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Theo Kalomirakis: A Personal History of Home Theater, Pt. 3

Theo Kalomirakis:
A Personal History of Home Theater, Pt. 3

related features

Theo Kalomirakis: A Personal History
of Home Theater, Pt. 1

Theo Kalomirakis: A Personal History
of Home Theater, Pt. 2

Theo Kalomirakis: A Personal History
of Home Theater—Complete

Theo’s Blue (above) and Broadway (below) home theater designs for Owens Corning

the Exquisite Theaters logo

a column grille for TK Living

The 2000s are mainly a story of Theo’s efforts to have his reputation resonate in the larger market beyond the home theater world

by Michael Gaughn
February 7, 2022

Theo and I have agreed to disagree over how to approach the third part of this interview. I had wanted to focus on the theaters he’s created since the turn of the millennium, which include some of the most striking and innovative of his career, most of which have never been published and none of which have been collected in a book. But he was adamant that we should focus instead on his various efforts to create a broader-market brand for himself. I relented for two reasons: Because I knew he would make the subject compelling and because, as he rightly said, “Talking about projects is misleading regarding how my career developed, and I know my career better than anybody.”

—M.G.

When did you first feel the urge, or need, to brand yourself in the larger market?

I began shifting my attention away from creating custom designs around 2000 because other designers were beginning to do home theaters, so that stopped being the exclusive territory of my company. But I had actually first come up with the idea of creating home theater products as a way to stay ahead of the game back at the start of the ‘90s with my first company, Theater Design Associates. Even though that effort turned out to be premature, I never abandoned the idea.

My dream was to create a category of pre-designed and pre-packaged theaters. Companies like Cinematech, Acoustic Innovations, and AcousticSmart have done that successfully within the AV industry but I wanted to reach out to the world beyond the industry. I found a way to do that with the help of large organizations such as Owens Corning, Disney, and IMAX, which had the means, name recognition, and brand awareness. They gave me the opportunity to access that larger market where my name was relatively obscure.

How do some of your other efforts like ESPN fit into all this?

Companies like ESPN, Hammacher Schlemmer, Henredon, and Roche Bobois approached me over the years to help them develop home theater-related products but there was always some obstacle. With ESPN, the product didn’t even make it out of the lab because it was too high-end. The electronics they were considering for the

entertainment console would have retailed for over $80,000, which would have extremely limited sales.

Has part of the problem been that the market wasn’t ready for what you were offering—that you were thinking well ahead of where the market was?

On the one hand, I think that was the problem. On the other, I think I was unrealistically optimistic, and I made mistakes. But I believe I now know what didn’t work with each of the partnerships.

With Owens Corning, they thought a home with a theater would be more attractive than one without, so they spent millions to develop a line of inexpensive, all-inclusive theaters. The builders they targeted weren’t the big, custom ones that do one or two large homes a year but the ones that build hundreds of homes a year. The biggest mistake we made—and I share the blame—was that we aimed at the lowest possible price for a theater—$40,000 for homes that sold for around $250,000. But we found out at the Atlanta Builders Show in 2000 that most of those homes only had two bedrooms. What self-respecting parent would kick their kids out of the second bedroom to put a theater in it? Owens Corning also offered the option of having the theater in the basement but that didn’t increase the market size enough.

Your next big collaboration was with Disney, but that wasn’t until a few years later, right?

That began in 2008 and went until 2011. A group of Disney executives came to a lecture I was giving to designers at the Pacific Design Center. They were looking for licensees to help them launch co-branded products for the luxury market under a new brand called the Disney Signature Collection. They told me they wanted to appeal to a more affluent segment of consumers who liked the idea of being associated with the Disney brand but “without the Mickey Mouse ears.” The other Signature licensees developed products such as fabrics and pottery, while I was offered the opportunity to develop a line of plug & play entertainment furniture that had the necessary electronics already built in.

We conducted numerous design meetings where the Disney team and I would sketch out and exchange ideas. We also spent months in China looking for factories to produce the furniture. Everybody opened their doors to Disney, which was fun to watch. That was a very creative period of my life. I was impressed by how organized and methodical they were about defining and developing a product.

As with Owens Corning, Disney wanted a bigger market than just the AV industry, and I related to that. We rented a showroom at the heart of the furniture market, in High Point, North Carolina, where we presented the collection to retailers. And we hired marketing directors from the industry who introduced the collection to all the major furniture stores.

At the time, it seemed like the collection was going to be a home run for you. Why do you think it didn’t catch on?

What we found out was something the furniture industry already knew—very few store owners want to deal with electronics. So most of them waited to see if other retailers would buy into it. They didn’t want to be first to stick their toe in a pool they weren’t very familiar with. As a result, Disney started losing interest and slowed down its marketing support. I think I was the last licensee to pull out. I realized then that even a strong brand isn’t enough to capture a new market.

Your next couple of projects seemed to keep you in China almost constantly for a couple of years.

I had met a lot of people while I was traveling there for Disney, including Stevie Ng, who is still a good friend. He was involved in the Chinese AV industry and knew about my efforts to develop pre-designed theaters. As the Disney business was winding down, he asked if I would be interested in designing theaters for his company, Alpha Technologies of Shanghai. We partnered with a strong AV dealer/distributor, Beijing AV Design, and created a company called Exquisite Theaters. We installed theaters in dealer showrooms in major cities throughout China.

Here I was again speaking to the press, inaugurating showrooms, and enjoying the experience while getting to know a new market. The theaters were meant to help sell design accessories and electronics but the problem was that the interiors required a lot of customization. Not living in China, it was hard for me to commit to working on too many of them. But the dealers didn’t seem to mind that much because the showrooms gave them a chance to give great home theater demonstrations and sell electronics.

When did you start designing IMAX theaters for the home market?

That was around that same time. Robb Report came to me and said, “We want the ultimate gift for this year to be an IMAX theater.” And IMAX said, “We’ll give you the equipment for the theater and see how the story does.” It actually created quite a stir, so IMAX decided to come up with a line of theaters, which they called IMAX Private Theatres. I worked with them to design the line, which we made available in the US but mainly in China. The theaters were spectacular but they were too expensive to sell very many. Still, it was thrilling to sit in one of them and be treated to the full-blown IMAX experience.

You did one for Seth MacFarlane, right?

Yes, that was the best IMAX theater I designed.

Is there anything you want to say about TK Living?

The major stops in my career were working with Owens Corning, Disney, and IMAX. TK Living, like Exquisite Theaters, was mainly an effort to sell home theater design accessories. To help customers create a design, I devised theater templates in Art Deco, traditional, and contemporary styles that they could use to apply different colors and finishes. Our most successful product was an extensive collection of acoustic fabrics, which my associate James Theobald still sells.

And that brings us to Rayva, which is your most recent effort to create a franchise.

Rayva is probably my final effort to create pre-designed theaters. From a product perspective, it is the most successful company I have worked with. Rayva has gotten wonderful support from its great chairman and our lead engineer, and from the dedicated team that still works for the company while I have moved to Greece. My only regret has been that we depended too much on the AV industry to sell the theaters. I believe the time has come to sell directly to end users but that requires a lot of money. Making that investment will reap huge rewards from what I and our industry have done so far for home theater. Roger Ebert wrote almost 25 years ago in the introduction to my first book, Private Theaters: “Henry Ford wanted to put a Model T in every garage. Theo Kalomirakis wants to put a theater in every home.” I was far from alone in making that happen, but Roger’s prophecy isn’t just a prophecy anymore.

Michael Gaughn—The Absolute Sound, The Perfect Vision, Wideband, Stereo Review, Sound & Vision, The Rayva Roundtable, marketing, product design, some theater designs, a couple TV shows, some commercials, and now this.

A rendering of one of Theo’s designs for the IMAX Private Theatres line

click on the images to enlarge

(above) a sports-themed home theater design for ESPN, and (left) a media wall unit created for Roche Bobois

the invitation to the launch of the Disney Signature furniture collection, with examples from the Toccata and Symphony lines

a rendering of Seth MacFarlane’s IMAX home theater

Origami photos by Phillip Ennis

Rayva’s Origami theater design

Review: Rifkin’s Festival

review | Rifkin’s Festival

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Buried somewhere deep in the heart of this unholy mess lies a movie actually worth watching

by Michael Gaughn
January 31, 2022

So little of Rifkin’s Festival coheres that you basically have two choices: Turn away or mentally cobble together the bits that add up to the film Woody Allen seemed to be trying to make. Just passively toughing it out as presented really isn’t an option.

