Jay Rinsky: Little Cinema, Big Ideas

CHARLIE MELCHER:

Hi, I’m Charlie Melcher, founder of the Future of StoryTelling. Welcome to the FoST podcast. Years ago at the Future of StoryTelling Summit, I got to see something unforgettable. It was the re-imagining of the Wizard of Oz into a multimedia immersive experience. Live music swelled, performers moved throughout on stilts, animation expanded the world beyond the screen, and apples and flowers were thrown into the audience. That experience came from a young creative studio called Little Cinema, led by Jay Rinsky. Since then, they’ve grown exponentially. They’ve partnered with Cosm to transform films like The Matrix and Willy Wonka into shared immersive experiences. They’ve also designed bold premieres and live events for major films and television in Hollywood. Today, Jay joins me to talk about that journey from scrappy experiments to a new kind of cinema. Please join me in welcoming Jay Rinsky to the FoST Podcast.

Jay, welcome to the Future of StoryTelling Podcast.

JAY RINSKY:

Thank you very much. It’s very exciting to be on this podcast.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

So glad to have you here. So please start by telling us about the history of Little Cinema.

JAY RINSKY:

About 10 years ago, Little Cinema was somewhat started on a whim, on the idea that there is not enough ways of experiencing cinema beyond being in a movie theater. I loved watching cinema. And the dream really was always to, again, bring back that magic of going to the movies of what I heard about from back in the Vaudeville days. So on a whim, on a cold night in New York City, when this new performing arts space opened up, we decided to improvise a show. That show was a screening of The Labyrinth, but we put a twist on that and we rescored the film with the best of David Bowie, and we infused live performances and stumbled upon what was back then, this mixed media presentation of films experienced in this fusion of a Cirque du Soleil, meets Sleep No More. Then just with really a spurt of energy, I decided to announce that we’ll be performing a new movie once a week. 10 years later, we’re now a fully operational creative studio. We’ve been building our own technology. We’ve been working with major partners like Cosm to pioneer new forms of people experiencing cinema. And yeah, very grateful that it kind of unexpectedly turned into a blossoming business.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

So tell me about the experience at the Future of StoryTelling.

JAY RINSKY:

This was early days of Little Cinema, and also part of the reason I’ve been very, very excited and humbled to be on this podcast. Future of StoryTelling has really shaped a lot of the relationships that have helped Little Cinema’s growth in these past years. And I think it was Katie Yudin that was working at FoST at the time. And she invited us to come and bring one of our most ambitious shows to close out the future of storytelling, which was a re-imagination of The Wizard of Oz with live performers, a live band, animation layers, balloons, and everything else that you can imagine. And also just in a very serendipitous Future of StoryTelling moments, when we were sound checking, I happened to bump into Vince, the founder and CEO at the time of Meow Wolf, which launched a partnership with Meow Wolf to premiere their films. At the second soundcheck, I bumped into Darren Aronofsky, which launched an installation with Darren Aronofsky around his film Mother and have formed relationships with more and more people that just keep coming in and out of my circles.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

I still remember and appreciate that production. And I think you haven’t sold it correctly. I think you haven’t really given a full picture. People have to understand, you brought the movies to life.That’s what you were doing. You had aerialists, you had musical performers, you had people on stilts, you were throwing apples into the audience. These became immersive 4D experiential happenings that were sort of inspired by the scenes in the movies. You were literally bringing the movies to life. You were breaking the plane of the screen and filling the audience with the experience.

JAY RINSKY:

Correct. And also re-imagining moments, allowing a lot of creative people to have creative conversations with those films. We did everything in a very analog theatrical way. So this was a very multidisciplinary approach to how to have a conversation with a film. And then the other one was to try something new in every single show. Film, really in most senses and lenses, it’s a moving picture. It’s like a one piece of art. It’s one Rothko. And you don’t touch it, you don’t mess with it. It’s what the director intended to make and create. I think where we started feeling comfortable tossing that idea out the window to an extent was one, seeing other art forms that built on other mediums at The Wizard of Oz, an 11-piece band playing live, a DJ playing the film through turntables with an added animation layer that was setting place.

