It was sometime in 2010, touring the country’s finer movie theaters with his first film, The Windmill Movie, that Alexander Olch first started to think seriously about “the rooms in which movies play.” He’d grown up with the glories of the Beekman, the Paris, the Ziegfeld, all dead or dying at that moment when his interest hatched, all of them places where “something special happened even before the movie started.” (Only the Paris has survived.) He had designed clothes and he had designed spaces. He had made a movie; why not a movie space? “I’d walk into theaters and think, I could do better than this.”
Like Olch, you may have noticed a growing slackness on the part of the theater chains, an experience of moviegoing that is increasingly casual, like watching television. Like staying home. Commercials, La-Z-Boy-style chairs, smaller screens, eating meals off a tray on your lap … Is it any wonder Tom Cruise had to appear at the start of Top Gun: Maverick to tell us that what we were about to see—for we, as a culture, have forgotten—was a movie?
