One of the most audacious movies to come out las year was the new film from Brady Corbet called The Brutalist (2024).  Starring Adrian Brody as an immigrant Holocaust survivor and architect, the movie tells the story of one man’s experience striving for the American dream by way of gaining favor with a wealthy benefactor who wants him to build a megastructure using the titular architectural style.  The movie is a complex character study about the faults lying within the pursuit of the American Dream and what toll it takes on the artist, but that’s not what makes the movie audacious.  The film is a staggering 3 and a half hours in length, which is not uncommon for a period set drama, but for this particular film, the director incorporated some long dormant Hollywood traditions that help to make the film feel even more monumental.  Baked into the film’s runtime itself is a 15 minute long Intermission, and the movie even opens with the announced Overture.  These elements are not used very often today in movies, but those who watch classic films from the 1950’s and 60’s will instantly know what they are.  They are throwbacks to a style of film exhibition known as the Roadshow format.  The use of the Roadshow format is certainly intentional on Brady Corbet’s part, since the whole movie is a throwback to a different time period, one in which this kind of movie experience existed.  In addition, to filming the movie in the classic and rarely used Vistavision format, the movie revitalizes the Roadshow style of presentation, even if it’s not quite the full Roadshow experience as it plays in local multiplexes.  But, why is the Roadshow such a novelty today compared to the Golden Era of cinema when it was used very frequently.  The answer reveals a lot about the way cinema itself has evolved over time, and it shows that even movies like The Brutalist will not bring it back to it’s full glory ever again.

The cinematic experience was much different 60 years ago than it is today.  From it’s early days and up through the post-War years, going to the movies literally meant “going to the movies” in the plural sense.  You paid a ticket at the box office, and then the cinema would be open to you for the remainder of the program that day.  That’s why people would just come and go throughout the day.  Unless there was a sell-out, audiences had free reign to choose what they would choose to watch that day.  In many cases, the availability of movies depended on how many theaters there were in town, and for some small communities that sometimes meant only one.  So, theaters practiced would run multiple films on the same bill, with one movie being the main attraction, while another smaller movie would be scheduled right after that.  This is where the terms “B-Movie” and “Double Feature” that still exist in movie lingo today come from.  In between the films, there were other short programming to fill the time, including news reels, animated cartoons, movie trailers, and various other shorts.  The heyday of the studio system stuck with this format for a long time, but as movies got more ambitious and lengthy, the industry was looking to a different kind of way to exhibit their films in a way that spotlighted the cinematic experience as something special.  What helped to inspire them was a form of entertainment that Hollywood had over the years been supplanting; which was live theater.  Shows performed on the Broadway stage, or in opera halls across the country used intermissions to break the performances into different acts, giving both the performers and the audiences a break.  Operas, musicals, and stage dramas by this time were considered prestigious forms of entertainment compared to the more provincial entertainment that cinema provided to the masses.  So, Hollywood looked to what the theater community was doing to create their own kind of prestige cinematic experience.

The Roadshow movie experience was meant to create a unique experience that emulated the feeling of attending the opera or any other high brow form of entertainment, but within the confines of a movie theater.  Roadshow films were often presented in a limited fashion, playing at only the most elite theaters in town, and at a premium ticket price.  To emulate the experience like you were going to the theater for a stage performance, the movie would open without trailers or any accompanying shorts attached.  Instead, the speakers would play a specifically orchestrated Overture before the film started; mostly with the screen blank, unless a specific preshow artwork was meant to draw the eye.  Then, depending on which theater you were at, the curtains would be drawn back as the studio logo was projected on the screen and the movie would play through.  If the film was longer that the average movie, there would be an intermission that would break the film into two acts, giving the audience time to either hit the bathrooms or to get more snacks at the concessions.  And at the film’s conclusion, once the words “The End” fades out the curtains close and another track of Exit Music would serenade the audience as they left their seats and walked out.  In whole, it made watching the movies that much more special.  The movie being projected on the big screen would be the same, but aura would be different.  To make the experience even more worthy of a premium ticket price, special souvenir programs would be handed out to you by an usher as you entered, just like you would receive at the theater.  It was a lucrative way to add an extra bit of revenue for the film, and also to help generate extra buzz and prestige around a movie before it was released to the wider market.  But, you couldn’t just do this with any kind of movie.  The films that would receive the Roadshow treatment had to be worthy of such a classy style of presentation.

