Meet the 26-Year-Old Saving L.A. Cinemas; Why George Clooney Should Not Buy Warner Bros; Zendaya and Tom Holland's Next Moves

16:27Ryan Lattanzio:Horrible. Terrible movie. Garb.

16:29Anne Thompson:Terrible. And it did really well because Tom Cruise was in it.

16:33Ryan Lattanzio:Yeah, that's a movie that I watched, you know, flipping channels in a hotel room or something. It kind of belongs in that canon. Now, we already know that Tom Holland can carry a movie. He's literally doing it right now, though he is abetted, obviously, by a huge piece of bankable IP. And he's carrying the Odyssey as being part of that ensemble.

16:54Anne Thompson:I wouldn't say he's carrying it. He's in the ensemble. He's part of the ensemble.

16:58Ryan Lattanzio:He is one of the people.

16:59Anne Thompson:He's holding up part of the tent there.

17:01Ryan Lattanzio:He's one of the people care. He's one of the people in the Trojan horse that is the Odyssey. It's interesting, the comparison to Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, lauded as some of the great actors ever, who they kind of move fluidly between tent poles. I mean, they met on Cleopatra. He was really drunk or hung over or something when he met her. I love that story. But then they would balance with these more personal, but still, I would say big scale projects. So I'd really like to see someone like Tom Holland or Zendaya go after an Oscar caliber kind of role. I think it would be unwise to just resign themselves to this world of blockbusters, because then it almost becomes harder to be taken seriously as a serious actor down the line.

17:41Ryan Lattanzio:An example, I like to think about someone who's always been a great actress, Jennifer Lawrence. You know, she was the highest paid actor on the heels of all the Hunger Game movies. But there's been some hits and misses since then. And I think she's really struggled to land something at the box office or even culturally in the way that she did in her heyday. So all of that for me is to say that marquee draw is not necessarily going to translate to going from being a celebrity who opens a movie to a serious, respected actor on the big screen.

18:08Anne Thompson:Even Tom Cruise has issues with this, at least as he is now. It's going to be interesting to see what happens with Digger, where there's a lot of, I have to say, there's a lot of skepticism in Hollywood about that one. But as far as Tom Holland is concerned, you may not remember any of them, but if you look at his filmography, he's made a lot of movies that have not registered or gotten really bad reviews. And I think he is a really talented guy who has a lot more in him. And he needs to do the same thing. He needs to prove that he can carry a movie without being in the MCU. And he was amazing in his first feature.

18:45Anne Thompson:Did you ever see The Impossible?

18:47Ryan Lattanzio:Of course, yes. And unfortunately, that movie is a bit lost to time, or it's on the carousel on Netflix every few months. But yes.

18:55Anne Thompson:I happen to like J.A. Bayona a lot. He did a movie called A Monster Calls. Holland was in that. But, you know, movies like In the Heart of the Sea and Cherry, it did not get him anywhere. Oh, Cherry. But I can't wait to see Astaire. I love watching him dance, whether he's imitating Beyonce or singing in the rain. And he's a very gifted man. So is that a commercial enterprise? Let's see if his fans follow him there.

19:23Ryan Lattanzio:So, and here's something that you can weigh in on. There's some lore here that predates my days around town. The news that Nikki Fink's estate is shopping her unfinished Hollywood tell-all, which is called very aptly and cheekily hubris. And this is sparking questions this week. Reporter Diane Haithman reportedly did a rewrite on this. But Fink's in the grave and is still exploiting a book she expressly did not want published, partly because she was afraid she was going to get sued.

19:52Anne Thompson:I knew Nikki Fink. At one time back in the 90s when I was West Coast editor at Premier, we would have meals at Hugo's near her apartment on King's Road. We shared a storage locker from which my husband David and I inherited a blue shag bathroom rug. Nora met her, but she was a kid, but she doesn't remember her. I spent more hours than I care to admit in her dark, cluttered apartment trying to avoid watching her in her skin-tight exercise clothes, working the stationary bicycle. And as we worked on the CAA chapter, she was supposed to submit this as a feature to premiere. Now, you know, a monthly magazine runs on a schedule.

