Charles Rogers, Completist

Charles Rogers is a film omnivore. Whether it’s in the theater, at home on video, or streaming during moments throughout the day, Charles is devoted to watching the best that cinema has to offer and he’s kept the records to prove it. He describes how he first got into watching and about his current position at the Academy Film Archive in Los Angeles; we also reminisce about working at movie theaters and video rental houses in Chicago.

RW: How did sitting in the front row start?

Charles: I think one time I was just like, "I'm going to sit in the front row just for the hell of it." I found I liked it. There were a number of reasons: One, I liked the film filling my visual field, and even if it's a little bigger than my field of vision I'd rather have that than when it's too small. You're paying to go to the theater and you want it to be big. If you want it to be small and far away you can watch it on your TV. Also, I'm quite tall. My being in the front row, I’m always going to have leg room. You're never going to be kicking anybody else. You're also not going to see anybody's cell phone in front of you, or see anybody else doing whatever. Less people sit in the front so you're also less likely to hear some jerk talking.

RW: I didn't think about that . . .

Charles: At the New Beverly I particularly like to sit in the front row, left seat. The very front, very left seat. When I go to the Egyptian I don't sit in the front row there because the front row there is really close, beyond even me. The screen is too high so it’s uncomfortable.

RW: So it's a preference but not a rule . . .

Charles: I don't have any particular routines like that.

RW: Do you remember how you first got into movies?

Charles: There wasn't a defining thing. My parents always tell the anecdote of taking me to Star Wars, but I would have only been one, almost two when it came out. It's possible they were referring to when it got re-released in '79 and '81 . . . Anyway, the anecdote they always tell is that they took me to it and I was very well-behaved, and I was fine until the sand people came around. As soon as they came on screen I got scared, and I jumped over my dad's shoulder into the next row and we had to leave the theater. And I know I saw The Blues Brothers in the theater which was when I was five, and it was an R-rated movie, but my mom thought that rating was stupid because it was just for swearing. As a kid I watched whatever movies were around. I saw Back to the Future when I was ten. I probably saw a few more adult-type movies as a kid, because I went to the movies with my mom more often, just me and her. If she wanted to see the new Woody Allen film she would take me, so I saw Radio Days when I was a kid, and that would have been ’86?

RW: I had the same thing with my dad. After school, we’d be wondering what to do and he’d say, "Well, I'm going to go see this, so you're coming with."

Charles: Right. I saw Amadeus when it came out, which was probably a little above the head of an eight or nine year old. I saw Dune when it came out. Both of my parents are intellectually curious—my mom more than my dad—and my mom loves Cary Grant and Fred Astaire and the Marx Brothers. My dad likes John Wayne and Humphrey Bogart. So there was a vague sense of film history around.

RW: When did that start to coalesce into . . .

Charles:  . . . “this is my thing?” Probably in college. I remember being in junior high and early high school, just seeing whatever dumb things came out at the multiplex. I went to Illinois “Urbana–Champaign” for college and I was an education major. There wasn't a lot of room for electives, but possibly literally the only elective I ever took was Intro to Film when I was a senior. That was a really good class. For being an intro to film class at a big state school it was surprisingly good. There are a lot of things that I saw there for the first time, I mean, we watched Citizen Kane which I’d seen, but that's the first time I saw Meshes of the Afternoon, which isn't a major film in my psyche or anything, but it's clearly a major film in the canon. That’s also where I saw Ballet Mécanique and the doc Soldier Girls and where I saw The Searchers for the first time . . . also The Maltese Falcon and To Have and Have Not. After college I got a VCR and had cable. I would obsessively tape things off of television—I’d get the newspaper’s TV guide every week, and that had the listings of all the local stations, with every movie that was playing in the back with a little review. I would go through and circle or bracket the 10 or 20 things that were going to be on TV that I hadn't seen that looked interesting, and set my VCR to tape all of them, and then I had a stack of VHS tapes that I would reuse over and over. That's how I watched Sunset Boulevard for the first time and a number of other things. Then I got the job at the Music Box when I was, what, 25?

