Matias Antonio Bombal

Brett Ryan Bonowicz: Where have audiences gone? Is this covid or is this behavior changing?

Matias Antonio Bombal: This is a paradigm shift, an absolute paradigm shift in the way the public consumes entertainment and information. It's not merely to be blamed on post pandemic, domino effect. I mean, that, that's all elements that help nail the coffin shut. But it's truly a paradigm shift. Disney has stopped producing Blu- rays and DVDs in foreign markets. Warner Brothers is looking at selling off all of its assets to cover losses for pictures that they've made recently. And Warner Brothers' biggest assets are what they wanna sell. For example, Warner Brothers has one of the largest, holdings of copyrighted music, Warner Brothers music. This includes all the popular songs going back to the turn of the century and they're looking at selling that to the highest bidder. So the structure is falling apart.

And then augmenting this is something that is very problematic, and that is the actors and writer strike, which can go on indefinitely. And what that has created for the streaming and the exhibition market is the fact that they're gonna put everything they've got on shelves out. And that'll maybe last through February then it's all gone. And suddenly there is a vacuum, and then there's no product and there's also a streaming boom that happened, which is now also receding according to recent reports in The Hollywood Reporter and Variety, which I was just reading moments ago. So I don't know where they're going. I don't know where the audience is going because all of these significant changes are happening simultaneously. And I think the actor's strike may be a catalyst for the industry to have another paradigm shift. Maybe they're going to create things with independent voices that can be had cheaply. Film students, whatever, that have never made a dollar in their life, and they pay them nothing compared to industry standards and then they're making content for them because it's gonna be exciting for any student filmmaker to have Warner Brothers come to you and say, "Okay, you've got this budget." And they'll use that for streaming services and for content. But there is a lot of content. This is the problem. What we have now is incredible amounts of information and incredible places to put our head, but no real vetting or organization. So it seems that culture today is more interested in not the value of the information, but the accessibility of the information. And what that has created with places like YouTube is that we expect to have this access to information and we expect it for nothing. "Information should be free." This is what the Internet's supposed to bring us all together to do. Although the internet has brought people like you and I together in ways that we might not have, if we would've in the old days, had to do pen pal letters across the world to find somebody else that actually cared about the same thing you did. So the Internet's been wonderful in that way. For me, it's been a wonderful marketing tool for the programming I was doing when I was doing film programming, although that's all gone away now. So I don't know where the audience is with so many different inputs, possibilities, for people to put their brains in so many different places. So glut of availability, glut of rehashed material (because people like the familiar) instead of being adventurous and learning something new. This has really created this sort of maelstrom of millions of images without significance or purpose. Now you and I have tried, in our experience to create environments where people can for a moment have an event based experience where they see something they wouldn't see in another way.

I don't know where people are going. I think people are staying home. I think people are staying home and finding a way to make their lives more valuable with people they care about and they're not going out. And to get them go out is really hard because everything is so expensive. For example, we put on discount movies for people so they can see them at a reasonable price. That's what we've done. That's what I did at The Fox...$5 or $8 to get in there. The Paramount until it closed its film series was $5 a person. And you try to go to a touring show at the Oakland Paramount and the seats begin at $225. Now where is that audience and where are they getting the money to fill those theaters to spend that? Yeah, that's what baffles me because there is a portion of the public that does go out and is spending outrageous amounts of money.

And I don't know what that market is and what is it about that market that's not interested in cinema at all? Now I understand the value of live music and the synchronicity of something like an event based movie where you've got a silent film and someone's rendering music live. Those seem to do better. But, you know, if you wanna mount a pre-code film festival, you're gonna have 12 people in there. And, uh, it's sad. Unless, unless you're in Chicago, maybe San Francisco...not so much anymore. And even in New York, it's just not doing as it was. Chicago's still a great movie town. The Music Box and the Chicago Film Society have consistently drawn audiences to those shows. But those theaters have always been open. The audience is built in, they know what it is. And it's generational because parents take kids and then kids take their kids. But there's a disconnect here, because in California everything's about what's next. There was a glorious time in the eighties going to see the programs that Anita Monga booked at The Castro.

