Today we’d like to introduce you to Joshua Handler.
Hi Joshua, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start, maybe you can share some of your backstories with our readers.
Thank you for having me! I’ve been a film fanatic my entire life. When I was very young, my father showed me one of the original STAR WARS films and my uncle showed me a bunch of other classic films, and from then on, I was obsessed with the movies. Like most film students, I thought I wanted to be a writer/director – the thought of doing what I do now, programming, didn’t seem to even be an option. In 2017, I was fortunate enough to meet an amazing artist, Jessica Anne Schwartz, who offered me an opportunity to run a film series out of her Chelsea-based art studio. What began as a small gathering in which we watched films on a paper “screen” grew into something a bit bigger in which we retrofitted the studio to properly screen films and hosted live Q&As after the screenings.
After that series ended, I began a smaller-scaled series in my apartment with a group of friends and colleagues dedicated to the best of the worst of cinema, something for which I’ve always had a passion. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, I wanted to keep that community together, so I took our meetings online. This series was called Corona Classics Cinema Club. After hosting a Q&A with my friend, screenwriter Bennett Yellin, on his excellent film, DUMB AND DUMBER, I decided to permanently switch the focus of this series to Q&As centered around underrated or under-appreciated films. The series grew over the course of 2.5 years – we hosted over 200 top filmmakers, actors, and craftspeople – and a screening series sprouted off of it.
By summer 2021, my close friend/business partner and I decided that we would eventually evolve Corona Classics Cinema Club into a new business that would be dedicated to promoting film literacy, a cause close to both of our hearts, as it has been declining over the past while. We feel that if up-and-coming filmmakers cannot learn from the past, the art form will not be able to move forward. On November 1, 2022, we launched this new series, called Picturehouse 441, with Oscar-winning filmmakers and Pixar executives Pete Docter and Jonas Rivera discussing UP. The Q&A was a thrilling evening, as Pete and Jonas are among the most passionate and well-spoken (not to mention utterly brilliant) artists making films today.
I’m sure you wouldn’t say it’s been obstacle free, but so far would you say the journey has been a fairly smooth road?
The road has never been easy, but it’s always been worth it. Film programming and interviewing filmmakers was somewhat of an inevitability for me, as everything in my life, whether I realized it or not, has pointed to this being my calling. It took a while to realize that, though.
It’s thrilling to build an audience and a community. It’s thrilling to explore the work of some of the world’s greatest artists. It’s thrilling to be able to promote film literacy and bring people closer to films that they may know and love already or come to know and love through our series. On the flip side, there has been and remains a large amount of unpredictability on this path. The virtual space is still relatively new, and thus, there’s a lot to explore, which is also exciting.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about Picturehouse 441?
I am the programmer and co-founder of Picturehouse 441, a new live virtual (Zoom Webinar-based) Q&A series dedicated to promoting film literacy through Q&As with the world’s greatest filmmakers, craftspeople, and actors. We specialize in Q&As centered around essential cinema, but our definition of essential cinema goes far outside “the cinematic canon”. That’s not to say there’s anything wrong with “the canon”, as we have featured talent from many of the films traditionally associated with it. We simply don’t want to be confined to a defined group of films that are considered “essential” by others.
This is a dream job for me, and I feel incredibly fortunate to have the opportunity to run this series and to have so many of my Corona Classics Q&A guests and audience members follow me for this series. I’m most proud of being able to work with various film schools to provide access to our Q&As to their students and faculty. Our Q&As are, by design, accessible to both casual filmgoers and ardent cinephiles, and it’s most satisfying to me to reach film students, for they are the future of our industry. To be able to provide a link between them and those who have or are currently moving our art form forward is a joy.
Picturehouse 441 is different from other Q&A series because of its intimacy and lack of pretension. Our Q&As are presented in a laid-back atmosphere, as I want to ensure that all of our guests, featured artists, and attendees, feel comfortable and that the discussions are as candid, entertaining, and enlightening as possible without devolving into sensationalism. We want to present an honest glimpse into how a film is made and how the films being discussed turned into well-loved essentials.
Pretension is rampant in film-related discourse, and so, it is important to me to leave any of the snobberies out of it. To me, a big studio-produced film that’s well-crafted with ample entertainment value is as important and worthy of celebration as a smaller feature that’s routinely ranked on “best of all time” lists. At Picturehouse 441, we feature discussions on both of those kinds of films and everything in between!
Pricing:
- $6 per Q&A
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.
picturehouse441.com - Instagram: https://www.
instagram.com/picturehouse441/ - Facebook: https://www.
facebook.com/picturehouse441/ - Twitter: https://twitter.com/
picturehouse441
Image Credits
Picturehouse 441