Which explains why I almost took a pass on reviewing this. But the more I thought about it, the more I sensed that there was a bit of a rough diamond buried deep in its dungheap that might be worth trying to pluck out, no matter how dirty and unpleasant the task. So here we are.

Allen’s previous film, A Rainy Day in New York, was an even bigger mess that had practically nothing going for it and probably never should have been released. So expectations—mine and of the remaining smidglet of the curious—were really low here.

The thought of spending 90 minutes with Wally Shawn at the center of a cinematic world induced a sense of dread. And, unfortunately, my expectations there were more than met. The casting of Shawn was misguided, if not disastrous, basically because he never had much of a range to begin with and, now that he’s older, has practically no range at all. His character is so thinly sketched in, and Shawn himself is such a negative screen presence, that he (both the character and the actor) just can’t provide the badly needed glue to bring it all together. A little more effort here, both with the conceptualization and the casting, would have made all the difference.

But Rifkin’s Festival is, once you start groping around in that pile, primarily about someone who exists almost wholly divorced from the real world trying to make whatever tentative connections he can with reality. And, viewed from that angle, Shawn couldn’t be more apt, even iconographic. Allen frequently emphasizes that gulf by framing and editing him so he’s ignored by the other characters. Even though he’s clearly a part of the action, he comes across as a passive spectator and an ineffectually ironic commentator.

And this is where the film begins to get interesting. The stuff with Shawn almost invariably falls flat, while just about everything with female leads Gina Gershon and Elena Anaya is surprisingly strong, even compelling. Rifkin is most engaging when it veers toward drama, when it sheds its irony and allows the characters to interact directly and with intensity. The exchange between Louis Garrel and Gershon on the boardwalk, Shawn and Anaya stumbling upon her artist husband in bed with one of his models, Anaya later putting Shawn at arm’s length while she grapples with what to do with her marriage and her life all have an inherent and authentic power. And if Allen’s point was that those messy interactions and emotions are what bring meaning to existence and Shawn is completely ill-suited to ever engage, then that’s a filmic experience worth having. It’s too bad he didn’t decide to shift his emphasis and proportions accordingly somewhere along the way.

Gershon, who has never made much of an impression before, is almost obliquely commanding, running much farther than expected with the half-baked material she’s given to work with. Anaya takes some getting used to and is saddled with a character who’s less whole person than convenient plot device, but she somehow makes her seem real over the course of the film.

Garrel is perfectly apt as the smug, pretentious movie director but isn’t as resourceful as the female leads at making something out of the straw man he’s been handed. This was a huge lost opportunity because the comments Allen attempts to make about the current state of Hollywood “art” need to be said—he’s just way too glib, obvious, and scattershot about saying them.

I wish Allen had never crossed paths with Vittorio Storaro, whose too insistent shooting style constantly goes against the grain of what Allen is trying to convey. Even in HD (which is the only way you can watch the film on Google Play), the digital cinematography is too sharp—to the point of being garish and grating. It’s especially out of place in a movie that frequently references classic movies. The various pastiches would have been far more convincing, and beguiling, if they’d been shot on 35mm and presented with a sense of film passing through a gate—but I suspect going that way would have been a budget-buster.

HD is actually an appropriate vehicle for Rifkin’s Festival. A 4K presentation would probably make it look even more video-like and antiseptic.

I flat-out hated the original soundtrack, which tries to ape Django and the Hot Club of France—something many, like The Gypsy Hombres, have tried and at which all have failed. Reinhardt’s isn’t a “sound” to be reproduced but an utterly unique extension of his complex soul, the sum of his experiences, insights, and unmimicable technique. Allen would have been far better off patching the score together out of vintage tracks, even if it wouldn’t have felt as consistent.

The music, like the images, is crisply, pretty much faultlessly, presented—which is unfortunate, because they both cry out for an analog patina.

Thanks to the ongoing New Puritan backlash that continues to plague Allen, it took two years for this film to get released. Only a handful of people will ever see it, and most of those people will wonder why they even bothered. But, even though it never comes together into a complete being, Rifkin’s Festival has more meat on its bones than any of the other walking corpses currently staggering across the blasted entertainment landscape.

PICTURE | Even in HD (the only way you can watch the film on Google Play), the digital cinematography is too sharp—to the point of being garish and grating. 4K would likely make it look even more video-like and antiseptic.

SOUND | The music, like the images, is crisply, pretty much faultlessly, presented, but both cry out for an analog patina

Review: The Birds

review | The Birds

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The 4K HDR transfer tends to emphasize the film’s many flaws, technical and otherwise

by Michael Gaughn
October 16, 2020

Without The Birds, there would be no Jaws—and, arguably, no Spielberg, since he lifted so many of his filmic mannerisms from this brutal and detached end-of-the-world tale. The really ironic thing is, while this is far from Hitchcock’s best film, it’s still better than Jaws. I realize that conclusion is heresy to the popularity = quality crowd but it underlines the vast difference between what an adult with adolescent tendencies and a perpetual adolescent with no interest in growing up can do.

As I mentioned in my Psycho review, Hitchcock, in that film, managed to intuit the entire course of the movies from that point on. But for whatever reason he wasn’t able to assimilate and exploit what he had achieved there and spent the rest of his career sputtering, trying to remain relevant while leaning on his past glories from the Studio Era. But, increasingly consumed by bitterness, he just couldn’t make any of those old conventions hold.

The Birds was his next film after Psycho, and seems meant to function as a kind of companion piece, but because he had lost so much confidence in himself and in the very nature of the movies, his attempt to make a shocker with studio polish resulted in a very uneven affair. This is especially obvious on the technical level, where the heavy reliance on process shots and matte paintings means things rarely sync up visually for large [swathes] of the film. That’s not to fault Robert Burks’ cinematography, which is beautiful and effective when it just gets to record things without having to allow for any trickery. And it’s not really to fault the heavy reliance on Albert Whitlock’s matte work, which almost succeeds in giving the film a warped pastoral quality, like the action is playing out on a vast theater stage. But it’s kind of sad to see Hitchcock’s reach constantly exceed his grasp and sense his slipping ability to maintain a proper sense of proportion.

The things in the film that go well go very well and more than justify the time spent watching it. Since it really doesn’t have any stars, just the semi-talented Robert Taylor and Tippi Hedren as the leads, Jessica Tandy gets to steal the show with her rock-solid performance as a deeply needy yet domineering mother. The scene where she discovers Dan Fawcett’s body still plays—and is one of the things Spielberg lifted pretty much straight for Jaws. And he didn’t just pilfer The Birds for that reveal of a mangled corpse. The subsequent low-angle shot where Tandy stagers out of the house to stand gape-mouthed next to the farm hand would also become a Spielberg staple.

As would the low-angle track-back late in the film where Tandy, then Hedren, then Taylor are revealed, with the ceiling looming low above them, as they listen for signs that the bird attack has subsided. Not only would Spielberg get an absurd amount of mileage out of this, ’80s filmmakers leaned on it so heavily that they eventually broke it.

What really doesn’t work at all is the famous attack on the school children—which I would have to shift into the “infamous” category, and not just for its technical blunders. The animation at the beginning of the crows welling up from behind the school house is crudely done and all out of proportion. And the pacing of the rear-projection shots creates the weird sense of everyone running in place. A cineaste would argue Hitchcock was trying to evoke a nightmare sense of frantic effort with no progress. He wasn’t—he just couldn’t pull it off.

The equally famous attack on the town almost works, creating a borderline apocalyptic feel larger than what’s being shown on the screen. But it’s marred by that hokey series of shots of Hedren reacting to the stream of flaming gasoline and especially by all of the heavily processed rear-projection stuff while she’s trapped in the phone booth.

