movies are such a part of the culture that basically everyone is Hollywood adjacent. The workaday lifestyle of the city is defined by this business. It's it's a working class town that just also happens to have the highest level of glamor imaginable. But where fewer and fewer movies are actually being shot. While the moneymen ask, does cinema have to be made in LA? It doesn't, but I feel like everyone agrees, shouldn't it? It just should. That is Evan Goldberg, co-creator with Seth Rogen of the hit Apple TV+ series <i>The Studio</i>. A send up and love letter to Hollywood. And I talked to him, Sean Fennessey of the cinema podcast <i>The Big Picture</i>, indie film legend Charles Burnett, and a red carpets worth of others about the fight to keep film making in LA and how, meanwhile, filmgoing in the city is booming. This has been the art form that survived the Great Depression because people need an outlet. They need to get the fuck out of their own heads. So fire up the GPS, We're going to navigate heavy traffic through the cinema scene, past and present of Los Angeles. So first of all, I should say LA's movie biz has fallen on hard times before, so I figured I'd start this tour with a trip to a symbol of Hollywood that has definitely had its own ups and downs. All right, and you want to introduce yourself and what we're doing? Sure, my name is Jeff Zarrinnam, and I'm the chairman of the Hollywood Sign Trust. And we're doing an interview today about the Hollywood sign, I guess. Yeah, and you're taking me there. I'm taking you right there. Right now we're in a truck... in my Ford F-150, and we're leaving from the Beachwood Market. The Beachwood Market sits in a neighborhood called Hollywoodland. The Hollywood sign sits high above it on Mount Lee at the end of a mile of steep, twisty road. And as we weave towards it, Jeff tells me its origin story,

which combines two super LA things: 4:34

advertising and real estate. This was originally a land development, and they were selling plots of land back in the 20s, and they were trying to figure out, how do we get people up here? I mean, you have to imagine this whole area was just barren hillside. They said, well, why don't we build this big sign called Hollywoodland to attract people? And then at night, they lit it up with about 3700 light bulbs, and they would blink 'Holly' and then 'wood' and then 'land' and altogether Hollywoodland. In true Los Angeles fashion, very low key, very quiet, not glittery at all. It's Hollywood. He pauses the story as we pull into a little driveway at the top of the mountain and step out to a spectacular view over the city and a steep drop down. It's only a 45 degree angle as you as you can see. Wow, look at this view. Oh, hey, here we are. We are right behind, I didn't even realize because we were kind of walking up this driveway that right to my right, here's the H in the Hollywood sign. We're behind it... and above it we're so high, helicopters fly by at eye level. As we clamber down to the letters, I can see they are huge. Over 40ft tall each and super engineered big white riveted steel beams and sheet metal. But Jeff says that wasn't always the case. The original sign was only supposed to last 18 months. Remember, it was an advertising gimmick to bring people up to the hillside to buy plots of land, right? So they just put the sign up very inexpensively, tin sheets. And they just nailed it onto these telephone pole wood posts. And that's how the Hollywood sign was built. By the 40s, Hollywood's movie industry was in full swing. The sign had become its most visible symbol, but it was a wreck. The H had actually fallen down on its face for about four years, the sign said'Ollywoodland', with a lot of panels missing from the other letters as well. So the Chamber of Commerce eventually took it over, ripped down the 'L-A-N-D' and began decades of piecemeal patch up jobs on the other nine letters. They came up with every kind of imaginable trick to keep these signs erect on the mountain. There was cables holding it to the hillside because they kept falling down the panels would, you know, the wind would blow the panels off the structure. They made a bunch of holes into the sign, literally thousands and thousands of holes so that the wind would pass through the tin panels. Until in 1978, here comes my favorite part, an unlikely character chipped in to reinforce it like it is today. The very first person up to the plate in April, I think, of 1978, was Alice Cooper, of all people. And the reason was, was because it was the 75th anniversary of Hollywood. The Hollywood sign was up there falling off the hill. Yeah, in an interview posted on his YouTube channel, shock rock star Alice Cooper remembers he coughed up 27 grand to rehabilitate one of the O's in memory of his then recently deceased pal, Groucho Marx. And the floodgates opened. As soon as we did the publicity thing Hugh Hefner brought the H, Gene Autry bought a letter, Spielberg bought a letter because they're part of Hollywood. That's where they made their money. And they looked at the sign going,"That's a