Somehow, he knew that even with the popularity of television, people still wanted to see films in the theater. The then four Laemmle Theatre locations dwindled to one, and Max (Greg’s grandfather), solo at the helm, kept it running. In the 1950s, the diffusion of television sets to every living room in America sparked a shift in movie-going trends. The strength of both has been tested time and again. “Only in Theaters” is a revelation, showing how closely intertwined the roots of the Laemmle family tree and those of arthouse cinema in Los Angeles really is. And when he discovered that there were Laemmle elders-owner Bob, 85, and his aunt Alyse, now 106-alive and well, Sbarge took on the project with urgency.
This story was both attractive and familiar to Sbarge, who, himself, comes from a Ukrainian Jewish immigrant background. Sbarge had to know their stories beginning with Jewish immigrants Max and Kurt Laemmle leaving Nazi Germany, pursuing the American dream, and founding an indie film theater. There, he stumbled upon a wall, a clustered expanse of framed Laemmle family memories, smiling faces behind the business-people. The latter reason is why Sbarge went to Laemmle Royal (one of the Laemmle Theatres’ locations) nearly three years ago to talk to Greg and see if he could find a screening home for his newest project. This is what “Only In Theaters” reminds us is at stake for the film community, both for movie-goers needing solace and escape from the spinning world and for independent filmmakers needing a platform for their work.
Laemmle Theatre’s nine locations offer curated indie arthouse cinema and the all-time sacred ritual of popcorn, previews, and shared excitement with the strangers down the row, something Netflix algorithms only scratch the surface of. Only a year later, with MoviePass bankrupt and the cost of living on the rise, theaters began closing left and right, and Greg Laemmle was forced to consider selling. And everything seemed to be going downhill for the movie theater industry after the record-breaking, MoviePass-driven boom of 2018. When Director Raphael Sbarge’s “Only In Theaters” premiered at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival in 2021, it was a timely piece, a documentary chronicling the ups and downs of the Laemmle family business, an 85-year-old theater chain in Los Angeles trying to stay afloat-no small feat in the age of streaming.
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