RW: Was that your first movie-job job?

Charles: Yeah, it was a really big deal. I wore a shirt and tie and shaved and got all cleaned up and everything. Then when I came in, it was one of those job interviews where you show up and the person says, "Oh. This is what the job is. Do you want it?" You know? Then, I could see everything that played at the Music Box, which back then meant new arthouse, foreign, and revival films every week; plus two different films at midnight, and two different matinees (on the weekends), which are typically classic Hollywood type films. And every once in a while we'd do a week-long Kurosawa retrospective or something. Plus (because I worked at the Music Box), I could get into the Film Center, the Landmark, and Piper’s Alley . . . six or eight different theaters all around town for free. Plus, I was still watching tons of movies on video! Doc Films is also really crucial in my film-going, and I still love them to this day. It’s cheap, and I love Hyde Park. Back when I was still living on the South Side it was so easy to get to.

RW: How did you learn film projection? Was it on the job?

Charles: Yeah. I started in January of 2001 at the Music Box—just serving concessions—but I was curious and the projectionists who were there were all youngish guys, roughly my peers, and I would ask them questions and they would just show me how they did it. And then some people left, and staff was moved around a bit, and that’s when I started training more formally to become a projectionist. I started projecting summer of ’01. But then at some point they needed another assistant manager, and the owners thought, "Oh, Charles can do it." I remember that summer, it was great. We would stay after work and watch movies, or I would just stay after because I was one of the managers, and I was a projectionist, and I had a key, so if there was something that I wanted to watch, I would just run it for myself in one of the theaters and watch it after hours, which was cool.

RW: And you were there for another four years?

Charles: Not quite three, until May of '05. And it was cool. I mean, I probably got a little burnt out on it, and I was still young and less in control of my emotions, shall we say?

RW: What precipitated the shift to Facets?

Charles: I was working nights all the time and getting a little older. Sometimes I still miss working nights and sleeping all day. I worked at Facets about three years (with a daytime schedule). I became a little burnt out there because it's a great place in a lot of ways, but it's also a struggling nonprofit. And like any place, it has weird management issues. But I think it was more just I was burnt out on the place. The same old stupid problems you have at any job, you know? And I don't know if running a video store is something most people are going to do for their whole lives. At Doc Films there was an acquaintance that I would see and chat with occasionally, and I saw him and he said, "Oh, I'm moving in a few weeks." I asked, "Oh, where are you moving?" And he was going study at the George Eastman House, which has a film preservation and restoration program. I knew that film preservation existed, but I didn't think of it as a job someone would do or a thing you would go to school for. I think I was just in the right place of "I need to change my life or just get a new job or something," and so I did some research. And in the US at that point there was the Eastman House, where they have a one-year program where you get a certificate, or you can do it in conjunction with a master's at the University of Rochester. There's also a program at NYU, and there's a program at UCLA. I decided to apply to UCLA and the Eastman House, and I got into UCLA. I think I gave them my notice in the beginning of June, and then I left in the middle of August, and then drove out here, to LA . . . and then did school for two years and got a job.

RW: It seems like before then, aside from that one class in college, that you're essentially self-taught in film history.

Charles: Oh yeah.

RW: But with movies, it seems like that's more the case than not with people.

Charles: Sometimes my friends will come with me to a movie, but it was definitely my personal thing, because at some point along the line, I thought, “I should try to watch a movie every day. That's a good rule of thumb," whether it's on video or in the theater or whatever . . . It's sort of still a rule I like to go by, but I also have skepticism about making rules about it and making it like a task you have to do.

RW: Yeah. It's hard when you realize "Do I want to watch this because I want to watch it today or because I feel like I have to get it in?” Do you have any routines when you watch at home?

Charles: Not really. These days my viewing can be fragmented, I might be watching something on Amazon on the TV, or Filmstruck with my wife, or by myself. I might be watching on my laptop after my wife's gone to bed with headphones on. I might be watching it at work on my lunch break. I might be watching it at work on the weekends, in the viewing room on film or a Bluray, because I don't have a Bluray player at home.

