The Room with a Memory

I didn’t expect to feel what I felt walking into the Alex Theatre last night. I went to see Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey in 70mm. I left thinking about Walt Disney, Bing Crosby, and what it actually means to make something worth showing up for. The Alex opened in 1925 in Glendale, California. For decades it was one of Hollywood’s most storied preview houses — the kind of room where studios brought their films before they met the world, to see how real people reacted before it was too late to change anything.

Walt Disney used to screen early cuts of his animated shorts here in the 1930s. He’d sit in the back row, watching the audience instead of the screen. He wasn’t studying the film. He was studying the room. He wanted to know what landed, what fell flat, what made strangers lean forward in the dark. Bing Crosby reportedly paced the lobby before a screening of Going My Way in 1944. He was worried audiences wouldn’t buy him as a movie priest. They did. It went on to win him an Oscar. Ben-Hur played here in reserved-seat 70mm in the early ’60s. Then in 1991, Terminator 2 became the last film projected from an actual reel before the theater closed its movie house chapter — silent for 35 years.

Until last night.

The Alex just completed a $500,000 restoration, installing new 70mm projection equipment — real film, real light, real grain. The Odyssey became the first film to run there since T2. Think about that for a moment. The same room where Disney watched audiences discover Mickey. The same lobby where Crosby paced before his Oscar. Now running Nolan on actual celluloid again in 2026. Sitting in that theater, I felt something I don’t feel watching content on a screen at home. Not nostalgia exactly — something more present than that. An awareness that the experience happening around me couldn’t be replicated anywhere else, by anyone else, at any other time. It was specific. It was physical. It was shared. 1,400 strangers in a room, all looking at the same thing, breathing the same air, feeling the same moments land in real time. No algorithm decided what came next. No one was scrolling. The room had our full attention — and we had each other’s.

I’m the founder of Penalty Productions. I’ve been making films since I was a kid inMichigan, shooting in the backyard with no budget and no permission and no idea what I was doing except that I couldn’t stop. I’m still making films. I’m still convinced they matter. But I’m building in a moment when that conviction requires some defense. The conversation in 2026 is dominated by AI-generated content, infinite scroll, algorithmic feeds, and the race to capture thirty seconds of someone’s fractured attention before they swipe to the next thing. The economics of the industry are shifting in ways that make the theatrical experience feel increasingly fragile — something to be preserved rather than assumed. And yet.

A century-old theater in Glendale just invested half a million dollars in the opposite direction. Not in digital. Not in streaming infrastructure. In 70mm. In real film. In the idea that people still want to leave their houses, sit in the dark with strangers, and watch something enormous together.

I keep thinking about Disney in the back row.

He wasn’t watching the film because he already knew the film. He was watching what the film did to people. He was studying the relationship between the screen and the room — the invisible conversation happening between a story and the audience receiving it. That relationship is what I’m chasing with every project Penalty makes. Not views. Not streams. Not engagement metrics. The thing that happens in a room when a story lands exactly right and 1,400 strangers feel it simultaneously. You can’t replicate that on a phone. You can’t automate it. You can’t A/B test your way to it. It requires a filmmaker who believes in it enough to fight for it, and an audience willing to show up and surrender to it.

Some infrastructure is worth preserving. Some experiences are worth showing up for.

And some stories are worth telling on the biggest screen you can find.