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SPEAKER_13: Yeah, I grew up in Dallas. Favorite pastime was to go to the movies. That's literally all I ever did. I mean, if I had a nothing to do Saturday, which was often, I would see at least three or four movies a day for sure. I think I was nine or 10 when I knew I wanted to work at a movie theater, but I couldn't actually do it until I was like, I don't know, 14 or 15 when they start letting people have jobs. Chancellor became a projectionist, which if you love movies, is a dream job. When New Prince came in, Chancellor would watch them all the way through for hiccups and errors, staying late alone in the auditorium.
SPEAKER_06: But what he really loved was to see movies with other people. So he would go back to work on his days off and watch the same movies over again with a crowd. The more packed, the better.
SPEAKER_13: Man, Fridays and Saturday nights were my favorite.
SPEAKER_13: You don't know any of the people in that room, but you're all on a common ground of how hilarious a scene is or how scary the scene is or how awesome it is to see Jackie Chan jump through a ladder. You know what I mean?
SPEAKER_06: Oh my God, I miss going to the movies.
SPEAKER_13: It's like everybody is on one accord. You don't know that person, but you're sitting there laughing with them and having a good time. Theaters in the early 90s, they weren't usually all that nice, and Chancellor's was no exception. The auditoriums were cramped and narrow. The screen was dim.
SPEAKER_06: It was a very tiny, semi-raggedy theater, but in the raggedy way that's endearing, where it's like the sounds coming from one speaker.
SPEAKER_05: But one day, Chancellor heard about a new kind of theater on the other side of town. This is reporter Ryan Kyloth with the story of this intriguing new theater.
SPEAKER_05: Chancellor jumped in the car and drove downtown and then passed downtown, passed the business district, passed the hospitals, passed the strip malls with the car dealerships, and finally, down one of those long, empty roads that seems to anticipate suburbs that don't exist yet.
SPEAKER_13: You can see it from the highway. You know how a Walmart or a Sam's Club looks from the freeway? No one ever says they can't find it. So, yeah, first time pulling up to that, it's just like, wow. Like, you feel like, especially growing up in Dallas when you're not around, like, Hollywood stuff and anything like that. That's like the closest you get to, like, Hollywood. It's like a cinema theme park, and they made it feel like that all throughout. Chancellor could not believe how much better this theater was than the one where he worked.
SPEAKER_05: In fact, he would get off of work at his job where he saw movies for free and drive 40 minutes across town to pay for movies at this new place. It was like, oh, this is what's going on. Like, why are we not doing this at the other place?
SPEAKER_05: What Chancellor had discovered there in the suburban sprawl of Dallas was the AMC Grand 24. Built in 1995, it was the first of its kind, the first movie megaplex in the U.S. You know the kind, the gigantic neon big box stores of moviegoing.
SPEAKER_06: They're kind of easy to dismiss as sort of a tacky 90s invention. But megaplexes, and specifically this one in Dallas, upended the entire theater business and even changed the kinds of movies that got made in ways you might not imagine.
SPEAKER_05: The rise of the megaplex is pretty recent, but it's part of a pattern. The kinds of movies we watch has always been tied up with how we watch them and where.
SPEAKER_06: The peak of moviegoing in this country was the 1940s, when there really wasn't another game in town. Besides, I don't know, newspapers? Comic books? The old ballgame?
SPEAKER_05: And then television came along. The TV dinner 50s.
SPEAKER_06: As television kept viewers at home, movies competed by becoming more spectacular. The 1960s was the era of huge studio ethics. I'm Spartacus!
SPEAKER_08: I'm Spartacus!
SPEAKER_06: And the theaters got bigger and more luxurious as well. To see a movie at the time was to have an usher in a tuxedo hand you a printed program before guiding you to your seat.
SPEAKER_05: Well, yeah, I started out as an usher and you never left the auditorium.
SPEAKER_04: So whatever movie was playing, you knew every line, every inflection that the director intended. You got to know movies pretty well. Ted Mundorf's first job was at a single screen movie palace in the San Francisco suburbs in 1969.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, we had, I want to say somewhere between 1200 and 1700 seats.