It was like a film education. You got to see these great movies with an audience that got it. And it would bring tears to my eyes. I remember a double bill of Barton Fink and Sunset Boulevard, if you get the connection, they're screenwriters. So Barton Fink ends, the organ comes up ('cause it was still the real pipe organ before that left a few years ago) and the audience went nuts. And Sunset Boulevard comes on and people are applauding character actors that appear on screen and they're applauding them as if they were watching a play. I remember seeing an Astaire/Rogers picture...the minute Edward Everett Horton comes out, the audience goes nuts. They applaud 'em as if it's a live play. And I said, this is what the communal movie experience is about. It made me cry. It was so beautiful. I haven't seen that happen in a long time.

Brett Ryan Bonowicz: I do see that quite a bit at the Stanford Theatre. Applause for Actors, Directors. I suppose they've had, you know, 30 plus years to grow an audience because of their unique situation...

Matias Antonio Bombal: They, they're not in danger of going away.

Brett Ryan Bonowicz: And they can keep prices low, which to me is one of those things that when I do a show at the Balboa, I showed Dark Star, a couple Fridays ago and those tickets are $15 a piece. I know that that's a big ask for people. So I really try to make a meal of it. I have vintage trailers in there, snipes one of the actors came in from Dark Star, Brian Narelle, really, you know, give you your value for $15. But when the Stanford's open, literally no theater can compete with that. It's $6 double features on 35mm. I don't even know if most of that audience there, which I assume a lot of them are from Palo Alto and the surrounding area, I don't even know if they care that it's on film or know that it's on film. They don't really advertise that it's on film very much. I mean over the weekend there had to have been 800 people at the Stanford for North by Northwest and Charade. 800 people there! But they're paying $6. They're not paying $250. And I do think that the cost of the experience has something to do with where audiences have gone, in my opinion, because I think people are priced out or they can easily convince themselves to do something else with their money or time if they don't see a real value to it.

Matias Antonio Bombal: I mean a $6 admission is less than a meal at McDonald's.

Brett Ryan Bonowicz: Yeah.

Matias Antonio Bombal: I know that you and I personally have had discussions about you wanting to (because of lack of contextual understanding on the part of the audiences) you want to champion the fact that there's an operator rendering the film. And that the thing is actually on film or it's a nitrate print. And as I'm sitting here thinking about of all places, the Stanford, where the rarest experiences can and do happen rendered in part by our brilliant friend, Phillip, who is the operator there. It seems to me the logical thing the management at the Stanford should do is have some sort of stage introduction where---

Brett Ryan Bonowicz: They used to!

Matias Antonio Bombal: Well, David Packard used to do it himself.

Brett Ryan Bonowicz: Yeah.

Matias Antonio Bombal: And then he'd bring stars in. But some brief introduction would be great. I'd be good for that job, but I live far away. But the, the point is, this is something special and you tell them it's special and you tell them why it's special. You tell 'em "This nitrate print is something you can't see anywhere else." And maybe the Stanford has the perspective that they know they are that way, but they don't extend that further there. As you have discovered, their marketing is not excessively directed at sharing or teaching the experience. And yet anyone who goes there has an educational experience, which is why they have done what they've done with the foundation, but they're not reaching out. And I don't know if that's because management is of an age where they're still like me, used to audiences that deserve perfection, and that's what we're supposed to deliver. And they only notice our job when we don't do it right.

Brett Ryan Bonowicz: Right.

Matias Antonio Bombal: I see the value in marketing some of these things, but it's always on film at the Stanford, it's never not on film at the Stanford. That's their modus operandi. And I think that there's a good deal of the public that goes to movies that understands it. And I know that the Stanford draws people from outside markets all the time. A concert pianist friend of mine, Richard Glacier, drives two and a half hours to see something at the Stanford because he knows he can see something with a degree of presentation that is extraordinary. I wish there was something like that closer. I wish that he would do more than one theater like that and spread but you know, that's where Packard put his money and that's where it is. And that we understand. And a lot of that money's going to film preservation, that will help save things for the future. So none of this can be complained about.