RW: How do you choose what to watch?

 Charles: I would say there's two things. For a long time, I would estimate that if there was something playing on film that came out before 1980 or maybe even 1990 in the city I lived in and I hadn't seen it before, I would go see it. And very occasionally there would be two things playing the same night and you'd have to choose. For the most part, that keeps you pretty busy. And, I got a bunch of books. One of them was the Katz’s Film Encyclopedia, which is biographical and is mostly entries for people but it also has a section for terms. And then there was the Halliwell’s Who’s Who in the Movies which is similar, more filmographic and less narrative in terms of the people's descriptions. And then there’s the Halliwell's Movie Guide, which has a different format that I like better. It listed the AFI's Top 100 that came out in 1998.

RW: I remember that! I taped the list to my wall and I'd cross them off.

Charles: So I would see all these. I had already seen a good portion of them, but I made a point to see the rest. And the Halliwell's also had the AFI's 400, which was the list they made the 100 from. So I went and saw all those 400. This was in the late '90s, early 2000's and so it was a little harder to find certain films. A lot of things were on video, but it wasn't like today . . . And then, at some point I found the Village Voice's list of top 100 films. I would have a tiny sheet of paper that I carried in my wallet for years that listed all of the ones that I hadn't seen, which got down to only five or ten films. I think Ordet was one of them (on the Village Voice list). And the Rise to Power of Louis 14th, the Rossellini film. But the last two that I had up until last year were Hold Me While I’m Naked, the Kuchar film, and Shoah. We actually have a print of Hold Me While I’m Naked at the archive, so I asked one of my coworkers to project it for me. We have thing we call ‘Friday Afternoon Screening’ that we do every Friday, where we show something for ten or twenty minutes. Often it will be a reel of trailers or it will be just a short someone found. Or someone says, "I made a new print of this. I need to watch it." Anyway, we watched that and I was finally able to cross it off this little list from the Village Voice. At some point I found some list from the BFI that was the top 360 films . . . there’s also the National Film Registry, which I'm really into. I just love lists that I can check off.

RW: It can become that driving purpose to watching, also then once you become familiar with seeing these titles over and over again on the lists when you see it out of context you can grab it.

Charles: You know the website They Shoot Pictures Don't They? It's this guy in Australia that compiles lists of films. He uses some sort of complex algorithm or formula to weigh them all to come up with the most critically acclaimed films of all time. It’s a top 1,000 list. I found this out when I was working at Facets and we're all like, "Let's see how many we've all seen."

RW: I seem to remember this (when we all worked at Facets)! It was a big stapled pile of sheets.

Charles: A ten-page document. I had seen three quarters of them maybe, things you would expect a film buff to have seen. The only thing was that the guy would update it every year. People would submit more lists and he would try to merge them in and recalculate. Every year I would be like, "I've only got 50 left. This will be the year I'm going to finally watch these last 50."

RW: But then there would be the deluge of new movies . . .

Charles: And then of course I always set out to watch them all and I never would. But last year I finally did!

RW: From the thousand?

Charles: Yeah. So last year—this is getting into some really nerdy territory, I know—I had gotten it down to around 25 films. I thought, if I just watch one a week until the end of the year, I can finish it. Of course, the ones that are left over are the ones I really don’t want to freaking watch. It's going to be the things that feel like homework that are going to be the last ones you watch. One of the titles on it is Andy Warhol's Empire, which is eight hours.

RW: And not easy to find I can imagine.

Charles: No, it's not available on any kind of home video. You can buy an hour-long portion of it. But I can't really say I've seen it if I've only seen an hour of it. You can rent it from the MOMA if you're a film organization and you're going to screen it, but it costs ~ $500. I could see renting something for $50 or $100, but $500 is a little out of my budget! So all I had left at the end of 2017 was Empire. But in January the guy came out with a new version of the list and Empire wasn't on the top 1,000! Then there was just a handful he’d added that I was able to watch relatively easily. So this January I finally finished this top 1,000 list, but I still want to go back and see all the titles that have been on former lists.