But it wasn’t ultimately the technical miscalculations and gaffes that undermined Hitchcock—they were just the symptoms, not the disease. There’s something really disturbing, but not in any entertaining way, about how he obviously relishes showing children being attacked and witnessing atrocities. Even more foul is how he sets up the doll-like Hedren just to have her brutally taken down—especially during the elaborate bird-rape in the attic at the end. It’s as if his faith n cinema to protect him from the outside world had been shattered and he felt he had to lash out at the audience in his fear and rage.

All of that said, Hitchcock deserves tremendous credit for doing a horror/thriller film without a score. Yes, the absence of music tends to lay bare a lot the movie’s flaws, but it also makes many of the scenes—like the discovery of Fawcett’s body, the later discovery of Annie Hayworth’s body, and the final attack on the Brenner home—tremendously more effective. There’s no John Williams here to Mickey Mouse everything by dragging you through the film by the nose, clobbering you with cues, telling you what to think and feel. You’re thrown into each of the scenes without any ersatz late-Romantic bluster to act as a buffer, which is not just bracing but kind of liberating.

The 4K HDR transfer is for the most part faithful—which means it gets the good moments absolutely right, but also tends to emphasize all that frequent mismatching between shots. Probably the worst shot of the film is the very first one, done on location in San Francisco, which looks like it was grabbed surreptitiously on a 16mm camera. (It wasn’t—it just looks that way.) Get beyond that, and you’ll be able to experience some patches of Burks’ best work.

The one shot I can fault the transfer for—although its problems lie in the original image—is the very last one in the film, an elaborate high-contrast matte shot that borders on monochrome. The HDR crushes the blacks and punches up the whites so much that it becomes not just too blatantly artificial but visually chaotic.

If ever a film cried out for a surround mix, this one would seem to be it. So much of it hinges on things happening from just out of frame and on characters being engulfed that it’s a natural for the 5.1 or Atmos treatment. And yet the original soundtrack is so well designed that the DTS-HD Master Audio stereo mix here is surprisingly effective. The staccato bird cries followed by the sudden, muted crescendo of fluttering wings that signals the beginning of the final attack is so chilling that it’s hard to say whether a surround reworking would be an improvement. But I’d be curious to know.

I’m not going to resort to one of those “You can tell I had problems with this film but it still makes for a great night at the movies” conclusions. But I will say this: With very few exceptions, time spent with a Hitchcock film is time well spent. Even if you just watch The Birds to pick up on all the Jaws/Spielberg parallels, you’ll have, in a way, improved your life. The Birds is a suitably disturbing thriller; it’s just not quite the film Hitchcock intended to make.

PICTURE | The 4K HDR transfer is for the most part faithful to the original film—which means it gets the good moments absolutely right but also tends to emphasize all the frequent mismatching between shots.

SOUND | The Birds is a natural for a 5.1 or Atmos treatment. And yet the original soundtrack is so well designed that the DTS-HD Master Audio stereo mix here is surprisingly effective.

Review: A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy

review | A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy

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This would rank as one of Woody Allen’s best films—if he’d just spent some more time figuring out the ending

by Michael Gaughn
February 3, 2021

It’s got maybe the worst title ever and probably the worst ending of any Woody Allen film, but wedged between the opening-title card and that Third Act that got away is one of Allen’s best films, an almost perfectly balanced ensemble piece that’s probably the best evocation ever of midsummer, which is especially amazing when you consider how much Allen hates the country.

A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy was his first film with Mia Farrow and kicked off the diverse and more subdued but still fecund era that followed the tremendous creative explosion of Annie Hall, Manhattan, and Stardust Memories. Allen shot Sex Comedy simultaneously with Zelig, which he now admits wasn’t such a great idea but led to two amazing miniatures. He and Farrow would then do such standouts as Broadway Danny Rose (one of his best), The Purple Rose of Cairo, Hannah and Her Sisters, Crimes and Misdemeanors, and the superb but troubling Husbands and Wives. After their all too public breakup, Allen would spend the following decades wandering in the woods, producing far more misses than hits, but occasionally conjuring up gems like Bullets Over Broadway, Mighty Aphrodite, and Blue Jasmine that, at the end of the day, still give him a higher overall batting average than any other first-rank filmmaker.

What makes Sex Comedy different from almost every other one of his films (and there are a lot of them) is that he apparently decided to start by capturing a certain time of year—the feel of the peak of summer—and then build a movie around it. He and Gordon Willis had already done something similar with Manhattan, where no other film has done a better job of evoking the sense of the Upper East Side at night. You’re not just watching the people stroll the streets—you’re right there with them, which creates an irreplaceable bond with the characters.

Here, you’re placed in the midst of the country that sits just on the cusp of the city—more specifically, Westchester County, just north of Manhattan—which is conveyed in such a way that it feels like both the city’s complement and dialectical other. This is some of Willis’s best cinematography, which is saying a lot, managing to capture that elusive sense of warm days, abundant nature, and lingering light. There is a reliance on day for night, which creates some unevenness toward the end, but is only really egregious in a shot of Tony Roberts leaving the front of the summer home to go off into the woods.

I was pleasantly surprised by how well Willis’s images came across in Kaleidescape’s Blu-ray-quality HD presentation. The subtle gradations are for the most part there and it’s possible to get lost in the frame while being only occasionally jarred by blown-out bright spots like the full moon. Of course, this film would likely look superb in 4K HDR, which would pull out the abundant detail in the fields, the interiors, and especially the period clothing, but I have no significant nits with the look of the film in its current incarnation. (And, given where this film stands in Allen’s body of work, and his current status in general, it’s not like Sex Comedy and 4K are likely to cross paths any time soon.)

Sex Comedy marks a big step forward in Allen’s evolution as a director, displaying a new maturity with his handling of the cast. Mary Steenburgen, Jose Ferrer, and Farrow all give nuanced, engaging performances that help reinforce the heady atmosphere of the film. Allen is even able to make Julie Haggerty shine within her very limited range. The one false note is Roberts, who was always tolerable when relegated to playing Allen’s sidekick but just isn’t that good of a film actor and whose beats always feel a little forced here. But nothing he does is enough to ever disrupt the ensemble’s seemingly effortless momentum.

Allen shows an increased mastery of film technique as well, with that new-found confidence carrying over into an increasing reliance on lengthy master shots, which reinforce the film’s ensemble nature while also lending it an appropriately pastoral rhythm. The Allen of his earlier movies would have been unable to pull off the extended exchange where Steenburgen confronts his character about lying about Farrow, which is masterfully blocked and performed.

This is just about the last film where Allen allowed his character to be well-rounded and witty, for some reason opting to just spew jokes via a borderline caricature from that point on. I’m not sure why he wandered off down such a self-defeating path—it’s obvious from the documentary Wild Man Blues that he was still capable of ringing resonant changes on the persona he’d so carefully wrought—but Sex Comedy pretty much represents the swan song of the Woody who defined an era.

Now, about that ending: Allen does an unimpeachable job of establishing the atmosphere, then setting the tone, then introducing the characters, and then setting the various interactions in motion, fleshing out the characters along the way. And all of that is so delicious and, yes, charming that it makes it that much more dispiriting when you have to deal with the train wreck of the final act. My surmise—and I’m really winging it here—is that working simultaneously on Zelig prevented him from seeing the flaws in the Sex Comedy script and likely kept him from doing the kind of reshooting that allowed him to elevate many of his other films from pedestrian or confused to extraordinary.

Had he been able to solve the puzzle he created for himself, Sex Comedy would have easily ranked up with Annie Hall, Manhattan, and Hannah in the mass mind. But anyone who hesitates because of what they’ve heard, or who has heard nothing at all about this film, is missing out in a big way. This is what a great movie feels like when it feels like it doesn’t need to strut its stuff. A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy is so light and energetic and infectious, it’s like a bracing tonic—the cinematic equivalent of a good saison. It moves and feels like no other film. It’s Allen’s most underrated work—and it’s a much needed infusion of summer light during what is, in many ways, the darkest time of the year.

PICTURE | The Blu-ray-quality HD presentation is really, really good, making it hard to find any serious flaws—not that you couldn’t find problems if you really wanted to hunt for them but nothing ever happens to pull you out of the film, which is all that matters at the end of the day.

SOUND | It’s not like Woody Allen makes silent movies and audio doesn’t matter—the all-important dialogue can be clearly heard, the mix helps create atmosphere in the scenes, and the music cues carry an appropriate weight. But it’s all in modest service of the material, as it should be.

