Temple of Film: 100 Years of the Egyptian Theatre

A great movie...

will take you places you could not imagine.

And if it happens at a temple,

a building dedicated to it,

the experience is transcendental.

Opera has palaces,

the ballet has palaces,

painting has museums.

Cinema deserves that magical realm,

which was the great movie palaces.

Like any other holy building,

you go to a theater

to recapture a spiritual moment.

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We're storytelling animals.

Every notion we have,

notion of love,

country, belonging,

they come from a story.

And the only art that can encompass any human experience is cinema.

When we can experience a movie

in the environment that you can surrender yourself,

it engulfs you,

heals, elevates,

connects with your soul.

So, for me, the Egyptian is a temple.

Many times I've been at the bottom.

I'm about to quit the job...

...of life, and I go, "This is meaningless."

And cinema has lifted me up.

With the right drama, the right horror movie,

the right cartoon.

Can be a Capra.

Merry Christmas!

Can be a Keaton.

And it just shakes you.

Come on!

Raging Bull.

Thin Red Line...

...Road to Perdition.

Those are the movies that stick with me the most.

It feels so real to me,

like I feel like I'm now in this magical world.

That's actually happening.

The experience of going into the dark with strangers

and having this group hallucination,

and coming out the other end of it a different person.

It is a group experience,

and it gives you permission to feel it.

The theater itself, the space at which your film is shown,

all feeds into how people are relating to your film.

Oh wow!

With the Egyptian, you go in there, and it's like, "Game on."

The whole experience is the show,

including walking up to the facade of the theater,

taking you back to the imagined glamour of Hollywood past.

It's a grand outing to a different reality.

You are transported to a place that has,

if not great architecture by the historical accuracy,

certainly grand architecture.

The bravado of the theater is felt.

You're engulfed in that whole environment.

As a person who completely believes in spirits and ghosts

and energy contained within spaces,

it's like those buildings have memory.

My father was actually there

on the opening night of the Egyptian Theatre.

It was Robin Hood.

And he said, "I saw Douglas Fairbanks."

It was a big night. It was a very special thing.

I fell in love with it.

It became my favorite place in Hollywood to see a movie.

I would tear 1,316 tickets every night.

It was fun.

It was exciting to be a part of all that, especially the premieres.

The red carpet, the flowers.

Most of the stars,

Marlon Brando, and all those people, they would come to the theater.

We were proud to be a part of something that was special.

Ben-Hur, opening at the Egyptian Theatre.

It's already proclaimed

as the entertainment experience of a lifetime.

There were lots of great premieres that happened there in the '60s...

How do you do?

...and the '70s, like Alien...

... the early '80s.

I drove by the Egyptian.

The building had big holes.

I think that we need to keep the Egyptian forever.

This is such a fundamentally important place

in the invention of how we experience movies.

The American Cinematheque courageously went forward on the rehab project

to save the history and character of the Egyptian Theatre

and to make it work again.

The first time I experienced King Kong was on a TV.

Many of my generation, and generations subsequent to mine,

have experienced most of their audiovisual storytelling on TV.