disgrace" Everybody then bought a letter and they redid the sign. Now, it may be obvious to you by now, but I'm telling you this long story as a sort of hopeful metaphor. Like the sign I want the LA film scene to end up standing strong against fierce headwinds. Because right now it can feel like it's being held up with phone poles and cables. What the Hollywood sign is known for is hopes and dreams. And, you know, Hollywood has been resilient. But, you know, lately... I don't know. Movie and TV making is so woven into the fabric of LA that if you've lived here long enough, you can feel it when it's not there. For me, my first inkling was when the yellow signs started vanishing. They're usually put up at the crack of dawn by production assistants, plastic yellow signs zip tied to phone poles and lampposts, each with a cryptic code word printed on it in big black letters and an arrow. They're there to direct film crews to shooting locations. When I moved here in the 90s, just driving around, you would see those signs everywhere. In fact, you'd see film crews everywhere shooting on some side street in the dead of night when you were walking home from a party. Shooting in the restaurant, you wanted to hit up for dinner, but now you couldn't'cause they were shooting in there. But slowly, those sightings got fewer and farther between. It is true, I don't see the yellow signs as much and I because I when I am driving around and I see one, I'm like, oh my gosh, a yellow sign. That's my friend Libby Minarik. For the last 20 plus years, she's been an assistant director on prestige TV shows like <i>True Blood</i>. She's noticed other omens around town. I live in Burbank. We're near a couple of studios, and there are restaurants that do a lunch heavy business. And you, if you happen to go in there at lunch, you would see stacks of bulk orders for people in production offices who are ordering their like, afternoon lunch for a large group of people. And I don't see those stacks anymore. Which makes sense because in more and more of those offices, there aren't large groups of people anymore. When we started the company,<i>The Ringer</i> that I worked for before we were acquired by Spotify, we worked at Sunset Gower Studios in Hollywood. That is Sean Fennessey. He is head of content at The Ringer and host of the podcast <i>The Big Picture</i>.<i>Time</i> magazine just listed it as one of the 100 Best Podcasts Ever. And this was 2015 when we took that space. At that time, that studio lot was occupied by a lot of Shonda Rhimes oriented shows like <i>Scandal</i>, and Netflix was increasingly taking space there, in addition to the fortress that they had built down the block. And we had to fight really hard to get space. Cut to ten years later, The Ringer is looking to open up more studio space beyond the Arts District headquarters of Spotify, and we looked at the Sunset Gower space, and we had our pick of the litter to choose from, because no one's filming there. So is that something that just happened this week? But it tells you as much as you need to know, I think, about the particular issue that is happening right now with production. What's happening is there's less of it. A couple of weeks back, the outfit FilmLA released its quarterly report on how many days productions shoot in town. Feature film shoots down over 21%. Commercials down 15%, documentaries, industrial films all down since last year. And last year's numbers were already some of the lowest ever. Nearly 40% of studio soundstages are empty. Sean says he can blame it on a lot of stuff, but it all really boils down to an old story. Yeah, it's just profit margins. It's just how much money can we make on this work because it's cheaper to make things elsewhere. The series of events that collided included cresting realization amongst major studios that the spend against the streaming boom was unsustainable. So a major pullback in that spending at the same time, two different unions demanding, better wage, coupled with the realization that the incentives overseas, especially in Europe, were significantly cheaper for the studios led to all of this production moving away. Yeah, in the last few episodes of this show, we've heard a few times from Rich Peppiatt, director of the Northern Irish movie <i>Kneecap</i>. He just started a production company in Belfast. One of the many overseas cities where films and shows that used to shoot in Hollywood shoot now. And he'll straight up tell you a big part of Belfast's allure is the bottom line. We think that there's an opportunity here with the tax credits we have at 40%, that's as good as anywhere else in the world. And you know, one thing as someone who's out in LA quite a lot and speaking to executives in America, no one wants to shoot in bloody LA anyway, right? So it's like no one wants to shoot in America particularly. It's too expensive. There's good news, though. When Rich says no one... that's a little bit of an overstatement. My name is Evan Goldberg, and I am a director, producer and writer of <i>The Studio</i>. With his partner, Seth Rogen Evan Goldberg's also the co-creator of movies like <i>Superbad, Pineapple Express,</i> and a ton of other blockbuster comedies, and they insist on shooting in LA, which feels like kismet because he and Rogen are from a city that's like the poster child for poaching LA productions. Vancouver was a film town, and so we grew up seeing people filming things around us. It was a sight we were very used to. Our high school is architecturally a very cool building, and so stuff would film there a lot.