Review: Blue Jasmine

review | Blue Jasmine

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A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy

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Woody Allen’s best late-period work is an almost perfectly balanced drama that still resonates almost ten years on

by Michael Gaughn
February 8, 2021

Fast forward 30 years from the last Woody Allen effort I reviewed, 1982’s A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy, and you arrive at Blue Jasmine, his best late-period work and the film that nabbed Cate Blanchett a Best Actress Oscar. That at first glance it can be difficult to see the common DNA between these two movies shows how much Allen evolved as filmmaker over the decades and helps dispel the jaundiced myth that he is little more than an assemblage of mannerisms treading in a rut.

What isn’t a myth is that Allen has struggled ever since his break with Mia Farrow after 1992’s Husbands and Wives. He earned much praise for Match Point (2005), but that film is ultimately undone by its implausibility, and its success can mainly be attributed to the public’s fascination with the bright, shiny Scarlett Johansson. Midnight in Paris (2011) was celebrated as a return to form, and made Allen a crapload of money, but it’s basically a lazy recitation of his greatest hits that’s ultimately thinner than fast-food coffee. Wonder Wheel (2017) earned Kate Winslett some kudos (but the real standout is Jim Belushi, who’s so good it’s shocking) and the film almost works, if you’re willing to roll with its early acts, but is ultimately a noble failure.

Of the later films, Bullets Over Broadway, Mighty Aphrodite, Vicky Christina Barcelona, the dramatic sections of Melinda and Melinda, and, much more modestly, Cafe Society, join Blue Jasmine as the ones worth a good look. (I’ve been trying to see the Sean Penn vehicle Sweet and Lowdown for years but it flits in and out of circulation so arbitrarily that I’ve never been able to seize the opportunity on the rare occasions when it’s bobbed to the surface.)

Jasmine exists at a higher level than any of his other late-period work, on par with the much earlier Annie Hall, Manhattan, Stardust Memories, Broadway Danny Rose, and The Purple Rose of Cairo. But it’s not easy to pin down why everything suddenly clicked here. Unlike his other masterworks, it’s not a comedy, although it does have some humorous touches. The Allen persona is nowhere to be seen, even in surrogate form. And even though he has an incredibly uneven track record with dramas, Allen shows an effortless command here.

I suspect many would attribute its success to Blanchett, but that shows a fundamental ignorance of how movies work. She didn’t write the script, plan or execute the shots, or labor in the editing room. Without that elaborate support—which is essentially the entire edifice of a film—a performance, no matter how good, isn’t worth bupkis. I think the success of Jasmine, and the reason Allen rose to the occasion, can be actually attributed to class. But I’ll get to that.

Blue Jasmine exhibits a bounty of great acting, and it’s not really possible to appreciate the film without first considering Allen and actors. From the late ’70s on, and even in his subpar efforts, Allen has offered a place where actors can show their abilities without fear of being humiliated, relegated to reciting genre cliches, treated like the director’s marionette, or subjugated to green screen. Because he provided an oasis, a place where an actor’s abilities were treasured and given room to flourish, a tremendous diversity of talent flocked to his projects—that is, until Me Too happened (but we’re not going to go there again).

(It’s ironic, by the way, that someone with no traditional training turned out to be the best actor’s director of the last half century.)

What’s always intriguing about Allen is that he can get me to appreciate performers I can’t stomach elsewhere. I wouldn’t want to spend a nanosecond with Andrew Dice Clay outside the boundaries of this film, and yet he’s perfectly cast here. Pretty much the same can be said for Louis C.K., who’s insufferable as a comedian and elsewhere only borderline acceptable as an actor. (He does do a strong turn in American Hustle, though.) Here he shines. Ditto for Alec Baldwin, who’s become a caricature of himself over time but rises above his limitations in Jasmine.

Other standouts: Bobby Cannavale (Boardwalk Empire) brings depth and some surprising twists to what could have been a thuggish performance as Sally Hawkins’ boyfriend. And Michael Stuhlbarg, who out and out stole Men in Black 3 as the pixieish multi-dimensional alien Griffin, is far more understated but still strong here.

As for Blanchett: As one of those performers, like Penn and Streep, far better at “acting” than acting, I’ve always found her work rough going—her attempt to play Katherine Hepburn in The Aviator was so cringeworthy I wanted to avert my eyes from the screen—but she is perfectly in sync with Allen’s material and makes a potentially unsympathetic character compelling. And while Blanchett got most of the attention, Hawkins—another actor I could usually take or leave—I think actually bests her here.

The two weak spots in the chain are Peter Sarsgaard, who just doesn’t bring enough heft to his role as the aspiring diplomat, and Alden Ehrenreich as Blanchett’s son, who barely registers as a presence.

About the whole class thing: Allen has taken a lot of heat over the years, some of it justified, for being overly enamored with Upper East Side society. And a lot of his portrayals are so fawning they take on a peepshow quality for almost every human being on the planet who wasn’t to the manor born. But the 2008 recession caused him to put all that in perspective, and Blue Jasmine is a perceptive, even biting, look at the great class divide that doesn’t have an ax to grind for either side—and thankfully doesn’t fall into the oppressive cliche of saying the members of the lower classes are forever doomed to do themselves in. It’s his ability to pull from his vast experience with both sides of the class equation without peddling an agenda that allows him to go deeper than most mainstream attempts to fathom the issue.

(Let me pause to note that Allen is one of the last filmmakers left from the era before you had to be a member of the top one percent to gain admittance to Hollywood, when lower-bred outsiders were at least tolerated as long as their movies made money, when they could still have a voice.)

Blue Jasmine looks really, really good in Blu-ray-quality HD—which I suspect can attributed to the existence of a DI. I was hard pressed to find any serious flaws—not that you can’t find problems if you really want to hunt for them, but nothing that was happening with the images ever pulled me out of the film, which is all that should matter at the end of the day. My one criticism is the introduction of too many golden tones in post. Yes, I get where they were going with that, but I still suspect that future generations are going to look at the early efforts of digital filmmaking and want to slap us silly for not being able to resist fiddling with the knobs.

And now I once again come to the pointlessness of talking about the audio in a Woody Allen film. It’s not like he’s making silent movies and audio doesn’t matter—few directors rely as heavily on dialogue—and it’s not like the mix doesn’t help create atmosphere in the scenes; and it’s not like music cues don’t have a huge impact in his work. The point is that the audio is in modest service of the material, as it should be—there are no bravura flourishes that would make you exclaim “Nice audio!” So let’s just say that it works, and works well.

You don’t need to know anything about Allen’s other films to appreciate Jasmine, but saying that at this moment in time sounds defensive and weak. Allen has created a tremendous and unparalleled body of work, one that deserves to continue to be appreciated. Few directors are capable of making movies that are as human, and Blue Jasmine, as a study of pride and vulnerability, might be his most human film of all.

Theo Kalomirakis: A Personal History of Home Theater, Pt. 2

Theo Kalomirakis:
A Personal History of Home Theater, Pt. 2

click on the images to enlarge

theater photos by Phillip Ennis

The box office (above) and foyer (below) for The Gold Coast

some of illustrator Phil Parks’ reinterpretations of posters for classic films, for Koontz’ Moonlight theater

Theo discusses the ’90s—the decade when he learned his craft, created his signature work, and gave birth to an entire industry

by Michael Gaughn
January 21, 2022

The 1990s saw Theo Kalomirakis create and hone not just the style but all the various techniques that would forever define home theater design. And it all happened within his first few commissions—which is especially impressive when you realize that he leapt into the field with no formal training as an interior designer.

It was the decade not just of his earliest work—which quickly established his reputation and caused him to be sought out by millionaires, billionaires, movie stars, sports figures, and business and political leaders—but of his first international commissions and his first coffeetable book, Private Theaters, which features, among other work, the Ziegfeld, Uptown, and Gold Coast theaters discussed below.

While much of Part 1 of our interview focused on the emerging technology that allowed Theo to indulge his passion for collecting and watching movies, the emphasis here is more on the blooming of his aesthetic, and on the succession of eager, generous clients who gave him the opportunity to introduce his exuberant showman’s flair into their homes.