RW: Well congrats! But then, immediately after the celebration settles: well, what do you watch now?

Charles: So I have all these different Excel spreadsheets of all the various titles I haven't seen. And after I watch them I go and delete a row and it's very gratifying to me. And I have a spreadsheet with the National Film Registry titles, and one with all those BFI titles. I also have a list of Jonathan Rosenbaum's top 100 films.

RW: Do you ever indulge in watching something that is not part of this endeavor?

Charles: Oh definitely. A lot of the films left for me on these lists are homework type of stuff. Sometimes something seems like it's going to be a homework and it's totally good, which is fun, or it's even worse than you expect, but it's always interesting. Again, I'm not trying to aggrandize myself or whatever, but I've always been interested in other kinds of movies that weren’t what I saw when I was growing up. But I think I'm still colored by so many things that people saw as kids. ‘80s type stuff, late '70s, early '90s. I saw the big things. I saw Star Wars, Goonies, Back to the Future. But I never saw any horrors like Friday the 13th or Nightmare on Elm Street until I was an adult . . .

 RW: Have you noticed a distinction between “movie theater people” and “video people,” renters?

Charles: There's definitely a distinction to some degree. There might be an age difference. I feel like from being at, attending, and working at repertory theaters, more older people go to the theaters. I don't know if it's just because there wasn't video when they were kids, so it's not a thing they learned to do. But who knows? Maybe those people are going home and watching a bunch of videos too. And there were certainly older people that came and rented from Facets, too, but in terms of the people that came and rented five movies at a time, that came in every day and rented three movies, or returned three and rented three, those tended to be younger or middle-aged people.

RW: How do you gauge film culture in Chicago versus Los Angeles, and the whole scene in LA in general?

Charles: In LA it's just such a bigger animal. There are so many people you know who are involved in it in some way. And also I work at the Archive, and having moved here not really knowing anyone, most of the people I know are from either school and/or work, so they’re also involved in film archives. It's a big part of my life, and I think it's a big part of Los Angeles. In Chicago, I'd go to Doc Films one day, and I'd go to Facets the next day. I'd see some of the same people at any place, any venue. That's obviously not the same as in LA. And of course the film production in Chicago is not anything like what it is in LA. There is some, and there are film schools and people doing their own independent things, but as far as repertory film viewing or just film viewing in general, LA seems better in some ways. I sometimes have sat down and tried to think, "Okay. Well, Chicago has Doc Films, but LA has the New Beverly. LA has the Egyptian, but Chicago has the Music Box." You know? And it still always comes out to the advantage of LA. There are more venues and I think there's more audiences for almost everything, whether it's Hollywood stuff or not, it's just more ingrained everywhere. But at the same time, I sort of get the sense that Chicago can be better because there is less stuff, so say, "Oh, the Film Center is showing Out 1, and this is the big event everyone should go to this week." You know? Whereas in LA, both film-wise and in general culture-wise, there's so much more going on that sometimes it doesn't even register.

RW:  I remember when we showed Satantango at Facets, it was a big deal for everyone in town.

Charles: Right. But in LA there's just so much more film stuff going on, and there's different people that are into this segment or that . . . there’s the people that go to the New Beverly, and then there's the people that go to the Wilder, and there are people that are just going to go to Cinefamily. Some of those are the same people, of course, like me, I go to all three of those places. But it seems more fragmented, not just "Oh, He's one of the film people I know from around," like in Chicago. But it also might be to some degree my personal feelings about LA versus Chicago since Chicago is my hometown, and LA is this semi-alien place that I'm still not totally comfortable with.

RW: What is your job exactly?