20:37Anne Thompson:You're supposed to hand in your story. You're supposed to publish your story. She would not push the button. She would not press send. She would not give us a story month after month after month. And this was why she couldn't work in the print universe. She couldn't deal with print. Print was too permanent. That's why she thrived as a digital writer. She could change it. She could fix it. She could move it. When she was at New York Magazine or the LA Times or other places, they all told horror stories. She would read her copy over the phone to the editor, you know. That kind of thing.

21:13Ryan Lattanzio:A new kind of fax machine.

21:14Anne Thompson:She was not a recluse. She had friends. She socialized. She just didn't do the usual industry rounds. And when a powerful Hollywood person like her pal Ron Meyer called on the phone, she lit up like a power rocket. She thrived on access to power and the ability to bring people down.

21:33Ryan Lattanzio:Well, what was her issue with deadlines? Just maybe it'll help me understand my own issue. Why couldn't she hit send on the story? What's the hang up? This was just neurosis, anxiety, perfectionism.

21:46Anne Thompson:I read the chapter. We were going to run this. We were going to put it in premiere. It was really good. It was fantastic. And I think she was just scared that she was going to get into trouble with the people who were in there. She was a good journalist, actually. I didn't approve of what she did at Deadline, trying to bring people down, you know, and thriving on a kind of vile that she had. but when it came to this book she took it very seriously and worked on it for years and years and years she had different editors come in and help her she was at simon and schuster at one point but she gave it back the advance and she followed me on twitter in 2014 and i thought well i've arrived i'll just say if she couldn't bring herself to finish the book when she was alive how can it be done when she's dead she's not around to defend herself okay next week ryan will take a well-deserved vacation, and our ace business reporter Brian Welk will join us to dig into what could happen in poor beleaguered Paramount's attempt to acquire Warner Brothers.

22:51Anne Thompson:I'm being a little sarcastic. I have no sympathy for them whatsoever. Ryan, what should we watch this weekend?

22:57Ryan Lattanzio:Everyone in my life knows I'm a fair weather television watcher, but I just started this week, and I'm totally hooked on this latest show from Elizabeth Merriweather, who was the creator of Dying for Sex and the Dropout, which those are actually two shows I did watch and adore front to back. But this is a Hulu series called Furious that stars Emmy Rossum as a what else but emotionally troubled FBI agent who's fresh off the police beat because she got too close to her job and a colleague played by Jake Lacey, who's playing another kind of squirmy, terrible, creepy guy. And now she's drawn into investigating a female serial killer who's played by Lola Petticrew, who is a seriously damaged cookie in this show and acting as an avenging angel upon all these guys who raped her back when she was underage and a victim of sex trafficking.

23:47Ryan Lattanzio:It's a narrative that's really heavy on trauma in a way that feels a little bit 2021, but it's still very fresh and exciting. And it's definitely going to whet the appetites of people who got burned out on something like Killing Eve.

23:59Anne Thompson:That is also my pick. I haven't been watching much TV of late. There hasn't been much to watch. This is a godsend. And I thank Meriwether for bringing this to us. Emmy Rossum has matured into a fine actress. She's taking the wounded ex-cop routine to a new level. It could be a cliche, and it's not. That's my point. As you said, we've seen this before, but she's taking it to a different place. And Scoot McNary is always great. He's a cop from the old days who's sort of helping her out when he sees how damaged she is. And Lola Pettigrew is great. She's scary. She has reasons for what she's doing, but she tortures her victims in a very chilling way.

24:42Ryan Lattanzio:Well, on that note, Anne, I think we've got our special guest on the line. So let's bring him on.

24:47Anne Thompson:Welcome. Ben Steinberg is from Save Your Cinema. Most of us have heard that he helped to save the Cinerama Dome and the Arclight, which were finally sold to Sony last month and will be operated by Alamo Drafthouse. But this came after many starts and stops. I mean, I was following him, of course, on Twitter, and he just kept at it. He kept at it and he kept at it. And he was hammering away at the Decourian Corporation that kept promising to reopen in 2022. This is after the pandemic, obviously, in 2023, then 2025. and it was like it was never going to happen. And meanwhile, in terms of Hollywood moviegoers, people in the industry and all the people who go to movies in LA, they were moving over to the AMC or the Grove or wherever, you know?

