Interview: “Only in Theaters”

If you watch movies in Los Angeles, you’ll know that the Laemmle theater chain is an essential part of the city’s cinematic community. Many independent and international films will never play at an AMC, and rely on Laemmle cinemas. They also host classic film screenings and film festivals, and they have cheaper tickets than most places. The new documentary “Only in Theaters” by Raphael Sbarge looks at the incredible history of the Laemmle chain as a family business that began in 1938, but is struggling to stay alive today. I saw the film at the Laemmle NoHo with a Q&A with Raphael and owner Greg Laemmle, where they talked about the sad fact that the NoHo theater had been sold and will likely close sometime in 2023. But the Laemmle theaters have adapted and survived for almost 100 years, and I have confidence they won’t give up anytime soon. I was very happy to talk with Raphael to learn more about the making of this heartfelt portrait of one of the landmarks of Los Angeles.

What were your first experiences with the Laemmle Theaters, and what made them special?

I had friends films who would screen films there. I went to the NoHo all the time. I would often go to the Royal seeking out sort of interesting and diverse kind of voices, foreign films, independent films, documentary films. Greg’s programming was always sort of innovative and, and different, clearly things that the AMC were not programming. You could go in on any given day of the week and see something interesting, something powerful and unique, with a beautiful theater and wonderful sound system. It wasn’t creaky and funky, it was nice, and it felt inviting. The tickets were not wildly expensive. And of course, as I got deeper into this, you realize part of that is because it’s a family business.

They care because their name is on it, you know? And that’s what’s so important, in a more and more conglomeration world. A family business as a media company, in this case to Laemmle theaters is astoundingly unique and, and really, um, important, um, that, that also became another theme for me, which is like, holy cow, this is a family who has spent, you know, three, four generations, um, supporting the art of film. The filmmakers who make them and the audiences who love them, that’s their mission, right? That’s their, that’s their primary purpose. And how unique is that in a, in a, in the ice face of the kind of rough and tumble, you know, bottom line universe that we, that we live in with a corporate structure, you know, uh, with the, you know, whether it be the studios or the streamers or, um, or the sales agents or whoever it is.

I mean, you have at this point, you know, such a unique thing with the Laemmle Theaters, and for anyone in LA doesn’t know them, run right out and see how valuable this is, how important it is, and support them. I had someone who brought their nine year old to see it and at the end of it, he was like, I don’t want to go to any other theater than a Laemmle ever. So sweet. I mean, I’m certainly not advocating that we have to go to all the theaters, but this is a unique brand and more unique by virtue of the fact is that it’s a family.

How did the idea of the film come about?

What happened was a couple things. One is that I had done a movie about the LA River, and it just so coincidentally that, the guy who ran this organization called Friends of the LA River, happened to see Greg Laemmle going by on his bike — he and Tess are avid bikers. And he said, this guy doing this documentary, would you talk to him? So it was the first time I’d met him, and I did a quick interview with him, and it went well. And it was like, this is Greg Laemmle, I was like, oh my God, you know, thank you for what you do. And he’s very modest. And he was like, thanks. And then what happened was I had an opportunity to screen a film.

And we all know as filmmakers, the place to show your film is in Laemmle theaters. And I talk about this in the movie a little bit, but I called Laemmle Theaters and I got Greg Laemmle on the phone, like the guy above the title, right? When does that happen? And he worked with me, and he is a good businessman, there’s no doubt, but what I felt from him was that he cared about the filmmaker and he cared about, you know, what can I do to support this happening? So that was striking to me. And to everyone else in LA who I’ve spoken to, they go, Oh, Greg Laemmle, he’s done so much.

Anyway, I was at the Royal, and if you know the Royal, it’s featured in the movie, there’s this amazing collage of images put together by this wonderful artist named Viva Sullivan, who lives in LA. And it really talks about the legacy, this incredible legacy story of this family. I mean, there’s been a Laemmle in the movie business ever since there’s been a movie business, right? So this whole idea that Carl Laemmle, who founded Universal Pictures was then responsible for bringing this family to America, escaping the Holocaust and came to America. And then in order to feed the families, they got some movie theaters and then created this, Max Laemmle who really took over the theaters at some point, really brought his vision of a European idea of a worldview of cinema.