SPEAKER_04: So it was huge. It was like you wouldn't even find anything like that today. Every movie was a spectacle that couldn't be recreated anywhere else.
SPEAKER_06: Back then, studios and theaters had a business arrangement where if a theater had a certain movie, nobody else in the area could play it.
SPEAKER_05: Seeing a film was kind of like seeing a painting or a Broadway show. It lived at one particular location and you had to go there.
SPEAKER_04: If you lived in the suburbs, you had to get in the car or get on the train and you had to go up to San Francisco to see the first run movie. And then afterwards, the movies would play later in the suburbs.
SPEAKER_05: In the early 70s, this began to change. Studios realized there was enough demand to release movies in the suburbs and the city simultaneously.
SPEAKER_06: But with just a single screen in most theaters, playing two movies meant half as many showtimes for each one, which led to the next logical step, creating more screens.
SPEAKER_04: You had the single screens and then you had the cutting up of the single screens. So you had these terrible configurations, these bowling alley type auditoriums that resulted from the slicing up of existing movie theaters. Ted Mundorf's enormous single screen was carved into two and then four long, narrow auditoriums.
SPEAKER_06: And here and there, some little four and six plexus were built now that there were enough films to sustain them. But as moviegoing became a less exclusive experience, it became a less exclusive experience.
SPEAKER_05: No more tuxedos. As the 70s rolled into the 80s, theaters went from swanky to sticky. Any Coke that ever spilled there is still there today.
SPEAKER_04: And this cramped, grungy sort of top floor of the mall movie experience was keeping people away.
SPEAKER_05: Ticket sales dropped 15 percent in the mid 80s. Meanwhile, home video was taking off, so people were staying home with their televisions again.
SPEAKER_05: And the industry took notice. Theater owners knew the whole experience needed an upgrade. If people were going to go to the movies less, we need to make it a knockout experience every time.
SPEAKER_06: Enter Stan Durwood.
SPEAKER_05: Back in the 60s, Stan had taken over the family business, a little Kansas City chain called Durwood Theaters, and carved up their big screens to show more films. By the 80s, he'd built a few dinky little four plexus. And eventually, he changed the name of his company to American Multicinema, AMC.
SPEAKER_06: Stan was known in the industry as a rule breaker and provocateur.
SPEAKER_16: He was larger than life. That was a long pause. He was a complex man. Nora Dashwood worked for Stan at AMC for 22 years, and she says he identified the problems in the industry before anyone else.
SPEAKER_05: He realized upgrading theaters and offering people more choices was the only way forward. He'd been to Belgium and seen a huge cinema with 25 screens. So he comes back from this trip. He says, this is the future. This is what we have to do.
SPEAKER_16: The finance team ran the numbers and said, no, this is a terrible idea.
SPEAKER_06: You will never sell enough tickets and popcorn to afford this thing.
SPEAKER_16: Increased rents, increased construction costs. And it just didn't work. The math didn't work. Stan Durwood did not care. He bet the company on Megaplexes.
SPEAKER_05: The AMC grand would be first. But before it even opened, 30 other Megaplex deals were locked. Contracts signed, ground being broken. When he got an idea, that idea got materialized.
SPEAKER_16: What would have happened if the bet had not paid off?
SPEAKER_05: AMC would have gone bankrupt.
SPEAKER_16: Nora was there in Dallas for the grand opening VIP party, and she says the energy at the event was nervous.
SPEAKER_06: It was like, OK, you built it. Now is anyone going to come?
SPEAKER_06: Oh, they came. In fact, they clocked out of their jobs at other movie theaters and came.
SPEAKER_13: Walking in always put a smile on my face because they go all out posters and banners and standees. That's Chancellor Haynes again, who used to drive to the grand from his job across town.
SPEAKER_05: This place was everything his theater wasn't. It was brand new. The seats had new car smell. There were arcade games, neon everything, multiple concession stands, enormous displays and props. And then there were the auditoriums themselves. Twenty four of them.