<i>The X-Files</i> was always happening and <i>Highlander</i> and other TV shows. So for them, the draw of LA wasn't the magic of being around the Hollywood Dream factory. It was the city itself. It was Los Angeles that really, like, landed with him and I in a big way. You know, Vancouver's a proper city, but like this is 80 proper cities. It is just like a city unlike anything I'd ever experienced. And the size of it and the, like, myriad architectural elements. Vancouver is like a planned city that like the downtown, like, clearly there's like palettes and materials you're allowed to use. And in LA, it seems, from my humble Canadian perspective, coming down that like there were no rules and you have like a Lautner house and then you have like a Spanish house and then you have like a weird, like old wooden house that looks like a weird little hobbit house, like LA has more different things than any place I'd ever been and maybe does like period. And for him, that's cool for reasons both esthetic and practical. I always think when it comes to LA, it has everything if you know where to look, and I think that's one of the reasons why this is such a good film town is like, if you need a house that looks like a castle in Ireland, like there's one, I don't know where, but it's here. People can just build the strangest things in the strangest places for the strangest reasons. And those strange little things make really good film and television. Is there one that you can think of that you might have just had in one of your movies where it's just like, what the hell is this?- Where are we shooting today?- I mean, I always go back to, <i>Superbad</i>. We had a sequence where they get into, like, an adult party, and, Jonah ends up getting period blood on his leg.<i>That fucking stain on your pants, idiot. What is that?</i><i>- What are you talking about, man?- Dude.</i><i>Is that blood?</i> And I just remember that was someone's house with barely any set decorating. And the walls were covered in tiger art, like tiger painting and tiger cross stitch. And it's just that kind of stuff where you're just like, who is this person? Of course, they live in LA. They're eccentric, uber specific and passionate about their weirdness. And that's yeah, weirdos make good movies and LA's got a lot of weirdos.<i>This jerk offs got period blood on his pants.</i><i>That's fucked up, man. Let me see.</i> Evan's show <i>The Studio</i> takes full advantage of LA locations, too. Maybe on the classier side. Sleek 1950s pads designed by modernist John Lautner show up a lot. But if the architecture is mid-century optimistic, the tone of the show isn't always. Especially when the talk turns to moviemaking. You know, I walked past the tour guide every morning, and they say that the office was built as a temple to cinema, but... it feels much more like a tomb. Like there's a scene where Seth Rogen's character, a studio boss, is standing on the lawn of one of Lautner's UFO shaped houses up in the Hollywood Hills, talking to his mentor. Behind him LA stretches out to the horizon at Golden Hour. And I got into all this because, you know, I love movies, but now I have this fear that my job is to ruin them. There is this feeling like the glory days are over. And do you feel that? Do you feel like it's-- And if so, can it come back? Seth and I don't really see it as like, the glory days are over. If you really look at Hollywood, it's, I'm not sure the exact number, but 110 years old, that is incredibly young for a large industry. Every 20 years or so, there's like a seismic shift that completely changes the way everything is done. This is no crazier than other ships. And there's a golden era of television happening.- There's still giant movies happening--- What about LA, though? Does it have to happen in LA now? It doesn't, but I feel like everyone agrees. Shouldn't it? Just shouldn't it? It just should. And I mean, as a local I agree, but it's not like there's a law. Although just a few weeks back, the state government did pass a bill.<i>California lawmakers have approved a plan aimed at keeping Hollywood in Hollywood</i><i>by giving production companies more financial incentive to stay here.</i> Yeah, when a production shoots in California, it can ask the state to basically refund a percentage of what they spend here. They get it in the form of what are called tax credits. Well, this bill boosted that percentage to 35% and more than doubled the amount of credits the state hands out.<i>From 330 million up to 750 million a year. That's a big deal.