And, and he introduced foreign film to the United States, and on and on and on. I mean, they won the French Legion of Honor. And there’s so much there that was astounding. So I approached Greg and I said, Greg, has anyone ever thought about doing a doc about your family? And he said, very modestly, do you think anyone would be interested, is what he said initially, because he’s always so unspoken and honest. And I said, Greg, I think, I think there’s really a wonderful story here, but it was the legacy that really pulled me in. And so then he told me about his 103 year old great-aunt who was married to one of the founders, and he told me that his dad was 85 and going to work every day.

And I said, how are they? And he said, they’re great. I was like, Greg, we gotta go, if we’re gonna do this, we gotta jump, we gotta get them on camera. So he helped me sort of arrange those interviews, and we did a day of interviews with a bunch of other people, and there was a story there, but I had no idea what it was. Because at this point, I had jumped at this opportunity to kind of get Elise Laemmle and Bob Laemmle on film. And while I was sort of sitting trying to figure out where I’m gonna go with this, that’s when the phone rang. And Greg called me and said, I need to tell you something in confidence, and I need to tell you about the fact is that we may sell the theaters.

And my response to him was like, oh Greg, that’s terrible news. I’m so sorry to hear this, and I think it’s gonna really hit the city like a bomb. And at that point, basically I said, look, I don’t wanna be mercenary about this, but I mean, to the degree that if you were interested, and it felt right, how would you feel about us continuing to film you? And to Greg’s enormous credit, he said, yes. And again, Greg’s participation in this wasn’t just, it also went into this whole other thing is that Greg’s seen a gajillion documentaries and he knows what a good documentary is. And he really leaned in. He engaged with me and talked to me in a very intimate way and really shared with me the struggles.

Did Greg have any input or oversight on the making of the film?

You know, I’m so glad you asked that question because it’s really important to sort of say this. Greg had absolutely no editorial control on this the first time he saw it. And this was his choice, cause I said, at some point, do you wanna see it? He said, no, I want to see it the first time in front of an audience. So he saw it in Santa Barbara when we premiered at the Santa Barbara Film Festival. He allowed me to tell my story and again, it just speaks to his character because he understands the art form and what we’re trying to do. I know because he’s spoken about it when he saw it the first time, it was pretty rough going.

We all know what it’s like to see ourselves on screen or hear our voices on a recording, that’s hard anyway. But to then actually sort of watch yourself go through the most difficult 24 month period of your life, you know, that is rough. But as it continued to evolve, and the feedback that we continued to get was, thank you for doing this. I’m so moved by your story. Your story echoes mine. Certainly other theater owners saying, wow, it was so hard to watch at moments, but it gave me such comfort knowing that, you know, your experience echoed mine and there was a really powerful sense of catharsis that came through what it is in this case, his journey, his challenges as the protagonist in the story, I sometimes call him a hero in the story cause he has to face countless challenges and somehow be able to kind of conquer all. I believe that the film captures a moment in time, but it also then tees up a larger question of where do we go from here?

The film is about the history of the theaters, but then it also talks about the possible sale of the chain, and then Covid shuts down the theaters. How was it making the film as the world kept changing?

I had no idea. I filmed this over two and a half years. Not exclusively, I did other things, but I had no idea what I was signing up for. I don’t know how you could tell a story like this, so without spending the time to kind of really see it through, and then at some point I was like, where’s the end? Where is this gonna end? Because you just keep going like, wow, there’s more, and then there’s more. As we got to Covid, then we were sort of waiting to see what would happen and where it would go how bad would it be? And I’m cutting in my head trying to figure out like, where’s the story, and we saw it through, I don’t wanna give it away, but essentially we saw through to the end.

