FOC johnnyhongkong sends along an article by San Francisco Chronicle film critic Mick LaSalle, "Audience fading for repertory movie theaters." The short version is nothing you haven't heard before: Home video et al. done killed the rep houses. In fact, if you read only trend pieces you'd be excused for thinking that it sometimes seems like a race to see which will die first: film criticism or art houses.
Still, LaSalle does a nice job of breaking down repertory's slow decline era by era. For example:
The rise of VHS tape exerted the first culling effect. Locally, the Richelieu disappeared and the Gateway converted into a first-run art house. But as Bill Banning, owner of the Roxie Cinema, has said, exhibitors could survive if they were willing to innovate. By the time he took over the Roxie in 1984, Banning knew "you couldn't show straight repertory and make it. You had to show top-notch films, and you had to have a strong theme - film noir, pre-Code. That worked into the '90s."
Another innovation of the late '80s and '90s was the "long-run revival," the creation of Bruce Goldstein, head of repertory programming at New York's Film Forum since 1986. "If you change the bill every day," he said, "the studios have no incentive at all to make a print. So what we did is we'd go to them and say, 'If you make a print, we'll give you a run, and we'll publicize it.' That's our standard for a long-run revival - it has to be a brand new print."
Goldstein's standard became the standard nationally, and following Goldstein's lead, it became common in the '80s and '90s for exhibitors, when advertising a "long run" or "premiere" revival, to talk up the newness of the print. The promise of a fresh print inspired audiences to flock to films they'd seen before - even TV staples, such as "Casablanca" or "The Wizard of Oz" - for the chance to see them projected in pristine condition onto the big screen.
It goes on in this mode for a bit, like one of those "begat" books in the Old Testament or the cataloging of ships in the Iliad. You know the drill. Kids today with their Netflix etc. The cinetrix will only note that there was nary a mention of the Brattle Theatre's contribution to rep programming, the vertical calendar that offers, say, Film Noir Mondays or Recent Rave Thursdays. But all is not lost, true believers. It never is. And the reason why is always the same. People. Specifically, people who need people:
With the home viewing experience suddenly reaching new heights of splendor, what conceivably could be the incentive for seeing classic films in a theater? The answer is simple and not what anyone consciously thought of during the repertory heyday: Other people. After all, in all our memories of transcendent theatergoing experiences, those other people - those strangers watching with you - were part of the experience, too. A big part.
"Movies are a group participation art form, to be in a room with 300 people laughing infectiously," Lavine said. "To see a movie at home, even with a group of friends, is like seeing it under a microscope. These were made to be seen by hundreds of people at the same time."
We'll let aside the sheer loathsomeness of many of those hundreds of people [and their fucking cell phones/small children/TB] for now. Do read the whole thing, and if you live near a rep house, be sure to patronize it sometime this month, won't you? Thanks.