My attorney still to this day came and also saw it and he was working pro bono for us and he called us the NWA of cinema. And he said, similar to NWA that pioneered rap music in the 80s taking James Brown records and cutting them, remixing, putting them out and creating major, major genre, you’re kind of doing that with film. And the more you remix, cut, edit, change, add, transform, the more you’re creating a new piece of work to an extent.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

It has its precursors to me what you were doing in something like Warhol’s Factory. He had this thing, he had the Velvet Underground and he was promoting and marketing them. He was working in mixed media and projection. He was doing these exploding plastic inevitables, which were basically like happening shows, performances with dance and projection and music and photography and all these different forms. So let’s go then from these creative collaborations and homages to these films with no economic model, really. I mean, people would show up for them, but I’m sure the ticket sales were not covering the costs. Then you started to do this as a business. You started to get hired by people to create these for films or for openings or shows.

JAY RINSKY:

Yeah. I also want to pause on that because that’s, I think, a very important business lesson. This doing something from the heart allows you to do something so well with so much passion that you can’t manufacture that with capital typically. So birthing a creative artist do that naturally, right? Their first album, their first painting, their first everything, they’re not making any money. They’re slaving over it. And then that first album breaks, becomes a thing. And then they’re dealing with what’s called the second album syndrome, which is now there’s a business behind it. Can we still manufacture that same level of art or creativity? I was lucky enough that movie studios came and they did not sue me. They did not do anything. They actually said, forget these buying apples on a dollar store or grabbing newspapers from the subway and turning those into a paper storm. Here’s real money. Here’s a budget. Here’s a real IP that hasn’t seen the light of day yet. Why don’t you go and create this as a experience?

CHARLIE MELCHER:

What was the first big one?

JAY RINSKY:

The first big, big one was The Alienist.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

I remember that.

JAY RINSKY:

It had Dakota Fanning in it. It had Daniel Brule and the studio also let us work. So we went in there and we created this really dark artistic performance that was performed at the premiere, which is a celebration event that challenged the audience and really made them feel something. Any typical studio execs would probably kill that. It just kind of reads risk, but we were left untouched and it was a hit. Then these events kind of kept rolling. These days we’ve scaled. So we do about 60 different events or stunts a year. We’ve got one today for The Testaments.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

You’re doing one a week, dude. You’re still turning out one a week. It’s amazing. But a bigger budget.

JAY RINSKY:

Yeah, we do. Warner Brothers, we did an insane, immersive premiere event for Weapons. We just premiered The Bride. We’re doing a bunch across the entire Disney family. We’ve got some really big ones.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

So let me ask you about where you think the whole cinema is going now. I mean, you’ve been a company that sort of built your entire business around making cinema experiential. What’s your take on these different experiments and where this is all heading?

JAY RINSKY:

I think to make real change and impact, it can’t be one person. It can’t be one company. It’s a force that kind of comes all around till it becomes a thing.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

Critical mass.

JAY RINSKY:

Correct. And especially in cinemas where it’s such a high stakes, expensive game where you need volume. Hats off to the Sphere for The Wizard of Oz really made an impact on what these things can be just based on the scale and budget that they put into it. So just kind of side note, the reason we actually started doing all this commercial work, initially we were doing screening films or experiencing films, and then we started taking a lot of studio work was to grow and understand and learn the industry and try and learn how to one day be able to shape this in a bigger form. And that biggest leap that I’ve seen has been with Sphere and with Cosm. And this is a technological leap that I feel is starting to allow scale to change how people are experiencing cinema. The effect it had on me was an effect that I read about when cinema was invented. You go back a hundred years to the introduction of all of this, and there’s this famous story of the Lumiere Brothers playing a piece of content with a train that’s kind of arriving at the screen, and apparently people freaked out and ran out of the cinema thinking that the train is coming at them. What I saw in this LED dome in this high resolution was that same impact. They were bringing on different environments. Your eye thinks it’s real. So I feel like we’re on the verge of a giant shift in experiential cinema aided by technology, also aided by the industry and consumer behavior.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