—M.G.

When did you get your first commission to do a theater?

1989.

So, by the end of the ‘80s, people were starting to show a lot of interest but since you didn’t really have any training as a designer, you had to sort of learn on the job.

Exactly. I just was pushed to do it but I didn’t find my stride until the ‘90s. The first home theater was in the Hamptons. It was called The Sweet Potato. I did that one with help from industry people that used to do commercial theaters, because there was no such thing as custom integration then. At the end of the year, I left my art direction job at American Heritage and incorporated. The first day of Theater Design Associates was January 1, 1990.

So home theater really began at the beginning of 1990.

Before then, there was no such thing. I called the company Theater Design Associates because I wanted it to sound like there were a lot of people.

Besides the Sweet Potato, this other guy, Skip Bronson, who turned out to be a very good friend, said, “I want to have a theater in my house in West Hartford, Connecticut.” He drove down and saw my Roxy and became enamored with it. He said, “I want a lobby, I want a box office—I want everything.” So I did The Ritz for Skip, and immediately I got the Barry Knispel job—immediately—about 1992.

That’s the Ziegfeld, right?

Yes. That was an amazing learning experience because I was given an unlimited budget to do things no one does today—expensive millwork, expensive hand painting. I was able to work with a lunatic in furniture design, Frank Pollaro, whose work can be seen now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He does the most spectacular reproductions of antique Art Deco furniture. You cannot tell from the original. He was doing just millwork for the rest of the house and somehow we connected. I wanted to do something different, Barry wanted to do something different, Frank wanted to do something different.

You’ve said before that the best clients are the ones who have a sense of adventure or creativity or play, because they’re willing to experiment.

Absolutely. You feed off that. You can’t fall in love with someone that doesn’t love you back. It’s as simple as that. I was lucky enough in the beginning to bump into people that were my duplicates in thinking—who had the same kind of enthusiasm.

But also there was still an inherent thrill at that point in the idea of having a theater at home, so the clients were riding that wave as well.

We were explorers. We charted new territories.

Barry wanted an Art Deco theater for the Ziegfeld, so I got every Deco book I could get my hands on. And I realized I didn’t need to reinvent the wheel because there are actual visual references for everything that signifies that era. So I singled out elements from Art Deco landmarks and built a library of design elements that I synthesized in the theater. This is the theater that made me start saying that you don’t invent—you steal, but you steal creatively.

Was the Ziegfeld when you felt like you’d arrived at something?

Yes. That was absolutely the pinnacle of what I was trying to do. And it was a very abrupt rise to the top, to where you have control of your medium and you are given the opportunity to just do what’s in your mind.

With the next theater, which was The Uptown for Larry and Nora Kay in Toluca Lake, he wanted to do a lot of Deco elements from The Pantages [theater in Los Angeles]. They were available, because I had found the sources, but if I had cast them the way they are they would have been out of scale. So, in my pursuit to create details that were as good as the originals but in a scale that would fit in a theater, I found my way to what used to be called staff shops, which are the movie-studio workshops where they make set ornaments out of clay. I started going to the shop at Warner Brothers and then at 20th Century Fox, where I discovered molds. And I asked them to reproduce them in different scale because all these facilities have sculptors, and they were doing things that would fit the scale of a particular movie set.

The next theater was The Gold Coast, which I did for another incredible patron—Lloyd Wright, the nephew of Frank Lloyd Wright. It was just client after client after client that pushed me to reach out to do things that hadn’t been done before. That was the blessing of my career.

When was Dean Koontz?

That was towards the end of the nineties, but it started right away. Dean was one of my first clients but the project was huge.

Was that the biggest theater you had done to date?

Absolutely. And he was very intent on having me do a recreation of the Opera of Paris, and I loved it. He financed a trip to France, and I came back with 2,000 pictures and did drawings. There were not computers back then to do digital drawings, so it took forever. But then in the course of the first two years we shed the classical thing and

click on the image to enlarge

switched to Art Deco because his house developed slowly into a Deco house. And that’s when we veered towards Frank Lloyd Wright because he loved Wright.

Again, another client with unlimited money to put in millwork and detail and original art. He was so obsessed with this thing that he didn’t even want original posters in the theater, so he had an artist create wonderful interpretations. You would think instinctively, “What the hell are you doing recreating a poster for The Maltese Falcon or The African Queen?” First of all, we couldn’t have found all of them in three-sheet configuration, big posters. They’re perfect recreations of the era of the poster, not the original poster. They were another indication of a confluence of people who just adored movies.

How many seats were in the Koontz theater?

There were four rows—at least 16—about 20, 24. And there were balconies all around for additional seats but it was mostly for effect.

Is Seth MacFarlane’s theater bigger?

Of course. His has 40 seats.

Is that the biggest one you’ve done?

Ah, definitely.

The key differentiator between you and other designers seems to be that you create from your passion for watching and escaping into movies, which you share with your clients, while a lot of the other designers are just creating a room to watch movies in.

It could absolutely be the differentiator. I was working in conjunction with the clients, while a lot of other designers are separated from the client so while they create a room for watching movies, it’s a room the clients don’t really want. They do it because everybody has a theater. The disconnect is double—not only do many designers not do a real theater because they don’t have a passion to design it, the clients don’t have a passion for the room. The funny thing is that the demand for home theaters has exploded through the roof, but it’s lost its soul.

As you mentioned earlier, there needs to be that intense emotional bond between designer and client in order to spur something exceptional.

I would have never done anything if the clients hadn’t encouraged me. I would tell them stories about what it would be, and I had their rapt attention. “Yeah! Let’s do that.” I was like a pied piper, leading them on to something that was magical that they didn’t know how to express. They had it in them. They knew what they wanted. But I was able to articulate it for them via architecture.

They were all the same people—all the clients. They were all like children, in that they wanted to build movie palaces, they wanted to build paradise in their home. They wanted the ultimate escape, which is what I enjoy every night when I go to my own theater. When I’m there, I become Skip Bronson, Lloyd Wright, Dean Koontz, Larry Kay, Barry Knispel.

Coming Soon: Part 3—From 2000 to the Present

Theo’s hand drawing of his original conception for Dean Koontz’ home theater, inspired by the Opera of Paris. (Scroll down to see the complete original rendering.)

related features

Theo Kalomirakis | A Personal History
of Home Theater, Pt. 1

Theo Kalomirakis | A Personal History
of Home Theater, Pt. 3

Theo Kalomirakis | A Personal History
of Home Theater—Complete

an ebony cocktail-table top designed by Frank Pollaro

the original Opera of Paris concept for Dean Koontz’ theater evolved into this Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired Deco design

Theo’s second coffeetable book includes more about the Moonlight and the other theaters that set the standard for private cinema design

Theo Kalomirakis: A Personal History of Home Theater, Pt. 1

Theo Kalomirakis:
A Personal History of Home Theater, Pt. 1

click on the images to enlarge

above & below: click on the slides to enlarge

The media coverage generated by Theo’s Roxy spurred much of the early interest in home theater

The man who started it all on how his desire to see favorite films at home transformed movie-watching forever

by Michael Gaughn
January 7, 2022

Because he’s the guy who invented home theater and remains beyond doubt its preeminent designer, people tend to assume Theo Kalomirakis’ interest lies primarily or solely in the design side of things. And if you only know his reputation or his work but not his history, that’s a natural enough assumption to make.

But digging a little deeper goes a long way toward explaining why, despite all the changes in technology, entertainment, and taste over the years, Theo’s theaters continue to be the most evocative and compelling expression of the idea of watching films at home. The explanation—which really isn’t a secret, just obscured by the dash and brilliance of his designs—is that everything he does springs from his unusually deep passion for everything movies.

Theo is an accomplished director, a graduate of NYU’s legendary filmmaking program whose work has been screened at such high-profile venues as the New York Film Festival. He’s also accumulated one of the largest private movie collections in the world—maybe the largest. The theater he recently built at his home in Athens, Greece has become a mecca from everyone from students to critics to directors and other film-industry professionals.

All of this, and his constantly restless spirit, which keeps him from ever doing the same theater design twice, helps make clear why he’s been able to create a body of work that will likely never be equalled, let alone surpassed.