SPEAKER_13: The screens were massive. Even the smaller theaters had bigger screens than the theaters that I was used to. Chancellor wasn't the only person going out of their way to get to this theater.
SPEAKER_10: I know there were six of us that went six guys. We all piled into like an 84 Thunderbird. I can remember that more than 20 years later. Kevin Morris still remembers the first time he went to the AMC Grand 24.
SPEAKER_05: It was a well over an hour drive. Was it worth it? Oh, yeah.
SPEAKER_10: Well, for me, it was because I actually got a seat. It was packed. I mean, it was there was a lot of people there. And at two o'clock in the morning, if you can believe that for a movie.
SPEAKER_06: AMC expected the grand to attract eight hundred thousand visitors in its first year. They got three million. By this point, Ted Mundorf, the guy who used to work as an usher back in the 60s, was film buyer at a theater company in L.A.
SPEAKER_05: Naturally, he kept an eye on the competition. He says the theater industry is unusual in this way because we share our numbers.
SPEAKER_04: So if you're running a movie theater in Los Angeles, you can see the numbers, the box office results of an individual theater in Dallas, Texas.
SPEAKER_05: Out of curiosity, how were you getting those reports? Were those emails? Was it too early? Were you getting faxes? Oh, no, this these were delivered, hand delivered to you, big chunks of paper like a newspaper, except thicker.
SPEAKER_04: And they were delivered on a daily basis to the offices. Ted would glance through these box office reports with his morning coffee.
SPEAKER_06: And he noticed that this one theater in Dallas was just going gangbusters. So you're seeing these numbers about the AMC grand that are just insane.
SPEAKER_05: Then what? Then we put a bunch of people on the plane and flew down and looked at the theater.
SPEAKER_12: Refreshments are available in the lobby. And please keep our theater clean by disposing of trash and specified containers. Enjoy the show.
SPEAKER_05: What Ted's team saw in Dallas, it wasn't just the big screens and big sound or the awe-inspiring lobby. There was something else bringing people to the AMC Grand. Stadium seating. Staggered seating on risers, steep risers all the way up to the rafters like a Roman Colosseum.
SPEAKER_06: We're used to this now, but at the time it was revolutionary. Before the AMC Grand, theaters had floors that were just ever so slightly sloped. If you got the wrong person in front of you, the movie was ruined. With stadium seating, every seat had an unobstructed view.
SPEAKER_05: Someone's wearing a hat in front of you. Didn't matter. Someone was six foot 10 in front of you. Didn't matter. You were high enough above them that you could see the screen.
SPEAKER_05: Ted knew exactly what he had to do. Back in Los Angeles, his company was about to start construction on a new theater.
SPEAKER_04: I mean, plans were done on this particular project and been approved by the city of Los Angeles. We were about to start breaking ground and we immediately halted it. We knew at that point that stadium seating was the direction you had to go in if you were going to build new theaters.
SPEAKER_06: Ted's intuition was right. As megaplexes went up all over the country, the theaters around them collapsed.
SPEAKER_16: So it was like a nuclear bomb in that when that thing opened, you could draw this circular ring around it and all the sloped floor regular movie theaters around it lost anywhere from 40 to 80 percent of their business overnight. Overnight.
SPEAKER_06: One by one, theater companies rushed to get in on the megaplex trend and took on a ton of debt trying to build these things. Were there people who said, eh, seems like a fad, I'm not going to bother?
SPEAKER_05: One of the largest companies in the country, that was their attitude. The president actually told me as he was building a theater, said, we don't believe in stadium seating theaters.
SPEAKER_04: What happened to them? They went bankrupt. The business has grown to 26000 screens across the country, even at a time when video rentals and cable channels keep some fans at home.
SPEAKER_00: Megaplexes seem to pull moviegoers back to the big screen. Kelly O'Donnell, NBC News, Los Angeles.