</i> Or at least it sounds like a big deal. But Belfast offers a 40% tax credit with no annual limit. So is it? or is this all just a big race to the bottom, where cities offer studios more and more rebates until at some point, LA'll have to promise to fund a movie's whole budget just to get a Hollywood studio to shoot in Hollywood. I think there's a kind of mistrust that, you know, this is just putting money into the pockets of studios. And I understand that fear. But we're not asking for California to have the most competitive tax credit in the world and race to the bottom. It just needs to be competitive enough. That is filmmaker and activist Alexandra Peckman. She co-founded an outfit called #StayinLA that lobbied hard for these incentives. And she thinks LA actually doesn't have to totally outbid the Belfasts of the world, because there are so many movie and TV people here with some power who'd just rather not leave town all the freaking time. They want to be home with their families. You know, Sarah Adina Smith, my co-founder, she developed a show that was set in LA. And, you know, the opening scene was supposed to take place in Malibu, and she was told to choose between South Africa and Australia. Like she has a toddler and would definitely like to stay home with her family. So you're saying LA doesn't have to beat other cities incentives? It's just got to get close enough that when you factor in quality of life, basically it makes sense to shoot here. Exactly. I mean, we we've talked to showrunners, and if it's 5% difference, that can be a conversation with studios. And there is hopeful stuff happening. TV dramas are the one kind of production that's actually shooting a little more in LA since last year, thanks to shows like HBO's <i>The Pitt</i>, who star Noah Wylie actually appeared on Entertainment Tonight wearing a #StayinLA t shirt.<i>I haven't worked in this city since</i> ER,<i>wrapped 15 years ago.</i><i>We would like to put a little bit more pressure on those streaming services and</i><i>studios to keeping work in the city.</i> But I know folks who have doubts any of this will be enough. I mean, I don't know, I guess I don't see, I don't... feel really optimistic about it. That's my friend Libby again, the assistant director. She has reasons to be jaded. Up 'til the strikes, she was working like eight months a year. Could have done even more. But she liked to take breaks from the 12 hour days to have time with her family. But starting with the strike, you know, like spring 2023, I have worked five months total since then. My life is full of people with these stories. My pal Keith was working constantly as a prop maker. This year he's worked three and a half months. My friend Ted wrote for multiple seasons of franchise TV shows. He hasn't had a staff gig since the strikes. And Libby thinks the problem isn't mainly about tax credits. It's cheap labor. I think that there's going to be a small amount of shooting that continues to happen in the US, because some power brokers will keep it here. A director who wants to work in LA and the producers will have to pay that cost. But I don't think we've seen in history that when labor becomes exponentially cheaper overseas, that we are able to return those industries to the United States because we don't hold the corporations accountable. We think it's okay for corporations to only maximize profit for those at the very top, and that's cultural and that's across all industries. I just think it took longer to get to film and and here it is. I hope she's wrong, but if she isn't and the film industry fades in LA, I can tell you the art form itself and the city's sense of its movie history isn't going anywhere. The cinema bust gives way to a rep cinema's boom. Coming up in just a minute. Stay with us. All right, everybody, MUBI is the global film company that champions great cinema, bringing it to you wherever you are in as many ways as we possibly can. We stream movies, we produce them. We release them in theaters. Movies from any country, from legendary auteurs or brilliant first timers. We have always got something new for you to discover. And this month I got something for you to discover at your local cinema. It is a cat and mouse thriller called <i>Lurker</i>. Appropriately enough for this episode, it is set in the world of LA show business not the film industry though the music scene and the online influencer scene which, by the way, is blowing up in Los Angeles right now. It is about an aimless 20 something who meets a rising pop star and edges his way into the guy's inner circle until slowly, the fine line between friend and fan blurs in scary ways.