In the series of interviews that follows, Theo provides a snapshot of each phase of his career, dipping into the past not so much to reminisce as to show the continuing relevance of the core ideas that have driven his designs. At a time when home theaters are going through a tremendous resurgence—especially at the highest end of the market—fueled largely by the pandemic-driven desire to have domestic retreats from the world, Theo’s efforts provide fertile ground for conceiving new ways to create unique and captivating movie-watching spaces within the home.

—M.G.

Because you had such an intense interest in movies, you started cobbling together systems before you even thought about designing theaters.

Absolutely.

What was the state of the technology when you started doing that?

My first glimpse of something coming was in 1981 while I was working as a graphic artist at the Abraham & Straus department store in Brooklyn. I went down one day to the electronics department and saw an exhibit of LaserDiscs. It piqued my curiosity because I already had started buying videotapes of movies. Before that, I would spend nights recording them off TV, waking up during the commercials so I could pause the recording and start it again when the movie came back on. The very first Betamax tape I bought was Glen or Glenda. It’s a bizarre choice, but it was good to see a movie that you could hold and have. The second one was A Star Is Born, with Judy Garland, which actually had stereo sound, which was a revelation. But it was cropped. The first version of every movie that came out on videotape was cropped.

What were you watching your tapes on?

I had a 19-inch Sony Trinitron monitor with two Klipsch speakers. Then one day I went to New York Video, where I saw this big TV—a Mitsubishi two-piece, where you opened the front and the three beams projected into a mirror from under the screen. I fell in love with it and bought it on the spot. It was a floor model, so I could afford it. I set it in the middle of my living-room window, which was the death for me of watching movies in my apartment because it blocked half the view and the sunlight would come in and wash out the movie, but there was no other place to put it.

I connected my Betamax to the Mitsubishi and played A Star Is Born, but the picture was fuzzy. So I went back to the store the same evening and said, “What you sold me is not what I saw. It has a defect and I need to give it back.” And the owner said, “You don’t know what you’re talking about. What are you playing?” I said, “A Star Is Born.” He said, “What you watched here was a LaserDisc. You saw a sharper picture because of the source.” So I said, “Give me a LaserDisc player and add a Raiders of the Lost Ark.” I didn’t hesitate because I was enthralled by the sharp pictures. So I took it home, and that was the beginning of my obsession with LaserDiscs

I took the Klipsch speakers—I don’t remember where I got them, but they were big—and I put them left and right of the TV and took advantage of the stereo sound. It was sensational. That’s why people would applaud. They were watching for the first time with a big picture and big sound. They would come and gather around and we would watch movies very religiously without distractions—except for the distraction of the environment, which was a major letdown for me.

What led up to you creating your first home theater?

In 1983, I found a brownstone on St. Marks Avenue in Brooklyn that had a basement so I could have a better place to watch movies. But I was very disappointed. The TV had looked big enough in my living room but looked too small in the basement. So I wanted something bigger. Someone had told me Barco was selling a bunch of projectors that had been in TWA planes. So I got one—I remember I paid, like, $600. I bought a screen from a photo-supply store. It was no more than a hundred inches but it was big enough. The room was small. It fit the space.

It fulfilled my goal to have a a dedicated room with a big screen and no windows. I painted everything a consistent color and upholstered the seats. But suddenly the fact that I had sewer pipes running over my head, and drop-ceiling tiles, was like anticlimactic. I thought, “This is not really cutting it.” I started looking at pictures of theaters but I hadn’t really spent too much time studying their architecture. But the buzz about home theater was already beginning because I still have the story that appeared in USA Today with me holding a bowl of popcorn at the 100 St. Marks theater.

I knew my theater needed something else, though, so in 1985 I bought a townhouse on Union Street in Brooklyn where I knew I could do something something better, something that was more grandiose. I had discovered pictures of the original Roxy Theatre, and there was a big model of it at the Kaufman Astoria studios in Queens.

How deep was your interest in movie palaces before you did this?

I would say there was no interest because there was no knowledge. But something strange happened. The lady who had lived on the first floor had been married to the last projectionist of the Roxy. And I found in the basement, in a box, wrapped up, some valences from the curtains for the balconies and a whole bunch of programs. And there was a key to a projection room, which I found out later was from the Loew’s Kings on Flatbush Avenue.

While I was finishing my theater, which I called The Roxy, I started immersing myself in books about theater architecture. I hired an architect to help me do the theater. I kept the arches of the basement as a design element. But the big difference between this room and St. Marks was that it had an outer lobby with a marquee. And immediately I started promoting it, or it promoted itself. I don’t know what happened.

Did you upgrade your system as well?

Yes. I had seen a 70mm film at the Ziegfeld in Manhattan and I was entranced by the sound. So I went to the projection booth and became friends with the projectionist, Mike Percoco. He took a liking to me because I was nosy. He took me backstage and showed me the big horn-loaded JBL speakers. I said, “That’s what I want.” Now, it was chutzpah to want these huge speakers—the same ones that were in the Ziegfeld—in a tiny room. I didn’t care. I thought, “These are the speakers that can do that sound. These are the speakers I should have.” That was a very important connection with Mike because it led to the theater being a guinea pig for new technologies.

Later he said, “You know, there’s something new coming and it’s called ‘surround’.” The first processor that came out was called Sensurround. Bob Warren from Dolby flew from California, saw what I had, and said, “I’ll give you what you need.” So I got free a Dolby surround decoder. I then bought four more JBL speakers for the sides—not in the back. Two and two, flanking the three rows of seats.

It seems like it’s never been just a design thing for you, that you were also trying to make sure you were on the cutting edge with the technology.

Absolutely, absolutely. Technology is important. Without it, you get stuck with just a nice-looking room—if it is nice. To your point, I was always chasing the latest technology that was produced.

That takes us up to 1986.

Nothing much happened from then until 1990, when I got my first commission to design a theater—the Sweet Potato on Long Island.

The first glimpse many people had of home theater was via Theo’s The Roxy on Union Street in Brooklyn, shown here
c. 1986. (Roxy photos by Phillip Ennis)

related features

Theo Kalomirakis | A Personal History
of Home Theater, Pt 2

Theo Kalomirakis | A Personal History
of Home Theater, Pt 3

Theo Kalomirakis | A Personal History
of Home Theater—Complete

Theo with his LaserDiscs

Theo (far right) at his first home theater on St. Marks Avenue in Brooklyn

Theo’s first coffeetable book, Private Theaters, includes more about his early work

Review: The Long Goodbye

review | The Long Goodbye

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Robert Altman’s sui generis noir looks suitably grubby in this Blu-ray-quality download

by Michael Gaughn
April 14, 2021

Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye is one of the best films of the 1970s—maybe the best—and one of the most influential. That last part is ironic, in a way Altman would have appreciated, because there’s no way it can be in any legitimate sense true. Altman and Kubrick created films that came from such an intricate and hermetic personal aesthetic that it’s impossible for them to be built upon without the result being anything other than travesty. That doesn’t mean legions haven’t tried, but all have failed.

I asked Altman once what he thought of the fact that The Long Goodbye closed almost as soon as it opened but has become possibly his best-known work. He deflected, with a purpose, saying his Phillip Marlowe fell asleep in the early ‘50s—the era of Chandler’s source novel—only to wake up in the early ‘70s, finding his sense of chivalry was no longer in fashion and could only lead to disaster. Even Altman’s Marlowe would be completely lost in the sociopathic present.

The Long Goodbye both is and isn’t a detective movie; is an unforgiving evisceration of Chandler’s work and a very heartfelt tribute. It’s so cynical it verges on nihilism while openly trying to figure out which values, if any, still have meaning. And because it lives both in and outside genre, it gets to feed from both worlds, very much like early Godard. There are very few films that feel this much like a movie.

Altman, of course, makes none of it easy, constantly toying with the audience like a sly, somewhat sadistic, cat. He and cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond did everything they could to make the film gritty, flashing the footage, flattening the palette, pumping up the grain. The result eschews superficial prettiness, which tends to be fleeting, to tap into something far more sublime.

This is John Williams’ best score (no, I’m not being facetious) exactly because it’s so awful. Williams isn’t known for having a sense of humor so I have to wonder if he didn’t just write a bunch of straight cues, not fully aware of how Altman was planning to deploy them.