SPEAKER_05: That report was from early 1996, just a few months after the grand opened. Within six years, the number of movie screens in the U.S. increased by 50 percent. In six years.
SPEAKER_06: And this is where you really begin to see the architecture influencing the art. Because these new movie palaces didn't just pull moviegoers to the screen, they pulled movies to the screen.
SPEAKER_05: When there's more screens to play, then you essentially need more content to play on them.
SPEAKER_14: Ben Fritz is an editor at The Wall Street Journal and wrote a book about the 21st century movie business.
SPEAKER_05: He says between the rise of DVDs and all this new screen real estate, film studios cranked their production up to 11. And films got more varied as well. A larger share of them started coming from original ideas instead of sequels or remakes or adaptations.
SPEAKER_14: All the movie studios will always start with the safest bets. They'll always start with Home Alone 3. But eventually they run out of those, right? And then they still need to make more. Then they're forced to just take bets on that weird original spec script that's been sitting around that everybody thought was kind of cool, but nobody really wanted to take a risk on making.
SPEAKER_06: For the first time in a long time, the major studios were throwing money at new ideas and new directors. Indie-flavored movies, the type of which used to live only in small art house theaters, started getting wider release.
SPEAKER_03: When it comes to the big box theaters, I always embrace them. Jack Foley was a distributor at Miramax.
SPEAKER_05: That's the person who sells movies from the studios to the theater owners. He distributed films like Pulp Fiction and Trainspotting. I'm not running a museum. I want this to be a business.
SPEAKER_03: And you want this to play out to the masses. You want to corrupt the youth of America. Foley says the Megaplex was a Trojan horse for slipping strange, subversive movies into unsuspecting suburbs across America.
SPEAKER_05: If the latest teen movie was sold out, kids might end up seeing...
SPEAKER_01: Malkovich, Malkovich. Malkovich, Malkovich. Malkovich. Malkovich, Malkovich. Malkovich.
SPEAKER_03: Being John Malkovich, for your information, got into 630 theaters at the widest. That was a pretty good break, because being John Malkovich was on the border of incomprehensible. I used to say to Charlie Kaufman, hey, next time make your film linear. Yeah, I mean, I remember walking out of being John Malkovich in theaters, going, what the hell was that?
SPEAKER_05: The New Jersey Turnpike. What about me seeing you seeing me seeing you in court?
SPEAKER_06: Me and John Malkovich came out in 1999, a year that lots of people call one of the best movie years ever.
SPEAKER_05: Can you just rattle off for me as many movies from 1999 as you can name from memory?
SPEAKER_07: Absolutely. OK, so Fight Club, The Matrix, Office Space, Three Kings, Election, The Sixth Sense, The Blair Witch Project, Notting Hill.
SPEAKER_05: Brian Raftery actually wrote a book about 1999 called Best Movie Year Ever.
SPEAKER_07: You have Being John Malkovich, you have Eyes Wide Shut, you have The Iron Giant, Boys Don't Cry, The Virgin Suicides, The Best Man. That's like the first wave. Drop Dead Gorgeous, But I'm a Cheerleader, American Movie, American Pie.
SPEAKER_06: Run Lola Run, Go, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Topsy Turvy, Girl Interrupted.
SPEAKER_06: There are so many more.
SPEAKER_05: Not only did all these great movies get made, they found an audience. You could go into a Megaplex and say, OK, there's not just 14 movies playing, there's 14 different kinds of movies playing.
SPEAKER_07: And which one am I in the mood for right now?
SPEAKER_06: But this mini golden age of interesting, unusual original films, it didn't last that long.
SPEAKER_05: Did it feel like in the late 90s, did it feel like a bursting of a bubble was coming?
SPEAKER_04: Well, we knew structurally we were in trouble. The Megaplex building craze had been so fast and furious that now there were just too many theaters and nobody wanted the old dingy ones anymore.
SPEAKER_06: But there was still rent to pay on those buildings. So you had, you know, all these old theaters and that's what caused the bankruptcy or bankruptcies.