<i>Lurker</i> is the directing debut of Alex Russell. He wrote some of the best episodes of the TV series <i>The Bear</i>, so imagine that show's high tension. It stars Théodore Pellerin and Archie Madekwe, best known for <i>Saltburn</i>, and you can see it in theaters starting August 22nd in the US and Canada. Check out MUBI.com/lurker for showtimes. Also, one more heads up for August if you happen to live here in LA first of all, hi, neighbor. And second of all, mark your calendars for Sunday, August 24th at 3pm. That's when I will be at the Aero Theater in Santa Monica to present a screening of the Breakthrough Irish Indie<i>Intermission</i>. This was the debut of John Crowley, who went on to direct <i>Brooklyn</i> with Saoirse Ronan. Way different kind of film, though it is the story of a bunch of Dubliners falling in and out of love and crime. The cast includes a young Colin Farrell and Cillian Murphy, and it is a fun, acerbic ride. That is Sunday, August 24th at 3pm at the Aero Theater. Tickets are on sale now, and tip if you go back and listen to the first episode of this season of the podcast, you can hear John Crowley himself tell me what a huge hit this thing was in Ireland. Meanwhile, for more of this kind of great cinema delivered right into your living room, subscribe to MUBI at MUBI.com As usual, you'll find all the links and info you need in the show notes of this episode. Speaking of which, let's get back to the episode. So here's a flashback. In 2004, I was a public radio reporter living in the Fairfax district of LA. And one night I visited the cramped projection booth at my charmingly shabby local movie house to interview a legend. Yeah, my name is Sherman Torgan. I manage and program the New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles, California. I know it doesn't sound like the voice of a legend, but for LA film geeks, Sherman was it. He had been running The New Bev as a repertory theater since 1978,

doing basically everything: 24:12

programing nightly double bills of classic cult and arthouse movies, running the box office, changing the marquee and occasionally serving as a first responder. Talking about, you know, just crazy theater stories. We were running a trailer show, a midnight trailer show, which was, you know, two hours of coming attractions, and we started the show late in the first trailer on was <i>Up in Smoke</i>, the Cheech and Chong film. Just at that time the screen went dark. I went running upstairs to see what happened, thinking that maybe, you know, the bulb went out. Walk into the booth find the projectionist screaming that we have a fire, and one of the lamp houses on the projectors was spitting out flames, shooting about two feet into the air. And it wasn't until about 5 or 10 minutes later when the fire was out, that the you know, that amazing irony hit me that the fire started just as <i>Up in Smoke</i> came onto the screen. It's a great story and apt because in 2004, movie houses like his were also flaming out. It seems as if we're if not, LA's last full time, independently owned revival theater we're probably one of the last revival theaters, you know, of this kind in the entire country. Yeah, even LA, the town that practically created film history, was down to just a handful of places that screened it. The New Bev, a couple theaters run by the American Cinematheque, the famed New Art Theater, with its midnight<i>Rocky Horror Picture Show</i> freak outs. In a city 30 miles across with a population bigger than most states there wasn't much. There's a lot of, issues that didn't exist, you know, 10, 15 years ago. Certainly when I opened the theater, we didn't have video, we didn't have cable television. We certainly didn't have DVDs. And running an eclectic mixture of older films, you know, you're running into a lot of competition, you know, from DVDs. Sherman died in 2007. Quentin Tarantino bought the New Bev and still runs it today, mostly showing his collection of 35mm prints. But after a decade plus of a few new players like him adding some heat to LA's rep theater scene, what seemed like the final death blow hit.<i>The empty streets, and businesses tell the story of the precautions being taken to</i><i>prevent the further spread of coronavirus.</i><i>Today, a big decision by the L.A. County Board of Supervisors.</i><i>They announced the closure of all bars, clubs, gyms and movie theaters</i><i>until further notice.</i> I thought I was out of a job. That's Bret Berg. He has been a film programmer and beloved movie advocate all over town for decades. These days, he works for the American Genre Film Archive, distributing cult movies to rep theaters. 2017, 18, 19 our business kept expanding year over year, and then in March 2020, boom! It immediately just cratered. I thought, there's no way that we can come back from this. And in 2022, the first burbles started... popping up, bubbling up, and it was really the opening of WHAMMY! that made me think, there is something here. This will come back. WHAMMY's cool micro-cinema in the Echo Park neighborhood. Just 35 seats, but it was a canary in a coal mine in a good way. And sure enough, 23, 24, 25 more and more places opened. More people reached out to me to say,"I'm starting my own place." I'm born and raised in LA. I've lived here my whole life and right now is the single greatest moment I feel in repertory history in Los Angeles. Certainly as long as I've been alive. Yeah, I can tell you in my neighborhood at the American Cinematheque's Aero Theater, there are lines outside screenings of arthouse and