And then there’s Elliot Gould’s almost non-existent range as an actor, which Altman turns to the film’s advantage by making his Marlowe continually spout lame, often improvised, wisecracks. Altman has everything around Gould do the acting for him, which results in Marlowe coming across as smug but ultimately lost.

To add irony to all the other irony, The Long Goodbye probably holds up as well as it does both because it’s Altman’s most genre-driven movie and because enough of what’s best of Chandler’s work manages to survive the merciless beating it receives here to permeate the film and give it a resonance unique to Altman’s canon.

And if all of that is just a little too high-brow for you, watch this movie just to revel in the secondary casting. Sterling Hayden is still astonishing as the washed-up writer on a fatal binge. Just as nobody seeing him as Dix Handley in The Asphalt Jungle could have anticipated his performance as General Ripper in Dr. Strangelove, nobody seeing those two earlier films could have ever seen his Roger Wade coming. And yet there’s something at Hayden’s core that creates a through-line that joins those characters in a way that goes well beyond their having been played by the same performer.

And nobody seeing Henry Gibson on The Dick Van Dyke Show or Laugh-In could have anticipated his Dr. Veringer in a million years. Gibson and Altman conspired to pull off a tremendous practical joke that’s simultaneously, when seen from just the right angle, chilling. It’s that he’s the least likely villain ever that makes him so apt.

As for the presentation: How do you judge the image quality of a film that went out of its way to not look very good? To reference my earlier thought, there’s that beauty that comes from aping the styles of the present, which rarely ages well, and then there’s the beauty that comes from staying true to the demands of the material, even if it takes you to deeply unpleasant places. The Long Goodbye is gorgeous exactly because it’s lurid, and because it’s as lurid in the heart of the Malibu Colony as it is in a decrepit city jail. While there’s plenty of Southern California sunshine in evidence, it’s always accurately shown as monotonous or piercing, never pleasant.

This Blu-ray-quality download does a pretty good job of honoring what Altman and Zsigmond wrought, and you can’t help but recoil in horror at the thought of some culturally myopic tech team scrubbing it free of grain and trying to expand its dynamic range. Still, matching its original resolution would likely yield huge improvements, and a deft touch with an appreciation for grunge could conjure up something amazing.

In a similar vein, should an upgrade some day come, someone should post a sign reading “Hands Off the Soundtrack” on the mixing-room door. This film would not benefit from a surround mix—stereo suits it just fine.

The Long Goodbye is the kind of art that appears when you just don’t care at all but can’t help but care a lot. It feeds from a wellspring of paradox and, while it wraps things up, it never really resolves a thing. There are no reliable guideposts. Nothing triumphs; nothing is vanquished. That constant troubling creates an energy that keeps Altman’s film vital and relevant, and impossible to dismiss as simply smart-ass. The result is nothing but a mess, but a strangely elegant one that somehow rings very true.

PICTURE | This Blu-ray-quality download does a pretty good job of honoring what Robert Altman and Vilmos Zsigmond wrought. Still, matching its original resolution would likely yield huge improvements, and a deft touch with an appreciation for grunge could conjure up something amazing.

SOUND | Should an upgrade some day come, someone should post a sign reading “Hands Off the Soundtrack” on the mixing-room door. This film would not benefit from a surround mix—stereo suits it just fine.

Review: Psycho

review | Psycho

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Seeing this film in 4K not only underlines how much Hitchcock reinvented himself here but how much he changed filmmaking forever

by Michael Gaughn
September 11, 2020

This was supposed to be a review of Rear Window. But I had such a strong reaction to watching Psycho in 4K that Hitchcock’s lurid horror classic quickly pushed its way to the front of the reviewing queue.

More has probably been written about Hitchcock than any other filmmaker, most of it boxing him in so tightly that he’s ended up as badly embalmed as Norman Bates’ mother. So I’m going to try to avoid retreading any of that ground here. My comments will be mainly about why you should care about Psycho in 2020—and why you should care about it in 4K.

First off, there’s Anthony Perkins. Sure, people have praised his performance before but I didn’t realize until this most recent viewing exactly how groundbreaking it was and how much it still reverberates today. Hitchcock was notorious for putting blinders on his performers, so while there are some exceptional breakout performances in his films (I’m thinking of Robert Walker in Strangers on a Train in particular), they’re rare, and tend to happen not because the actor was given extraordinary latitude but because he figured out how to roll within Hitchcock’s often stifling restrictions.

Perkins turns that straitjacket into a virtue, offering the most direct, nuanced, and startling performance in any Hitchcock film. (His bursting in on Vera Miles at the end always seems so comical because he has kept Norman on a such a believably tight leash until then.) There are many things in Psycho that are unique for a Hitchcock film (I’ll get to that in a minute) but this is the most unusual. As soon as Perkins says his first lines to Janet Leigh, Psycho pivots from a traditional studio-era production into the cinematic unknown.

And then there’s the enduring influence of his performance, which has become the standard for any actor attempting to explore the extreme edges of dissociation. It’s hard to watch his Norman Bates and not see De Niro’s Travis Bickle—or even Rupert Pupkin. To watch Perkins in this film is to watch him actively and radically reinvent film acting—all while under his director’s unblinking gaze.

But Hitchcock ventured into all kinds of new territory in Psycho, and it’s fascinating to watch him try to reinvent himself as he grapples with the collapse of the studio system and the realization of how tightly he was bound to it. The tragic thing about Psycho was that he found it impossible to build on his many innovations here, instead retreating to what he already knew, which is why all of his later films feel half-baked and carry the fetid reek of nostalgia.

A lot has been made about Hitchcock using a TV crew to shoot the film but that kind of misses the point. Psycho, on the moviemaking level, is mainly about Hitchcock grappling with his increasing bitterness, cynicism, disorientation, and misogyny in a world where he could feel his influence as a filmmaker and a personality waning, and figuring out what the hell to make of his unmistakable attraction to La Nouvelle Vague, a movement that worshipped his work but couldn’t have been further removed from his Hollywood-machine style of filmmaking.

Any talk of Hitchcock’s misogyny in the age of the New Puritanism is guaranteed to fall on deaf ears—but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be said. His take on women was far more deft and complex than he’s usually given credit for (consider, for instance, that the two most assertive and courageous characters in Rear Window are Thelma Ritter and Grace Kelly, and how Eva Marie Saint makes Cary Grant look like a dope in North by Northwest). Yes, the sense of personal aggression in his handling of the Marion Crane character is troubling, but the film hinges on being able to see her through Norman’s eyes from the second he first encounters her in the rain at the Bates motel.

That’s one of the more New Wave elements in this very New Wave-y film, that not only is Marion not very likable—nobody in this film is, which is what forces you to gravitate toward Norman and feel some uncomfortably complex emotions about him as it all plays out.

As for the shock factor—it’s there, but not in the broad strokes that enticed and repelled audiences at the time. Probably the two most disturbing images now are Janet Leigh staring out at the audience with her face flattened against the bathroom floor and Perkins mounting Martin Balsam, butcher knife aloft, while Balsam lies on his back squealing like a stuck pig.

What’s more disturbing are the droller, more perverse touches, like forcing the audience to suffer John Gavin through the whole second half of the film, and the justly infamous penultimate scene where the smug psychiatrist explains all. But it’s worth enduring that to get to the brilliant Godardian shot of Norman in confinement, leading to him giving the camera what would become the patented Kubrick crazy stare, with that almost subliminal superimposition of Mother’s rotting face.

What 4K brings to all this is distressing—as in, you can see all the little nicks and scuff marks and tears and stains that evoke the shabby decay of the Bates Motel. It’s hard to emphasize how much this heightens the experience of the film. Given Hitchcock’s horror of any kind of filth, the idea of a place—and a mind—than rundown was probably truly terrifying for him, and it takes all the clarity of UHD resolution to faithfully convey that.

Strangely, capturing the full impact of 35mm film makes the subtle verbal duel between Perkins and Balsam that begins in the motel office and continues out on the walkway far more intense than it felt in earlier home video incarnations. This is another scene where Hitchcock went well outside his comfort zone, not only in the way he allowed the actors to fence, but in the way he turned it into a duel of acting styles that had until then had been foreign to his work. This scene had always felt kind of flat seen anywhere other than in a movie theater, until now.