What set the trend for the modern Hollywood Roadshow was the release of producer David O. Selznick’s Gone With the Wind (1939).  While Gone With the Wind was not the first film to use the Roadshow format for it’s release, it was definitely the one that set the trend for all the movies that came after.  Selznick’s gargantuan Civil War epic really could not have been released in any other way.  At a staggering four hours in length, the longest studio film ever made up to that time and for several years after, Gone With the Wind had to be presented in a Roadshow format no matter where it played.  The Roadshow fit well into Selznick’s zeal for showmanship, and the demand was there for a premium movie experience with the film.  After premiering in Atlanta in 1939, the movie sold out in every large market it was presented, shattering every conceivable box office record, and this was even before receiving a wide release after it’s Roadshow run.  But, while the Roadshow proved to be a valuable source of revenue for some films, the success of Wind was still something that Hollywood found difficult to replicate.  That was until the 1950’s, when the advent of widescreen helped to make cinema feel like a prestigious experience again.  This revitalized the Roadshow format for a new generation, as big screen sword and sandal epics like The Ten Commandments (1956) and Ben-Hur (1959) benefitted from the larger than life experience that the format offered.  The Roadshow experienced offered something that you couldn’t get from watching television alone in your living room.  It made going to a movie palace feel as enriching as going to an opera or concert hall.  And the experience wasn’t just made for biblical stories either.  Historical dramas like How the West Was Won (1960), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), and Doctor Zhivago (1965) also adopted the Roadshow format for their prestige releases.  But the Roadshow’s rise in success throughout the widescreen boom would face a different challenge as viewership patterns changed.

Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) fundamentally changed the way people went to the movies, as it’s shocking first act twist made people realize that they had to watch a movie from beginning to end, and not just casually dive in like movie goers would do in the past.  The way movies were released changed accordingly; movie trailers would still play prior to a movie’s start, but double features along with accompanying shorts and newsreels were a thing of the past.  One ticket meant one movie, and the appetite for lengthy 3 hour plus Roadshow features dried up.  Cinemas wanted more showtimes, which meant leaner movies without all the bells and whistles of the Roadshow, including Intermissions.  The ballooning budgets of the Hollywood epics, which used to be justified because of the Roadshow’s premium ticket prices, also became a problem.  The end seemed near for the Roadshow format as a means of theatrical release, especially after 20th Century Fox’s colossally expensive Cleopatra (1963) nearly drove the studio into bankruptcy.  But an unexpected reprieve came for the Roadshow format with the remarkable success of movie musicals in the 1960’s.  Fox was able to recover from their financial woes with the monumental box office of The Sound of Music (1965), becoming the biggest money maker in Hollywood since Gone With the Wind.  Disney and Warner Brothers likewise saw great fortune in their releases of Mary Poppins and My Fair Lady around the same time in 1964.  But what the movie musical also did was use the Roadshow format to perfection.  It harkened back to what inspired the Roadshow in the first place, which was musical theater.  The musicals even had their Intermissions already baked into the show itself, making it easy for Hollywood to know where to put them in their film adaptations.  For a time, this worked out well, and the Roadshow format would survive a bit longer.  But, it unfortunately would be short lived.  The success of Sound of Music and My Fair Lady made Hollywood mistakenly believe that there was a widespread appetite for these prestige Roadshow musicals that actually wasn’t there, and the resulting glut of Roadshow movies in the back end of the 1960’s spelled disaster for the format as a whole.

While Hollywood was rapidly changing, with counter culture films like Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Easy Rider (1969) becoming all the rage, the Roadshow format was representing all that was wrong with the industry at the time.  Big budget musicals that were trying to emulate the success of The Sound of Music were continuing to fail at the box office.  These included musicals like Doctor Doolittle (1967), Camelot (1967) and Hello, Dolly (1969), the latter of which almost wiped out all of the profits that 20th Century Fox had recovered with their Sound of Music success.  Going into the 1970’s, Hollywood was weary of using the Roadshow release format to generate buzz for their tentpole films.  A couple movies of the era did cautiously try to use it, like Patton (1970) and Fiddler on the Roof (1971), but when the big epic of the era, The Godfather (1972), released to great success without using any of the Roadshow features, it all but killed the format.  Hollywood still put out 3 hour plus epics in the decades that followed, but they would run like a regular movie would without an overture or intermission.  This includes some major prestige films that went on to awards season success, like Schindler’s List (1993) and Titanic (1997).  Neither film has any of the same features of Roadshow epics despite sharing their epic lengths.  The rise of the Hollywood blockbuster also changed the movie going experience as well.  With higher demand for blockbuster franchise films like Star Wars (1977), Back to the Future (1985) and many other crowd pleasers, the multiplex supplanted the movie palace as the primary destinations for movie goers.  Hard to replicate the same prestigious experience on the same level of attending a musical or opera when it’s in a small dark box of a room next to many others just like it.  After being the pinnacle of Hollywood prestige at it’s best, the Roadshow was reduced to being a relic of the past.