classic movies almost every night. But that's just the tip of the iceberg. You've got UCLA at the Hammer, you've got USC, Academy Museum, Brain Dead Studios, New Beverly, Alamo Drafthouse in Downtown, 2220 Arts + Archives. There's a new spot in Burbank called Killer Fitness, which is a half, fitness studio, half horror movie screening space. It's a cool spot. You've got, American Cinematheque's three different venues. The Egyptian, the Aero, the Los Feliz 3. You've got the reopened Vista, also in Burbank, there's Be Kind Video. The Autry Museum out in Griffith Park shows Westerns. It's really just this explosion that even I have a hard time staying on top of. Sean Fennessey has been caught in the explosion too. I mean, certainly like the New Beverly has always has been a landmark for this in Los Angeles for 50 years, but it was one of the only ones for the last 20 years. In 2012, when I moved here, I was hunting for these screenings every night. Now it's like overwhelming. I mean, every day there's 3 or 4 options that are at least somewhat appealing to me. And it's exciting to be in the room, too, because people are just pumped. They're just fired up to see <i>Thief</i> on the big screen. For those who don't know, Michael Mann, 1980s, unbelievable movie.- Sure. Yeah.- Heist film. And this is my favorite thing that's happening in America right now. And yes, the rep cinema revival is a nationwide thing that Sean thinks was at least partly fueled by the lockdown. As someone who hosts a contemporary film podcast that had to pivot pretty aggressively to the history of movies during the pandemic when few new releases were coming out. I know that there were just millions of other people who were going back into the history of movies while they were stuck in their homes. But Bret Berg thinks LA's repertory boom is especially miraculous'cause it's had more hurdles to jump, ironically, because it's an industry town. With New York, it was baked in that repertory film culture was just part of the scene. here in Los Angeles, you know, because of Hollywood, because of movie production... the focus for decades had been new movies, shiny huge places to see, new movies. And so repertory had always taken a back seat. And also, I would say up until a few years ago, there was not even a way for us to compete with the New York repertory scene. But now the amount of available real estate and storefront space, you know, post Covid lockdown, there are a lot of for lease signs all over the town. There's never been a better time for someone who has a dream to open their own cinema to do it right here. And maybe because so many places closed a sprawling city full of people that have always lived way apart from each other, are hungrier for spots to come together. What they call the third space? You know, shopping malls are gone. You know, in Westwood, which used to be the epicenter of moviegoing when I was a kid, I was there in Westwood on opening night for so many blockbusters in the 90s, those theaters are gone, and we crave those kinds of spaces. You know, there's fewer bookstores, video shops. These are all disappearing. So it's probably not a coincidence that the poster child for this wave of movie joints. Hi, guys! Kind of combines all of the above. So we're standing in Vidiots, in the video store, the beating heart of our new home here in Eagle Rock. Amongst the racks, 70,000 titles on DVD and Blu ray. That's Maggie Mackay and that video store is part of the cinema where she is executive director, Vidiots. Step through the doors and it's like going 20 years back in time. Racks of thin DVD boxes, mostly grouped by genre but also by fandom. All right, take me to your favorite part of the store here. My favorite part of the store. That's really hard. The Harry Dean section is a Harry Dean Stanton section, is a pretty important section for me personally.- 'Cause you knew him?- 'Cause I knew him. And we loved him, and we were able to give him a really great tribute before he passed away. Yeah, Vidiots has been pretty entwined with the hippest corners of the movie world, really, since 1985. That's when founders Cathy Tauber and Patty Pollinger opened it as a video store on the other side of town in Santa Monica, and made it one of the coolest spots in L.A. County. Because even at that time, when video stores were still plentiful, walking into Vidiots was not like walking into any other video store on the planet.- How so?- Just crazy shit everywhere. And parties like, you know, throwing Les Blank a polka party for a birthday one year, or bringing Russ Meyer in for his birthday and baking him a boob cake, which I don't know how well that would go over these days, but they baked it.- It was their idea.