SPEAKER_04: I think there are 12 of them. Hollywood is coming off a record holiday weekend and appears to be headed for a record year.
SPEAKER_11: But ironically, more movie screens will close this year than open. As the theater bubble began to pop, the creative one did, too.
SPEAKER_05: With fewer screens, there were fewer reasons to take chances on, you know, a weird story about a portal into the brain of John Malkovich. Instead of showing all different kinds of movies on lots of different screens, exhibitors realized that they could just play one blockbuster like Pirates of the Caribbean on half the screens with a new show starting every 20 minutes.
SPEAKER_04: What it did is it created this huge attention to opening weekend. Studios love to break blockbusters wide, opening on as many screens as possible.
SPEAKER_05: That way they could rake in the cash and brag about the best opening weekend in box office history, which would generate more headlines and buzz and business. So if you're a film buyer, you get a call from the distributor and say, hey, you're opening Batman or you're opening Pearl Harbor or you're opening whatever it is.
SPEAKER_04: I want two screens. I want three screens. I want four screens. And sometimes those were conditional. In other words, you weren't going to get the movie unless you could guarantee four screens on Pearl Harbor.
SPEAKER_06: As blockbusters took up more and more screens, smaller indie movies got squeezed out for a while. Booming DVD sales provided another platform for oddball movies with a niche audience. But as DVDs disappeared later in the aughts, the major studios leaned more and more on their big franchise blockbusters, which is why every new movie these days is another Spider-Man sequel or Fast and the Furious 25.
SPEAKER_14: What's hard to imagine that's coming back from now is that, you know, I think movie theaters have become a place very much almost exclusively for these big budget franchise films. To what extent do you feel like really it's the business model that is the valve that turns the creativity on or off?
SPEAKER_14: I think sometimes people look back and say, oh, there must be some kind of cultural movement that made Americans who are interested in indie films in the 90s, for example, or something was happening in the culture that we wanted to see, kind of Marvel franchise films starting in 2010. No, it's really the explanation is that the economics of the movie business changed in that time, and that changed the types of movies the studios were making.
SPEAKER_05: Now, the economics of the movie business are changing even more radically. Theater companies were in trouble even before COVID. Attendance was dropping as people turned to Netflix with more and more bingeable content. During the pandemic, the industry has been living out a real life experiment people have wondered about for years but never tested.
SPEAKER_06: What happens when new movies go straight to streaming or released simultaneously in theaters and at home?
SPEAKER_05: If we can get them just as easily at home, which movies will get us to go out to theaters?
SPEAKER_04: The smaller the film, the more in danger it is. Ted Mundorf thinks the big action blockbusters will still get people out, but the dramas and comedies and weird little art films might be relegated to your TV.
SPEAKER_05: Maybe by this summer, we can safely go back to theaters and studios can start to gather data on what kinds of movies still have the power to pull us out.
SPEAKER_06: In the meantime, if you need just a little fix, if you just want to remember what it's even like to see a movie with a bunch of people, let me recommend these audience reaction videos on YouTube recorded in the before times. There's one that someone filmed in a movie theater as a very passionate audience was watching Avengers Endgame. In this scene towards the end of the movie, there's this one big battle where it looks like all hope is lost. But slowly, all the heroes of the entire Marvel Universe come to the rescue one by one. And the audience just goes wild.
SPEAKER_05: This clip reminds me of a feeling that I've almost forgotten about watching movies in a packed theater. It truly is something you just can't replace. Megaplex, art house, full lie down recliners with the waiter service, fold out chairs in the back of some art gallery. It doesn't matter. I just want to sit in a dark room with a bright wall and cheer at the same stuff with a bunch of strangers.
