Two weeks before tickets went on sale, the Alex Theatre couldn’t sell a Universal picture. Its ticketing system didn’t talk to Fandango and couldn’t report grosses to Comscore, the reporting the big studios require. So Miles Williams and his associate director, Ida, built a new one, seat map and onboarding included, in about fourteen days, by his account without a break. Then The Odyssey went on sale in 70mm and nothing happened. Williams ended up out front on Brand Boulevard, under the neon tower, wringing his hands.
Of all the weird misfit shows that I do in my theater that need all this attention and marketing, I never thought that I’d be struggling to sell tickets for The Odyssey.
He had no marketing budget for it. Why would he? It was the biggest movie in the world. The audience for Christopher Nolan existed. The audience for the Alex didn’t, not yet. Los Angeles had simply forgotten the building was a movie house.
A Studio Picture Sold Like a Cult Show
So he did what he does for his misfits: press, a special opening night, a reason to show up on a particular date. In his telling, the Alex finished third in the country for 70mm that first week, behind the two other big-capacity houses, the Music Box in Chicago and Westwood’s Directors Village, the old Fox Village, now owned by a filmmakers’ collective that includes Nolan and open for the summer before renovation. By week two the Alex was first. The theater announced in August that it was the top-grossing standard 70mm venue for the film in the U.S., and the run that opened July 17 was extended through August 20. It was the Alex’s first first-run studio release in 35 years; the last was Terminator 2: Judgment Day in 1991.
Williams tells this as an embarrassment that turned out fine. Listen to how he fixed it, though, and it’s the identical method he uses for a Betty Boop birthday party. That’s the real argument of the episode, and he never says it: the tentpole and the niche show are the same job. Nothing in the room sells itself. Not the format, not the director, not a hundred-year-old marquee. An audience gets built one show at a time, and a culture is just an audience that’s formed the habit.
The Building Talks First
The Alex is his sixth theater and his fifth historic one. He started in his twenties at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts in its first seasons, came downtown nearly thirty years ago to help run the Los Angeles Conservancy’s Last Remaining Seats screenings, and from there opened the Orpheum. He calls what he brings “launch energy.” He’s a commercial operator, not a nonprofit, and his clients have always been the owners of the buildings. At the Alex, that’s the City of Glendale. He took over after the pandemic, and arrived, in his phrase, with a listening heart.
What does this community need? What is the history of this place? What does it whisper to me in the dark? What does it want to be?
The walls answered, and so did the people who remembered them. The Alex opened in 1925 and spent decades as a first-run palace. Walt Disney previewed cartoons there when his studio sat nearby on Hyperion. Williams has the photographs from Ben-Hur, and says the original Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark both ran there. It wanted to be a movie house again.
First it needed repair. On his initial walkthrough, the old facilities man kept pointing: this is broken, this needs fixing, this, this, this. Williams likens it to the inspection after you’ve already bought the house. He told the city flatly that it had to invest in a building on the National Register of Historic Places, one whose maintenance had been deferred for twenty years. In the first week, the air conditioning in the basement dressing rooms died and Glendale spent a hundred grand fixing it. By his count the city has put in about $2.5 million over five years. The projection was his own bet: the Glendale News-Press reported his company spent roughly $500,000 on new 35mm and 70mm projection and audio, housed in a custom booth built as a temporary installation on steel deck platforming. The house that topped the country in 70mm runs its film from a booth designed to come back out.
Film You Can’t Count in Pixels
His case for the format is practical. Nolan shot the first feature made entirely on IMAX film cameras. IMAX runs that stock horizontally, which buys a taller frame; traditional 70mm runs vertically, the way 35mm always has, on a frame he describes as about four times larger. You don’t count it in pixels, he says, because it isn’t digital, and you can feel the difference.
He makes the same argument about physical media, and it’s the same argument about the room. He sees Gen Z collecting discs and records, and he reads it as a kind of presence he likens to mindfulness: the phone goes away, nothing auto-plays next, and you’ve put one thing in the player because that’s what you’re doing tonight. A print, a disc, and a 100-year-old building have one thing in common. Each exists in a single place and asks you to commit to it.
Niche Is the Business Model
As a concert promoter he learned that you sometimes charge more down front so people can afford the back. Studio films are the front rows. They pay for the space to give a filmmaker from Lebanon, who shot in both Glendale and Lebanon, a premiere, or to roll out a red carpet for Disney Imagineer Bob Gurr at the premiere of Bob Gurr: Living by Design.
Asked how to curate, he doesn’t talk about taste. He talks about niche. Independent presenters, some of them partners for 25 years, fill his calendar, and specific crowds are where he wins: the Betty Boop Birthday Bash in August, with Fleischer footage from her 1930s heyday and cosplay all over the theater’s Instagram, and on November 11, Claudio Simonetti’s Goblin playing the score live to Dario Argento’s 1982 Tenebrae. A goth-rock band on stage under a giallo. What a night, he says.
His test for any pitch is readiness. Downstairs alone holds almost 700 seats, so a show that can draw two, three, four hundred people will feel alive. One that can’t should grow somewhere smaller first. He’s booked too early before, and watched 85 people come when he’d planned on five times that. He calls it soul crushing.
The Alex belongs beside two films it never names. Tsai Ming-liang’s Goodbye, Dragon Inn is the 85-person night stretched to feature length: the Fu He Grand in Taipei on its last day, King Hu’s Dragon Inn on the screen, a leaking roof, almost nobody in the seats, and two of the original film’s stars in the audience, agreeing afterward that nobody remembers them. Joe Dante’s Matinee is the cure. John Goodman’s Lawrence Woolsey, a William Castle type, rolls into Key West during the Cuban Missile Crisis and wires a theater with Rumble-Rama for the premiere of Mant! Woolsey knows what Williams learned on the sidewalk. The picture is half the show.
I Am Spartacus
Asked what print he’d pull from a vault for a brand-new audience, he answers with a memory instead: the first big-screen film he ever saw, with his father. Spartacus, Kirk Douglas’s 1960 epic, which Stanley Kubrick took over after Anthony Mann was dropped a few weeks into the shoot. Williams didn’t see it first-run, but he was old enough to understand the finale, the captured slaves rising one after another to claim the name and die for the man who’d given them their freedom. It hit him so hard that “I am Spartacus” became his first internet handle.
Look at what that scene is. A crowd of strangers, each one deciding to stand at the same moment as the others. That’s an audience, and it’s what Williams has spent five years coaxing back onto Brand Boulevard. He says his favorite thing in film is the moment you can only get from a good storyteller and a good cinematographer. He leaves out the third ingredient, the one his whole career supplies: a room full of people to have it with.