But 4K both giveth and taketh away. This transfer does its best with some occasionally bad elements, the worst instance probably being a POV shot through Marion’s windshield at the 24:11 mark where the resolution and image enhancement create a giant swarm of digital gnats that make it feel like you’re watching the opening to Men in Black.

Also, without getting pulled into any sweeping generalizations, it needs to be pointed out that while the HDR version bests the UHD version, the differences are so subtle they’ll probably only register with hyper-critical viewers. Spot-checking scenes with a lot of gradation, like Marion and Norman in the lobby parlor (Chapter 8) or Norman burying evidence in the swamp (Chapter 12), showed only the slightest difference between versions.

But it’s hard to emphasize how much 4K does to revive Psycho and make it feel vital, instead of like some vaguely appreciated but permanently filed-away relic. And experiencing it in either UHD or HDR brings a new respect for its mostly restrained black & white cinematography. Color would have been too distracting, visually drowning out the impact of the film’s brutally pared-down main elements. And we can only shudder at the thought of 4K colorization.

As for the sound, you’re probably best off experiencing Psycho with the DTS HD Master Audio stereo track. The Master Audio 5.1 mix doesn’t make the film more engaging, just different. That’s not to say someone someday couldn’t do a compelling Dolby Atmos remix but they would have to be an absolute virtuoso to make their efforts dovetail with Hitchcock’s aesthetic.

And let’s pause for a moment to acknowledge Bernard Herrmann’s groundbreaking score, which is well served by both mixes. I had never really appreciated until I heard it here just how much Herrmann relied on the primal physicality of the bows scraping across the strings and the rough resonance of the string instruments’ body cavities—the cellos and basses in particular. Sure, that impression had always been there, on the verge of recognition, but this time that naked musical aggression seemed far more crucial to the impact of the music than the notes themselves.

Anybody who cares about movies beyond junk-food event flicks needs to make the pilgrimage to Hitchcock at some point in their lives, and there are far worse places to start than Psycho (like, say, Family Plot). Whether it gets under your skin on your first viewing is a matter of blind luck, but it will stick with you. If you haven’t seen it in a while, your best chance beyond the local revival house will be these UHD and HDR releases. And if you’re a rabid fan of the film, you should have already hit the download button by now.

PICTURE | What 4K brings to this film is distressing—as in, you can see all the little nicks and scuff marks and tears and stains that evoke the shabby decay of the Bates Motel.

SOUND | You’re probably best off experiencing Psycho with the DTS HD Master Audio stereo track. The 5.1 mix doesn’t make the film more engaging, just different.

Review: Stardust Memories

review | Stardust Memories

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The film that drove the masses away from Woody Allen’s work offers the deepest, most nuanced, portrayal of his persona

by Michael Gaughn
March 7, 2021

Having considered a handful of Woody Allen’s most significant films, we now approach his most problematic work (that is, the most problematic for anyone who’s not a prisoner of the irredeemable present). Allen had been on a roll with audiences after Annie Hall and Manhattan but ran into a massive wall with Stardust Memories, which effectively alienated the broader following he’d created with those two earlier films and left him with the small but blindly devoted fan base that would allow him to keep making movies for the next four decades. As perverse as it sounds, it seems possible—even likely—he deliberately created Memories to offend, in a maybe too successful effort to cull the herd.

I wondered in an earlier review why Allen soon abandoned his nimble, well-rounded, creatively fertile persona to portray a thin caricature of himself in later films. The answer might lie here. Being too honest about himself and his perceptions created a backlash that might have been both personally traumatizing and a threat to his career. With his Zelig-like need to be accepted, Allen might have decided that, rather than continue to mine that tremendously and uniquely fruitful vein, he should play it safe—or at least safer—from now on.

Some have called Stardust Memories his best film. It’s undeniably a great film—it takes tremendous talent to go this picaresque and be this unvarnished and ambitious and still pull it off—but it just doesn’t hang together as well as the equally audacious Manhattan. And I think the fault might lie in the relationships he chose to portray and his too facile casting of his partners.

Allen tends to go for the Flavor of the Month with his actors, and while Charlotte Rampling might have photographed well, she just doesn’t have the chops to be believable as his deeply disturbed love interest. Marie-Christine Barrault fares slightly better as his more grounded alternative but, again, there’s just not enough depth there. Jessica Harper almost makes her part work, but she’s not a significant enough screen presence to care about. While Allen was likely just staying true to his actual situation, and famous directors undoubtedly do tend to flit from one stimulating but superficial relationship to another, the film needed a deeper emotional resonance there to balance its incisive but ultimately wearying examination of celebrity.

I don’t want to give the impression I don’t like this film—I do. I just wanted to pinpoint where it sags. Stardust Memories shows a fierce courage—and Allen paid a huge price for going there. Many felt he was too brutal on his fans, but that misses the point. He’s mainly exploring why we manifest the worlds we do and his intense dissatisfaction with his current state, which he was largely responsible for. The suffocating fans were just an inevitable extension of that.

It’s got the loosest structure of any his non-gag-driven films, with a “meet the director” weekend at a seaside resort supplying the armature for him to hang his diverse impressions on, and he makes it work well. The problem (to the degree it is a problem) is that people assumed it would be fun to be inside Allen’s head for 90 minutes and were thrown to find the experience jarring, even disturbing. It’s as if he took another stab at the deeply subjective, free-associational original premise for Annie Hall (called “Anhedonia”) and this time succeeded in landing all the blows.

And let’s not forget that Stardust Memories is a comedy, and a funny one—his conversation with a bunch of street-wise aliens (“I have an IQ of 1,600 and I still don’t know what you expected from that relationship with Dorrie”) might be the best bit in any of his films—but there’s not a single comic moment than isn’t deliberately troubled by darker currents—which is what makes the film so brilliant but also threw audiences so hard.

Allen does somewhat balance, or at least temper, his unflinching take on his reality with a deeply bittersweet romanticism, which he sees as a necessary buffer while realizing that retreats into fantasy always come at a price (something he would explore with far more nuance in The Purple Rose of Cairo). That romanticism permeates the film, in how the Allen character treats his relationships, in the Django Reinhardt-inflected jazz soundtrack, and especially in Gordon Willis’s cinematography, which takes the more epic style of Manhattan and gives it a deeper bite.

My comments about how Willis’s images fare in this Blu-ray-quality HD download will sound eerily similar to my comments about his work in Manhattan. Everything looks good, but not first-rate, and Memories really does need the subtlety of all the captured steps of grayscale to help soften the impact of the deliberately harsh material. The movie is perfectly watchable in this form—although intense pools of bright light are so harsh they’re distracting—but it would be not just better but a different experience in 4K HDR.

Stardust Memories remains a challenging film—partly because none of Allen’s other movies have pushed the audience as hard to consider the difficult, but valid, positions he’s putting forth. It’s hard to appreciate the risks he took here—especially when you consider that even he didn’t accurately anticipate the backlash he’d trigger. If you see this film and know exactly how you feel about it at the end, you weren’t really watching.

In hindsight, this was the pivotal moment in Allen’s career. One of the running gags in Memories is his fans’ preference for his “early, funny” films, a sentiment he acknowledges and, through this film, says he’s OK with because he knows that’s all behind him now. Time has since affirmed his judgment, exposing the many weaknesses of those early movies while revealing the many strengths of his mid-period work.

But this was also his first film in years without Diane Keaton as his leading lady, and although her presence can be felt in the Rampling character, his inability to make the romantic relationships interesting enough does weigh the film down. This is pure speculation, but it seems likely Allen would have continued making far more adventurous movies if the public hadn’t turned on him so viciously after Memories. Looking to regroup, he assumed he needed a leading lady to make his work more palatable—which is when a very eager Mia Farrow appeared.

PICTURE | The movie is perfectly watchable in Blu-ray-quality HD—although intense pools of bright light are so harsh they’re distracting—but it would be not just better but a different experience in 4K HDR.

SOUND | You can hear all the dialogue and various vintage jazz cues just fine.

Michael Gaughn

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