I believe it tells a very compelling story about a family business. That was my hope, that we wouldn’t just sort of tell a sort of a Hollywood inside baseball story, because I wanted to be able to appeal to a larger audience outside of LA who wouldn’t know a Laemmle, you know, if they stood up in their soup, right? I mean, I live in New York, and there’s a lot of people here who’s, you know, they don’t go up above 14th Street, let alone actually go to California to see a Laemmle. So I wanted to see if I could find some way to tell this in a universal way that we felt this multi-generational family business with this tremendous legacy, and how a family starts to make choices. And then who is responsible, in this case Greg, to be able to kind of navigate, be the captain of that ship and, and how difficult, or just how multifaceted and complex that is. From the response that the film has gotten, it appears that that worked, because I’ve played it now all over the country in the festival circuit, and then we went internationally, again, people responded to it on that human level. And to me it was always about a family.

What have the reactions been to the film outside of Los Angeles?

We played very memorably in Bethlehem, PA, which is one of those abandoned steel towns, right? You know, Bethlehem Steele was the center of the universe, and then it collapsed. We were the closing film at the festival, with a huge turnout, and people said, I run a family business, and I recognize this, or my business went through Covid and I recognize this, or I love movies, but I didn’t know about Laemmle, and God, it really speaks to me. In Ireland, Annette O’Toole, her father is actually in the movie, Peter O’Toole, but she basically presented the movie in Galway, Ireland.

She said, of all the films in this festival, this is the one that means most to me because theaters and the survival of theaters and the survival of the movie going experience is so profoundly important to me, and I truly want to preserve that. And on and on, I mean, she gushed about it, but again, what I’ve loved is that it’s translated outside of, I mean, obviously the LA market is the ripe market for this, because everyone knows Laemmle in LA, but even in New York here, because I grew up in New York City where there used to be a theater called The Thalia, and then the New Yorker, and then the 8th Street Playhouse, where we always used to go to see Rocky Horror Picture Show.

And then there’s a infamous theater called the Zigfield, where I saw ET and Close Encounters and Gandhi. And then there was another art house theater, kind of ground zero for many people, which was called the Lincoln Plaza Theater, which is right across the Lincoln Center. All of those theaters are gone, poof, like overnight. So what I’ve sort of continued to sort of say in the Q&As and the talkbacks that we’ve done, it’s playing in New York right now. Laemmle may not be a story that you’re aware of, but as a New Yorker, I know the theaters that are gone, maybe you do too, and everyone nods. And I say this is an opportunity to talk about the theatrical experience. We know that Covid has given us this, you know, all our life has been designed around convenience, whether it be Zoom or Amazon or whatever. You can just basically, you can never leave your house and have the illusion of connectedness all the time. You can be on Facebook, you can be on Zoom.

But there is a theatrical experience that is a place where you go somewhere with other people into a dark room, you come in as strangers and you leave as friends because you all have this shared experience there. There’s an opportunity for, I believe, for the gathering to kind of really give us a kind of an amplification of the emotion, the laughter, the tears, the screams of fright, that being an audience just amplifies that. It also is frankly a place where we’re not freaking distracted, right? No one’s gonna ring the doorbell. No one’s gonna instant message us on the computer that we’re watching. Our dog’s not gonna run in and bark. It’s an immersive experience.

And then we wander out, with our brain having been sort of rewired. And suddenly it’s almost like, oh my God. I got out of all of the noise in my head and I fell into this movie, and I just was in this place with this movie and this art form. And it’s almost like you get a moment of clarity, right? It’s like someone cleans your windshield. This is actually what the movie experience does. I’m not so worried about the Avatars of the world. I mean, people will come out for that, 2 billion later. We know that people will come out for Avatar, but it’s the small movies, the so-called small movies. The first movie that I went to after the shutdown was Nomadland. There were only five people in the theater when I went that day.

I literally had my socks blown off by the emotional impact of this so-called small movie, in this immersive experience because of all of the subtleties and all of the intricacies of that filmmaker and that actor is basically kind of creating a world where it transported me. And that’s the deal, that’s the transaction. And we forget because we can watch something goofy on our watch just because we can, we think that we’ve gotten the experience, we’ve gotten the information, but you haven’t gotten the experience, and what we’re losing as we lose these movie theaters, we’re losing an opportunity to have these experiences.