- Just to be clear. It was shaped like boobs. It wasn't made of boobs. It was a treat in the shape of a woman's upper torso. But also, I mean, just the movies alone are endless. I remember the first time I was coming to talk to them for the first time about possibly joining Vidiots, and I walked in and I looked over to my right, and I saw the documentary sign, and it was like, you know, a sign over, like two full wall racks. And I thought, oh, they're a little light on documentary. And then I turned around and the documentary section went the entire length of three walls. Even so, the place couldn't survive the video biz version of a pandemic: movie streaming Vidiots closed in 2017, but Maggie and a bunch of well-connected fans dreamed of finding a new venue for it that could hold all those videos and parties and also screenings. They looked at derelict gas stations an empty bread factory and definitely not cinemas. It's so rare to think about getting an old movie theater and turning it back into an old movie theater, because most of them turn into churches, and churches are pretty immovable. You know, they get tax dispensation, they tend to hunker down. But one day in LA's Eagle Rock neighborhood, a cinema desert where there were no movie theaters... the Lord provided. My best friend and I had commuted to work for years and years. He lived on a street called Yosemite. The light at Yosemite that we would sit at looks directly at this basically repurposed movie theater marquee. Once upon a time, the building was a 1930s era cinema called The Eagle because, you know, Eagle Rock. But for years it had indeed been a church. The long standing sign on the church was'Jesus Christ is the Lord, stop suffering.' So this space was known as the Stop Suffering Church. And it had become like a joke. It was like like a northeast LA meme. You would say, like, I'm having a really bad day. It's been like really rough, my kid, blah blah blah. And someone would be like, you know what?- Stop suffering...- Suffering. Exactly. It was a thing. And one day, that building we looked at hundreds and hundreds of times, sitting in his car waiting for the light to change, a 'for lease' sign went up and our friend Noah Segan tweeted,"Make it a cinema again."#StopSuffering." And once she got a look inside the place. It was like goosebumps. You could see it, you could feel the history, and you could start seeing Vidiots as not only bringing itself back, but it's bringing back this historic theater in a really underserved part of Los Angeles.<i>In the shell of a 94 year old movie theater</i><i>in north east LA's Eagle Rock neighborhood.</i><i>A merry band of hopeless optimists are mounting an unlikely comeback.</i> Sure enough, in 2019, Maggie and crew fundraised from the Hollywood glitterati, formed a nonprofit foundation, then spent most of lockdown turning the Eagle back into a cinema and more.<i>The grand opening of a new video store at 270 seat movie theater, and a hunger</i><i>for the shared experiences of the past.</i> That's a clip from the <i>Today Show</i>, by the way. This reopening was literally national news. Now Vidiots is the kind of place where, like when they screened the restoration of the Talking Heads movie,<i>Stop Making Sense</i> in 2023, the Talking Heads showed up for opening night.<i>Call it a Hollywood comeback, hoping to recapture that Friday night magic.</i> But if this all sounds hipper than thou, it's just totally not. In fact, to me, the vibe is more like a big neighborhood bar. They actually have a full bar open to the public. Or, I don't know, an ice cream joint. A third place that feels like family. One of the things I'm most proud of is that we are attracting the next generation of film lovers. We've got like, a endless stream of little kids and teenagers getting dropped off. It feels like the 1980s in here in the best possible way. This is part of their world. They have real ownership in this thing. We have one little kid who calls it 'my Vidiots.' He thinks this place is his. Bret Berg wonders if actually rep cinemas might be realigning goals for a certain kind of LA kid. There's so many people who get into film making because they have a dream. LA is a city of dreamers, and people are realizing now that another dream that they can have is film exhibition and curation and community building. And it seems like a more viable dream than making a movie. Which is both beautiful and to me, kind of sad. Because, yeah, it's great to have an LA that gets kids into sharing great movies. But what kind of film culture can LA really have if it's not viable for kids to make them?<i>Stop right here.</i> Like this is the opening scene of a 1977 movie called <i>Killer of Sheep</i>. The UCLA thesis film by this soft spoken guy: My name is Charles Burnett. I try to write and direct. A lot of people will tell you it's one of the most important films of the 70s. Set in the LA area called Watts, where Charles Burnett grew up. It's kind of about a guy who works in a slaughterhouse trying to get by, but it's also just a humane, neorealist slice of life in a black neighborhood where there's crime and desperation and also simple pleasures. Kids play in vacant lots, swinging rocks at each other and at passing trains. Just hanging.<i>Where you going?</i><i>I'm going to get my BB gun.