25:35Anne Thompson:So this is going to be interesting to see if they can bring it all back. Ben, you really made this happen and I have to applaud you. I mean, the Arclight was once the highest grossing theater in the country and you kind of turned it around.

25:49Ryan Lattanzio:Thank you. Everyone in LA has been desperate for this venue to reopen. I'm someone who, I left New York City in October 2020. And obviously, Arclight was a huge part of my life, living in LA for nine years or whatever it was. And then the final scoop of dirt on the coffin of me potentially returning was the theater not reopening. So I'm really happy from the ramparts afar. So Ben, you've been mounting this grassroots campaign for years to help reopen the Dome and the Arclight, starting in, I believe, 2021. So how did it start and why did you want to work to save these theaters? Yeah, so it started in March of 2021.

26:29Within like five minutes of finding out that the Cinerama Dome wouldn't be reopening, I created a petition to save it. And overnight it got like 30 ,000 signatures. And then I created other social media channels, Save Arclight and Save the Cinerama Dome. And on the theater and like public records requests and permits because I know they were pretty serious about reopening it at one time and then in 2023 or 24 that's when I found out that it wasn't reopening like the property manager told me and a few other sources told me that the reopening was officially canceled and then I looked into the ownership and I saw that they owned other historic movie palaces that have been abandoned for over 20 years.

27:18So I got kind of paranoid that they were planning the same thing with the dome. So I got a little more aggressive and I was just making sure everyone knew who was the owner of the property and how we can contact them to tell them that we all wanted to reopen.

27:37Anne Thompson:How did you bring Tom Rothman and Alamo together. How did that happen? Well, I signed an NDA, so I can't talk much about that part, but Sony has been extremely nice, and they contacted me before the public announcement, and they've been amazing so far, and I'm glad that they thought of me.

27:59Ryan Lattanzio:But you don't know what any of their plans are or anything. You can't talk about that. No, I can't talk. Sorry.

28:04Anne Thompson:So a few months before the sale was announced, you projected pictures of the owner's faces on the dome for two hours. How did you do that? And do you think that made a move to tip the scale for the reopening? Yes, it was always an idea of mine. I just never kind of executed it. And then eventually, I did a GoFundMe to hire a professional projection mapping engineer. And he brought four high-end projectors and reprojected just the owner's faces onto the dome, asking them to reopen. and then the police were called but the police told us like we're not being threatened with the citation or arrest they just wanted us to know that the ownership considers it like a form of escalation so we just stopped right away because we didn't mean to harm the owners we just immediately stopped and then also throughout like the five years of campaigning to get it to reopen we never received emails or phone calls back from the ownership but the next day after the projection I started to notice that executives from the company viewed my LinkedIn profile.

29:09Just a few weeks, or just like about a month later, there was a public hearing for the property that it sits on because they own the whole mall, the Dome Entertainment Center, and their property representative was asked about my projection and campaign, and she responded that the ownership took notice and extreme public interest in wanting the Cinerama Dome to reopen. and then after that i had posted on twitter that we were giving to kurian a deadline of august 20th 2026 this year to announce plans to reopen it or get someone to lease it and then just like two months later i got a call from sony that's wonderful you guys i don't live

29:52Ryan Lattanzio:in la anymore what's even happening at that mall anymore is it a total ghost town i remember there was like the floating sushi restaurant.

29:59Anne Thompson:They still have the gym and the restaurants. Well, Blue Note Jazz Club just opened there, and that's gotten a lot of foot traffic back. And they have like two theaters, and they have like celebrities performing weekly. So that's good. Oh, good. What's the timeline for this? Like how long is it going to take to get off the ground? Sony and Alamo Draft House said 2028. And that's all they've said so far. It was just one press release. And then I know Tom Rothman of Sony just did a variety interview, but he didn't provide any specific updates.

30:33Ryan Lattanzio:What do you feel like was the holdup in terms of getting the Arclight and the Dome reopened over all these years? I mean, why couldn't Takarian get it off the ground? It's a matter of money, but there's other factors at play. Well, they're primarily a real estate company now. They pivoted away from theatrical exhibition. So I definitely think it wasn't their number one priority. I can only speculate because they never responded to my emails or phone calls, so I never had direct communication with them. But I think it's just like a family-run company, and they might have had other priorities. Yeah, well, we're wary of studios controlling theaters, but we definitely don't want real estate companies owning and operating our theaters.

