It’s Tuesday afternoon at the century-old Alex Theatre in downtown Glendale, Calif., and the paint can’t dry fast enough. The sound of nail guns reverberates off the Doric columns and Egyptian solar disc that form its proscenium arch, and on the silver screen beneath it, gracing a stage where monthly war bond rallies were held during World War II, scenes from a Christopher Nolan film silently flicker.
The reel is sitting on a spinning platter inside a freshly constructed projector room built in less than six weeks in a rapid effort to bring the Alex back to its roots as one of Los Angeles’ oldest movie palaces. And unlike most projector rooms, this one has wide windows along the back to allow moviegoers with bags of popcorn from the theater’s new popping machines to look inside and see the splendor of the Alex’s brand-new 70mm projector, which will make its debut Thursday with Nolan’s latest film, “The Odyssey.”
“You would be hard-pressed to find a better opportunity to reintroduce a 1925 historic venue to the Los Angeles moviegoing public than a Christopher Nolan movie,” said Taylor Umphenour, the man who will be behind that projector in just 48 hours, showing the print Universal provided by request to the first batch of Nolan fans who bought tickets to the 2 p.m. Thursday screening.
The refresh is happening as analog film has enjoyed a resurgence of mass interest. Cinephiles are actively seeking out theaters capable of showing films in this format for some of Hollywood’s most acclaimed films like Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners.”
So who better to oversee this update than Umphenour, one of the country’s most experienced projectionists? From behind an array of whirring movie machines, he has witnessed this comeback in analog after the rise of digital and laser projection in the early 2010s.
Among the many films he has screened are Imax 70mm reels of Nolan’s 2023 juggernaut “Oppenheimer” and this past spring’s sci-fi smash hit “Project Hail Mary.” He also worked with the Vista Theatre in L.A. on its VistaVision screenings of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Best Picture Oscar winner “One Battle After Another.”
Umphenour was brought in by Miles Williams, the Alex’s artistic director, to oversee this renovation. While the Alex has flourished since the mid-90s as a live performance venue, it hasn’t screened movies from actual film reels since the now-defunct Mann Theatres ceased its operations there in 1991 with “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” serving as its final presentation.
But the Alex played a key role in the early decades of Hollywood, most notably as the preferred theatre of Walt Disney. In the early days of the famed animator’s studio, the Alex was where Disney would go to offer preview screenings of his team’s cartoons like “The Wise Little Hen,” the seven-minute short that marked the debut of Donald Duck.
Ten years later, Bing Crosby would anxiously wait in the lobby of the Alex as it premiered his musical dramedy “Going My Way,” a film that would win him an Oscar and cement him as one of the Golden Age of Hollywood’s foremost leading men.
That history is part of what inspired Williams’ desire to make new and repertory cinema a part of the Alex’s programming for the first time in decades.
“So many people that I met told me that as children they saw movies here, and because of the grand history of the Alex, I see pictures in the library archives of ‘Ben-Hur’ and all these giant films in our past,” Williams said. “And then there’s also the reemergence of repertory cinema, of large format film and the audiences that are flocking to these kinds of entertainment choices.”
Indeed, “Sinners” writer-director Coogler urged moviegoers to see his $370 million-grossing vampire drama on film when possible, promoting cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw’s use of 65mm film and Imax. She became the first woman to win the Best Cinematography Oscar for her work on the movie.
And just this week, Warner Bros. delayed J.J. Abrams’ original sci-fi film “The Great Beyond” in part so 70mm prints of the film can be readied for a theatrical exhibition next fall.
It was Umphenour’s idea to time the Alex’s cinematic relaunch to “The Odyssey,” as he felt that putting the extra time and money into updating the theater for 70mm projection would allow the Alex to stand alongside the Vista, the Egyptian and the Aero among L.A.’s top gathering spots for cinephiles.
And what better film to mark that relaunch than the latest from a director like Nolan, who boasts a fanbase that, more than anyone else’s, considers analog film formats the essential way to see his films? At the roughly 40 locations around the world that are screening “The Odyssey” in Imax 70mm, screenings at times as early as 4 a.m. are selling out throughout the next two weeks. Combine that with digital Imax screenings, and “The Odyssey” is on pace to set a new opening weekend record for the premium format company.
Using his connections, Umphenour reached out to Universal this past April and asked if an additional standard 70mm print of “The Odyssey” could be made for the Alex. It now stands as one of the approximately 96 locations in the United States screening the film in that format, which has a traditional widescreen 2.20:1 screen ratio compared to the expanded 1.43:1 ratio of Imax 70mm.
“I sent them some photos of the theater and talked to them a little bit more about the history,” he said. “They called me back 10 minutes later and said, ‘Look Taylor, if you think that you can get [70mm] up and running there by July, we will do our absolute best to get you a print of “The Odyssey.”‘ And so I talked to Miles, and we pulled out all the stops.”
In this case, “pulling out all the stops” meant taking out three rows of seats to make room for and build the new projector room, buying and carefully moving in a 35mm/70mm changeover projector with accompanying platters for the reels, updating the auditorium’s acoustics, and other complex refurbishment work that, if done step-by-step, would have taken a year to complete.
Williams and Umphenour didn’t have that time, so the only way to have the Alex ready in time for “The Odyssey” would be to do all of those steps simultaneously in a $500,000 makeover, all while making sure the theater was in proper condition for its ongoing live performances.
“The acoustics that are great for live shows are not necessarily the best acoustics for cinema. For live, you want some reverberance. You want kind of a live room. But with cinema acoustics, you actually want more control,” Umphenour explained. “You want to have the ability to drop a pin and not have any reverb time at all.”
Within weeks, the Alex’s team installed a line array sound system with speakers that direct the sound towards the audience and away from the auditorium’s century-old walls, designed to prevent the sounds of war during the Sack of Troy and the stormy voyages that doom Odysseus’ men from turning into echoing incoherence. Meanwhile, the new projector room was built with what Umphenour calls “constrained layers” so that while the audience can peek through the windows to look inside and watch the projectionist work, they wouldn’t hear the loud whirring of the projector throughout the film.
It’s a lot of work pushed into a tight schedule, and Williams, Umphenour and their compatriots will be working right up until the gates of the Alex open for the first “Odyssey” screening to get it all just right. Even afterwards, they will be fine-tuning and adjusting on the fly based on how the sound and picture pan out in those first few screenings before a filled theater.
But Williams hopes that this will be the beginning of a new chapter for the Alex, and that with enough time and screenings, word will spread throughout Los Angeles that there is a new place for those who love cinema to gather and enjoy its greatest offerings from the past and present. The place where Bing and Donald became movie stars will become hallowed film ground once again.
“This is certainly not a reopening, but Taylor and I like the term ‘reclamation.’ There’s a reclamation of our identity as a place for real cinema to happen,” Williams said.
And Umphenour believes none of this would have been possible without Nolan, not just for the Alex but for the global resurgence of interest in analog film. Even before the latest surge in Imax craze that he ignited with “Oppenheimer” and “The Odyssey,” the Oscar winner and DGA president has championed analog film presentation and preservation as a key part of cinema and has made 35mm and 70mm part of the marketing of his movies as big screen events.
“His commitment to shooting on film and then releasing in all these formats has been the defining thing that has allowed the infrastructure to be maintained and expanded for his films, but also for other filmmakers to make use of as well,” Umphenour said. “If that had not been happening over the past 10 years, the infrastructure that largely collapsed with the advent of digital cinema would not be what it is today, and we would have lost a major component of a foundational part of the medium of film.”