SPEAKER_06: Spike Jones and Quentin Tarantino weren't the only filmmakers trying to make it big back in the 90s. There was also a motley gang of dentists after the break. The International Rescue Committee works in more than 40 countries to serve people whose lives have been upended by conflict and disaster. Over 110 million people are displaced around the world, and the IRC urgently needs your help to meet this unprecedented need. The IRC aims to respond within 72 hours after an emergency strikes, and they stay as long as they are needed. Some of the IRC's most important work is addressing the inequalities facing women and girls, ensuring safety from harm, improving health outcomes, increasing access to education, improving economic well-being, and ensuring women and girls have the power to influence decisions that affect their lives. Generous people around the world give to the IRC to help families affected by humanitarian crises with emergency supplies. Your generous donation will give the IRC steady, reliable support, allowing them to continue their ongoing humanitarian efforts even as they respond to emergencies. Donate today by visiting rescue.org slash rebuild. Donate now and help refugee families in need. If you need to design visuals for your brand, you know how important it is to stay on brand. Brands need to use their logos, colors, and fonts in order to stay consistent. It's what makes them stand out. The online design platform Canva makes it easy for everyone to stay on brand. With Canva, you can keep your brand's fonts, logos, colors, and graphics right where you design presentations, websites, videos, and more. Drag and drop your logo into a website design or click to get your social post colors on brand. Create brand templates to give anyone on your team a design head start. You can save time resizing social posts with Canva magic resize. If your company decides to rebrand, replace your logo and other brand imagery across all your designs in just a few clicks. If you're a designer, Canva will save you time on the repetitive tasks. And if you don't have a design resource at your fingertips, just design it yourself. With Canva, you don't need to be a designer to design visuals that stand out and stay on brand. Start designing today at Canva.com, the home for every brand.
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SPEAKER_05: Yeah, it's a little sub piece of this whole Megaplex rise and fall saga. One of my favorite people that I talked to throughout this thing. So the story of the Megaplex that we just went through, right? It's this new technological invention that opened up room for all these new movies to be shown and new kinds of movies spreading across America. Interesting unusual ones. But they weren't all being John Malkovich and Fight Club and The Matrix. You know, this boom in movie making also created some other kinds of movies, shall we say? Not so indie classics.
SPEAKER_06: Exactly, exactly. Because this was a gold rush of movie making. So lots of people got into the movie making business, including somewhat famously, a group of dentists led by this guy.
SPEAKER_05: My name is Jim Kreiser. I live in Lake Forest, Illinois.
SPEAKER_15: Okay, so what's his story?
SPEAKER_05: At some point in the mid 90s, he is living in the Midwest, you know, in his words, fighting the war on Tuesday. And one night he and his friend decided to drive into Chicago for this charity auction that they'd heard about. So they go and it just so happens that that night the Bulls have a playoff game and the charity auction is empty. It's like Jim and his friend and like three other guys in this giant hotel ballroom. And Jim gets one of the grand prizes for a steal. It is a walk on part for his wife in a certain TV show that's filmed in front of a live studio audience. Oh my goodness, that would be a dream come true. I guess we should say for people who are quite young or maybe don't have Netflix, that is the theme song to Cheers.
SPEAKER_05: So this happens like a few months later, Jim and his wife fly out to LA to the Paramount lot where Cheers is filmed. Jim gets to sit in the bleachers in the live studio audience. And my wife got to sit at the bar. She got to meet the stars. And it turned out that Ted Danson had just had a root canal. And she says, well, my husband's an endodontist. Are you having a problem?
SPEAKER_15: He says, I am actually. So she waves to me down to the bar area and I'm standing there sticking my finger in Ted Danson's mouth.
SPEAKER_05: So incredible. Like Jim is having the best night. So he is then very primed after the break for when this guy he'd met in the audience sidles up to him later and says like, hey, man, you're a you're a successful endodontist.
SPEAKER_05: You ever think about producing movies? I thought this was the coolest thing ever. Very naive. And it truly was just like lambs being led to a slaughter.
SPEAKER_15: So this guy that he met talks him through the basics of producing movies and how much money you need and the work involved.
SPEAKER_05: And Jim goes back home to the Midwest and starts passing the hat around. Well, I just say I was in practice for 15 years at that point.
SPEAKER_15: I had hundreds of friends who had a lot of money and it was the golden age of dentistry. And these guys were in their 40s. One was an orthopedic surgeon. One was a general dentist. Another was an orthodontist. Yeah.