But the memory of the Roadshow format managed to survive through an unexpected avenue; home theater.  As Hollywood began going through their archives to find movies to release in the rising home entertainment market, they found these longer versions of films that were made in the Roadshow format that they could put out on video as a collector’s edition.  Spotlighted as the “Roadshow Edition,” these home video releases gave cinephiles the oppurtunity to see these movies in their original format, complete with the Overtures, Intermissions, and Exit Music included.  It was like rediscovering all of these movies again, seeing the way that they were originally meant to be seen instead of the truncated versions that were either re-released in multiplex theaters or aired on television.  It renewed an interest in the film enthusiast community towards the bygone era of the Roadshow.  Movies like Gone With the Wind, Lawrence of Arabia, The Ten Commandments would subsequently be given restorations that re-incorporated the entire Roadshow format into their home video releases, and those same restorations would likewise be used in all future theatrical exhibitions as well.  The same went for all of the movie musicals released over this same period.  In some cases, the people who worked on the restorations would include graphic art for the Overtures and Exit Music, as modern audiences are not as familiar with these features and would probably be confused why they are included in the presentation.  While Hollywood hasn’t fully reembraced the Roadshow format completely as a part of their film releases, it’s at least worthwhile that the memory of it is being preserved with the restorations of these older films.  It’s probably a good thing that the Roadshow format is not used for every epic length movie; hard to imagine it being used on something like Avengers: Endgame (2019) or Avatar: The Way of Water (2022).  It’s a special kind of format to be used on certain kinds of movies; ones where the use of Intermissions to break the film into two acts is essential to the experience.

Which brings us back to Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist.  Corbet could’ve released his film without the trappings of a Roadshow style presentation, but he included them in his movie because of the way it evoke the era that the movie takes place.  It’s a film that has the feel of an old school epic, while still being fairly modern in it’s sensibilities.  The Overture and Intermission are integral features of the experience and not a necessity of the presentation because of it’s colossal length; though I’m sure audiences are pleased to finally have a long movie with a bathroom break.  It’s all the more astounding that Corbet was able to make a movie that felt like an old Hollywood epic on a miniscule $10 million budget.  My belief is that using the Roadshow format features helps to reinforce that evocation of grandeur, even with the movie being small and intimate in true scale.  And while Corbet is getting a lot of attention for his expert use of the format, he’s also not the only one that has attempted to revive the Roadshow style in recent years.  Quentin Tarantino famously put out his film The Hateful Eight (2015) in a Roadshow style version that played in select theaters nationwide.  It included the same Overture and Intermission features you would find in Roadshow movies, which Tarantino specifically paying  homage to, especially with regards to the Spaghetti Westerns of Sergio Leone that released in the format.  In select screenings, you would even receive a souvenir program, just like they used to give out in the old Roadshow days.  And while both The Hateful Eight and The Brutalist both are loving recreations of the format, they are unlikely to make the format reach the heights that it once held within the industry.  The way people go to the movies these days has changed too much to support such a format now.  We’re even seeing epic productions like Dune and Wicked choosing to release as two separate films a year apart rather than a single two act Roadshow style film, and it’s working pretty well for Hollywood that way.  Could there still be Roadshow style releases in the future; probably, and with any luck more frequently thanks to The Brutalist’s success.  But it’s future will still likely be that of a novelty rather than the norm.  And that in a way is what’s best for the format.  The Roadshow was the pinnacle of Hollywood prestige and the rarer the treasure the better.  With the industry recognizing the special quality it brings to making the art of film feel as important as that of the high arts of theater and opera, it’s a good thing that it stands as the high water mark of cinema at it’s peak.