</i> It's a world, Charles says back then, a lot of America had zero concept of. You know, like you would always ask at the time, what do you think the black community needs? What do you think? How would you improve on this? Well, the thing would be I couldn't tell them if you do ABC then this would happen. But you say you make a film that shows everything that happened that you had witnessed and say, okay, now that you see how life is the same way I saw it, how would you solve the problem? It's not some simple solution.<i>Hey! Stop!</i><i>Can't you see the man's hurt?</i> So one motivation for making it was political. But another, even at the very start of Charles's own career, was to show other people like him that it could be done. When I did <i>Killer of Sheep</i>, I wanted to have a production where kids could work on the film. Young kids, people of colour where they won't be discriminated against, where they wouldn't be scared to touch things. They helped with the lights. They had to work on the sound and all that sort of thing. You want to show them that look, go to school, this could be yours. And the thing is, at that time in LA, that was way more possible. Everything was inexpensive back then. UCLA you could-- you didn't have to get a student loan. Yeah. I mean, back then wasn't tuition free? It's California state schools. It was just like like a few hundred bucks for fees or something. Yeah, it was just, I don't know, but it was so cheap that we stayed in school. I stayed at UCLA 'til they kicked me out. Meaning like you would just stay there all day. Or you mean like you stayed extra years? We stayed years because, I mean, you had hospitalization, you had all these other benefits. Food was cheap, all these things that they give you. But the idea was to make films and use films. I mean, make as many films as you can. Just stay there 'til they kick you out'til they said something. Today, UCLA's film program costs 38 grand a year. The median LA rent is 2800 a month. Redfin just named this America's most expensive city. So yeah, today you can shoot a film on a phone and there's way more diverse voices making movies. But unless they're born rich, it's still harder and harder for them or any indie artist to do it in LA. How many <i>Killer of Sheeps</i> aren't even getting made? And how many kids don't get to learn this could be yours. Reminds me of something I asked Jeff, standing with him in front of the H in the Hollywood sign, one of those letters that kept falling down for years'til Alice Cooper rode to the rescue. One question though. They seriously just kept rebuilding this tin sign. They tried to keep the original tin for decades and decades. Decades and decades. They would they would have to replace some of them. But for what is that? 1923 to 1978 is what, 55 years? Yeah. So 55 years. They kept rebuilding this original structure that was built back then that.- Was never built to last.- That was never built to last. In LA, movie making matters maybe more than anywhere else, but its foundations have been cracking for a while. We've got some shiny new patches in place. Now I'm hoping for some real structural reinforcement, maybe to the whole city, to brace it for a storm. And that's the MUBI Podcast for this week. Follow us to hear more of my travels through the world's film scenes. Next time we wrap up our season in Istanbul, a beautiful city where some great filmmakers speak truth to power under a government that seems less and less willing to let them. Probably I will have more difficulty in even showing my films in cinemas. 3 or 4 weeks ago a comedy film was banned. It features that man, award winning filmmaker Emin Alper. Follow us so you don't miss it. Meanwhile, if you love the show, leave a five star review wherever you listen. Tell them we're not your standard movie chat show. Also, if you've got questions, comments, or a secret shortcut from Santa Monica to anywhere during rush hour, please send immediately. Our email is podcast@mubi.com And now let's roll credits. The show is written, hosted, and edited by me, Rico Gagliano. Ciara McEniff is our producer. Michelle Lanz is our story editor. Jackson Musker is our booking producer. Our assistant producer is Kat Kowalcyk. Steven Colon mastered this episode. Martin Austwick composed our original music. Thanks this week to Micah Gottlieb and Sarah Winchell of the Los Angeles Festival of Movies. One of the places really championing new indie cinema from LA and everywhere. Also, Bret Berg, whose delightful Museum of Home Video

streams every Tuesday at 7: 42:29

30pm. He calls it "90 minutes of found footage for stoners, seekers,"archivists and drinkers." Hope one of those is you. Find it at museumofhomevideo.com And big thanks to every firefighter in California. This show is executive produced by me along with Efe Çakarel Daniel Kasman and Michael Tacca. And finally, to watch the best in cinema subscribe to MUBI at mubi.com Thanks for listening, go watch the movies. And travel tip for LA. I'm going to paraphrase something I saw a guy post on Threads. If you're eating the best taco you've ever had in LA, but you're not standing on a sidewalk eating it off a paper plate, it's probably not the best taco in LA.