31:14Ryan Lattanzio:Most of them do.

31:16Anne Thompson:That's how it works. It's real estate. Right. Because I know Lemley Theaters, too, just recently bought all the property for their theaters. They won't open a movie theater where they don't own the land it sits on. That's smart. That's really smart. Well, look, you've gotten really involved in making this more than a campaign about these two theaters, but about other theaters as well, like the Bruin. Have many people approached you? Has this become your mission? Is this your job now? Rescuing theaters? Restoring theaters? Not really. I mean, I just started it for fun and like for passion. But it's definitely gotten a lot more serious now that I have like celebrities and different media following me.

32:01And then over the course of like the last three years, I've had Rui Pereira from Canada. He's a movie theater operator and he's wanted to open up in L.A. And then the Bruin Theater closed down. And so the perfect opportunity kind of came. So I helped him get in contact with the ownership of that theater. And then he just literally like a few weeks ago signed the lease officially. So we kind of have like a group of people just helping him out. We have Bill Counter from Los Angeles Theater Blog and then Peter Kunalis from the Bay Theater in Seal Beach. We're all working to reopen it and we're hoping by October it can open.

32:43Ryan Lattanzio:So you just have your sights on California right now. Do you hope to roll this out nationwide? Maybe let's just start small. You know, we don't have to think in that kind of a level of big picture yet. Well, I've received like over 100 DMs and like emails of like people asking me how I can help them, like even if like their theater is already open, how to promote their business or like how to get their abandoned theaters open. But I haven't had the time like to actually work on it. So I'm kind of just focusing on like Southern California. I mean, I'll see where things go. Well, you're also a California State University student and, you know, you're a filmmaker yourself and you had some acting roles, right?

33:23Ryan Lattanzio:You've been on TV and a couple of things.

33:24Anne Thompson:And you're like 27 years old? Yeah, I'm 26 and I got to be on two episodes of Brooklyn Nine-Nine and then Shining Veil with Courtney Cox. And I'm also a filmmaker. So I think eventually I can combine all of them together somehow.

33:41Ryan Lattanzio:There's something about Gen Z. I mean, first of all, this is the biggest demographic of ticket buyers as everybody knows now. But also what's great about younger film fans is that they're hugely invested in movie restorations and repertory movie going. And so I feel like that groundswell has probably helped bringing the Dome alive. You're probably hoping to keep that tradition alive too, as well as wanting the Dome and the Arclight to show first run movies. Yeah, definitely. I think that there's going to be a resurgence in specialty movie theaters. I know, sadly, a lot of multiplexes closed, like specifically in the suburbs of Los Angeles.

34:21So I think a lot of people are going to be seeking out more specialty venues, especially with like the success of the Odyssey and IMAX 70 millimeter. I think that's been amazing to see. So hopefully IMAX can expand more of their sites for 70 millimeter.

34:36Anne Thompson:To the Alex Theater, right? Yeah, I went to the Alex Theater in Glendale to watch that in 70 millimeter. And that was actually my first time there. and they haven't even screened a new movie since I think it was Terminator Judgment Day in the early to mid 90s. They said they're going to keep the projector permanently and they're going to show first run movies now. And then also I know there's a non-profit trying to get the Westlake Theater in like the MacArthur Park downtown LA area reopen. And also a few people have contacted me about getting the Warner Cinerama to reopen and that's been closed for like 30 years.

35:16I've also had a few other theaters that I'm interested in contacting or just at least exploring and getting to see if they're open to a conversation about showing movies.

35:27Anne Thompson:Well, keep up the good work, Ben. This is great stuff. Thank you. I'm proud of you. I feel maternal for some reason.

35:36Ryan Lattanzio:Oh, yeah. She always feels maternal.

35:40Anne Thompson:Good job. Thank you.

35:42Ryan Lattanzio:All right. Thank you so much, Ben. Thanks for coming on. Thank you.