Charles: It’s Film Traffic Coordinator at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, specifically at the Academy Film Archive. We're part of the Oscars—this is sort of a standard spiel, but what people don't realize is that yes, we pay to produce the Oscars, but a lot of that money goes to running the film archive and the Margaret Herrick Library, which is a world-class film research library. We're opening a museum soon. We give all sorts of grants to people and local film institutions. There's the Nicholl Fellowships, which is a yearly screenwriting competition, and the Sci-Tech Council. We do programming in our own theaters and in outside venues in LA, New York, and London I believe. The last few years we've had this big internship program which is aimed at increasing diversity in the film industry, which is really admirable. The interns go to work at different studios and production houses, and some of the interns are working at the archive or at the library, too. I work at the Film Archive, which I honestly think is probably the best place to work. We're one of the major film archives in the United States. Besides us there's UCLA, the Museum of Modern Art, the George Eastman Museum, and the Library of Congress. Those are the five archives that hold a significant amount of nitrate prints, and the five largest. I think we're the third largest, with UCLA and the Library of Congress being bigger than us. We have a really great collection. People think, "Oh, you're the Academy archive. You just have Hollywood, Oscar-winning films and Hollywood films," which we do—that's one of our missions is have a copy of every Oscar-winning or -nominated film—but we also have really major experimental avant-garde collection, documentaries, and a significant home movie collection. In particular, we have a collection focused on California and southern California, to some degree, but we don't take industrial or educational films. We also don't take TV or anything like that. But other than that, we collect everything, and it's great. It's a pretty good place to work. We send a couple hundred films every year to places all over the US and the world, and I’m responsible for the shipping.  I've sent films to Australia, Asia, South America, and Europe. I’m in charge of inspecting all the prints when they go out, making sure they don't have damage, and I make sure that they’re ok to be projected. If there's any damage, I write it down so that we know if the picture has the same damage when it comes back. I also deal with everything that comes in the door: whether it's films being returned and then I re-inspect them and put them back in the vault, or whether it's someone that’s just dropped something off from a lab and I get it to the right person in the Archive. Sometimes we get local inquiries, like "So-and-so wants to donate their collection to us. They're up in the valley somewhere." I’ll drive the van with a colleague and go pick up their collection.

RW: Why do you still watch so many movies?

Charles: It's a question I ask myself. I don't want to be too vague. Sometimes, like I said, I get caught up in lists, and I have these spreadsheets. I have vinyl records, and I still buy records sometimes, but I don't collect them in the same way. It's not as much about, "Oh, can I find this rare pressing of 'Desire' by Bob Dylan?" It's more, "Oh. This sounds cool. I heard it on the radio. I'm going on Amazon or on eBay and buying the record. It'll be at my house tomorrow." But sometimes I feel like with the film lists and "Oh, once I've watched these, now I've got to watch every film with Eddie Cantor or whatever." I love Eddie Cantor . . . So I sometimes wonder how healthy this is, it has a certain acquisitional air to it, which I want to avoid in life even though to some degree you can't. But I still just like watching movies. There's really not much of a deeper explanation to it than that, I guess. I particularly like going to the theater. I like eating popcorn. I like getting there on time. I like watching the trailers. I mean, obviously I get sick of seeing that damn Mission Impossible trailer that I've seen eight times in the last couple months, but I love the good movies. I like the bad ones too most of the time. I also like talking about films, although not as much as some people do.

RW: What are some of your favorites?

Charles: I feel like my favorites have sort of gotten calcified, but I usually say the original Scarface, followed by Sunset Boulevard, then Umbrellas of Cherbourg and Mickey One.

RW: Mickey One! That's interesting. That played at the Castro a couple years ago at Noir City and I missed it.

Charles: That's actually a really notable experience because that's a film that I came into knowing nothing about, just that it was playing at Doc Films and it was from the ’60s. I just loved it, but also didn't know what to make of it. It seemed like such a weird thing to exist. And it was made in Chicago in 1964 or '65. I think I immediately decided it was my fourth favorite movie. I've seen it a couple times since then, and it hasn't changed my opinion. I still love it. I mean, I have a zillion favorites, you know?

RW: I think anyone that's worked in the business, you have to have one even if it's just the one you can say when people ask, even if it's become like you said a calcified choice.

Charles: Scarface is definitely still my favorite. I've seen it many times, and I still like it every time. Other films, I don't know. I actually haven't seen Sunset Boulevard in quite a while.

RW: It holds up very well.

Charles: I'm sure it does.