SPEAKER_05: So this motley crew puts their money together and they make a movie called Fever Lake. Oh, I'm going to watch it. Yeah, please don't. I'm so sorry, Jim. Did you watch it? Steve, hurry! Hurry up! Steve, I don't think it helped much.
SPEAKER_06: So this seems like a kind of typical Cabin in the Woods slasher type movie. Yes. We hired Mario Lopez, who was at that time, which is coming off Saved by the Bell.
SPEAKER_15: And he was looking for something to do. Corey Haim, who was between, you know, between rehab and Mario became a good friend of mine, actually. I've lost touch with him over the years, but I'm sure we would rekindle a lot of memories if I ran across him.
SPEAKER_05: Fever Lake, not a huge hit, obviously, but it got a lot of publicity. So we didn't deserve that kind of publicity.
SPEAKER_15: But at the time, there were very few independent production companies made out of dentists from Wisconsin. We had a big premiere downtown. It made the front page. And so Jim's happy for the publicity and all.
SPEAKER_05: You know, he gets it. People think it's cute that they're dentists, et cetera. But also he had his limits. The Wall Street Journal in particular came to me one day and said, we'll interview you in your office. And would you sit by your dental chair with a cigar in your hand?
SPEAKER_15: I said, absolutely not. I said, you know, I'm above that. I'm not I'm sorry. You know, I'd rather not do the article.
SPEAKER_06: I like that he stood up for himself. I like that he drew a line in the sand and said, you know, like, you can have your fun, but I will not participate in it to this extent. But that that's that's great. Well, good for him. And Fever Lake made money.
SPEAKER_05: But it was so bad, it was culty and people picked up on it and it wouldn't cost us that much money. So we got out of it pretty well.
SPEAKER_15: The problem was it's a bit like going to Vegas and winning for the first time because these guys were like, great, let's keep going.
SPEAKER_05: So they kept making movies and they became the dentist production company.
SPEAKER_15: Flying back and forth, doing root canals one day and going out and doing producing a movie the next day. Not every film did as well.
SPEAKER_05: But Jim says they didn't lose money on a single film. So, yeah, Jim's feeling pretty good about himself at this point.
SPEAKER_15: Who do you think you're dealing with here, baby? You know, at that point I was I had become this dental mogul in Hollywood.
SPEAKER_05: Even though in the early 2000s, just as this Megaplex bubble is bursting and frankly, a lot is changing in the whole industry. Jim found things harder to navigate. So he took a long break from the movie industry and just focused on the day job. Although in the past several years, Jim is back at it. Recently, one of his movies won a BAFTA for best feature in Scotland.
SPEAKER_06: It was like, I think before you told me the story, I would think it's just a disaster to get involved in producing movies. But now I'm kind of like, hey, maybe I should get into producing movies. Well, thanks, Ryan. This is really fun. Yeah, I'm so glad we got to tell Jim's story.
SPEAKER_08: 99% Invisible was produced this week by Ryan Kylof, edited by Katie Mingle, mixed by Amita Ganatra, music by our director of sound Sean Real.
SPEAKER_06: Delaney Hall is a senior producer. Kurt Kohlstedt is the digital director. The rest of the team is Emmett Fitzgerald, Joe Rosenberg, Christopher Johnson, Abby Madon, Chris Berube, Vivien Ley, Sofia Klatsker and me, Roman Mars. Special thanks to Charles Ackland at Concordia University for his help and time on this story. His book, Screen Traffic, was a great resource. Thanks also to Bill Banowski, Dan Jenks, Michael Schomburg and Sharon Waxman. We are a project of 91.7 KALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. We are a part of Radio-Topia from PRX, a collective of the best, most innovative shows in all of podcasting. Discover, listen and support them all at Radio-Topia.fm. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars and the show at 99pi.org. We're on Instagram and Reddit, too. But we have every episode of 99% Invisible playing on over 400 screens at 99pi.org.
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