You have great interviews in the film with LA Times film critic Kenneth Turan, as well as filmmakers like Allison Anders and Cameron Crowe. How did those come about?

Some of them I knew, some of them were friends. Allison Anders is a friend, and, and also Bruce Joel Rubin, who won the Oscar for Ghost. My producer reached out to Cameron Crowe. Cameron Crowe, I understand, never gives interviews. You’d be hard pressed to find a lot of online interviews with Cameron Crowe. He just doesn’t do them. He was very moved by the idea of talking about Laemmle and what that meant. Ava DuVernay came through Greg, because Ava had, similar to me, I mean, I’m not comparing myself to Ava, but similar to me as an independent filmmaker, had reached out to, she had won Sundance and she reached out to Greg and said, Greg, you know, I got this movie. Would you gimme some shows? And he gave her some shows. And then because of that, she could call New York and then say, look, uh, I have some shows in LA. Are You gonna gimme shows? And that opened a huge door for her. And she wanted to say, look, obviously I have a relationship with Netflix. I mean, 200 million countries is a massive audience, I’m not gonna go away from that, but exhibition is really important to me. Alison said that, and Nicole Holofcener. James Ivory talked about how his partner, Merchant and him, but Merchant was doing all the booking of the films, Laemmle’s were really important. In New York, it was The Paris. These were the places where you went to the theaters, that you knew had a built-in audience for the film. And the story that you told and how important it was to have those. So I told you that I started with the legacy story. But as I was doing this, concurrently in the news, all of these people started kind of coming together and talking about, wow, what’s happening? You know, the whole day and date thing came around, and then HBO Max and Disney +, they launched as we were doing this.

And then more and more Ink was filled about like, well, what’s gonna happen to theaters? And all these movie theater owners were continuing to sort of express their wild upset about the fact that movies were opening in a theater and then leaving literally money on the ground as they were sort of premiering online at the same time to get subscribers. It’s such a cynical thing, right? And then all these filmmakers would come out and say, this is terrible. These aren’t movie studios, because they’re now multinational corporations. The studios have all been purchased by large telecom companies that are only interested in subscribers and how to sell their devices or whatever it is.

Essentially there is a thrust away from the art of film and more about just trying to get people to use the film almost as click bait in a way. And so all of this began happening, really at an accelerated pace as we started to kind of really move into this whole other like, well, what’s the story? Where is the story? Where is this going? I mean, yeah, we followed Greg, but we also sort of backed into the zeitgeist of kind of the future of movie theaters. And that was not planned. That’s the thing I guess that happens. It can be very thrilling or very frightening. It’s sort of like a high wire act.

Sometimes you go into a doc and you know the story you’re gonna tell and you tell that story. There’s this other kind of doc, which this is, which is where you go, I got an instinct and I’m gonna trust the process. I’m gonna keep moving in that direction. That’s what we did. And as the noise got louder and louder about what’s happening to theaters, we were kind of there starting to talk about it. I think the day and day people are beginning to sort of back off that a little bit, not completely, obviously Netflix is still committed to subscriptions, but I think there’s awareness about the fact that, if Avatar tells us anything, holy Moses, there’s money to be had in theaters, 2 billion worth of money in theaters.

We’ve got some of the highest grossing movies of all time have happened in the past year and a half, like Spider-Man. It’s amazing that the theatrical experience, people still want it. In the Q&As that I’ve done with Greg, where he’s been asked about it, he talks about how his grandfather had to deal with the similar experience of television coming along, and eventually people found their way back. There’s some strength to be taken from that. I think that’s what we’re holding onto, but then the question is whether or not there, there will be enough theaters left to be able to have that experience, once people start to want to come back.

“Only in Theaters” is now playing in New York and other cities, and will hopefully return to Laemmle Theaters in Los Angeles again soon. Raphael’s next project is a documentary series for KCET in Los Angeles called “10 Days in Watts,” which will be premiering during Black History Month this February.