Well, I think we have to talk about that because what’s happened is everybody has gotten used to watching their movies and television at home. They have access to everything they can possibly want. Why do they go out? How can we make it worth their time to leave the home and go to a cinema or someplace else? Obviously, part of the success of Little Cinema is the industry’s realization that they needed something more dynamic to be worthwhile for people to come out to do, whether it was at first for the launch to get buzz, but now the work you’re doing with Cosm is not for the launch. It’s for drawing people to a 270 degree 87-foot theater or dome, and they can come and have a deeper, more immersed, more emotional, more embodied, more social experience than they can get at home.

JAY RINSKY:

Correct. The partnership with Cosm is one that I am almost most proud of, which again, allowed us to take what we learned 10 years ago doing things in a very analog way and put them now into a form of technology that can scale and prove the business economics to it. I think it was from FoST, actually. That’s how we got through to Cosm. Yes, it was from FoST.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

Neil Carty used to come all the time and Katie Yudin works there formally working with us. So yes, I think there’s a connection.

JAY RINSKY:

That’s right. So through the FoST network, when Cosm pioneered the tech, before they even opened the venue, we got a call from Neil Cardi and from Katie Yudin saying, “You’ve been pioneering experiential cinema. Come help figure this out. ” Then I took that trip to Salt Lake City and I saw the tech and I had that like, oh my God, this is like Vaudeville cinema kicking off all over again because what we were doing with 30 performers you can now do with visual effects and create these things that feel real that are actually happening on the screen. And with my limited business understanding, that scales better than hiring —

CHARLIE MELCHER:

30 performers. Yeah. You didn’t need an MBA for that, right?

JAY RINSKY:

But then came the other challenges, which are business challenges. You’re still dealing with a really complicated industry of what you’re allowed to do to the film and how do you license it and all those other elements, which now I had all these studio relationships and an understanding of how to do this as opposed to —

CHARLIE MELCHER:

Stealing it?

JAY RINSKY:

Easily breaking the rules. No, I was paying for it. I was just paying for the wrong license. Everything was legal and above board. It was just more complicated than it seems. Then came the other much bigger challenge, which I’ve also heard the Wizard of Oz folks talk on your podcast, Ben Grossman, which was fascinating, is how do you take a rectangular format and adopt it to a sphere? And our creative approach and philosophy is still something I’m very proud of because one notion which they’ve done very successfully is you paint the frames around it — how to paint the frame bigger. Ours was much more of a going back to our roots, which is site-specific screenings. In a site-specific screening, you take a film and you find a really cool environment like Harry Potter in a castle to screen the film, but the environment of you just sitting there has this immersive impact. Then we also looked at elements of production design and theater and the opera and being able to emotionally change the set with lighting, but building one big elaborate set.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

Let me explain that to people. So because I went to see your Charlie and Chocolate Factory, which by the way, is one of my favorite stories, Roald Dahl. And for those who are astute listeners to the podcast, I’ve shared this little tidbit before. But “Charlie, you know what happens to the person who suddenly gets everything they ever wanted? They live happily ever after.” That’s the last lines of the book, which I said to my wife at our wedding. And we are about to rerelease, Melcher Media is about to rerelease Charlie and Chocolate Factory in a deluxe interactive edition. So we’re also connected to the book in that way. Nevertheless, one of the things that you’ve done beautifully is that you still keep the film in a frame and that’s untouched and you’ve augmented the experience by, as you said, creating a context or a scene around the frame of the film that makes you feel like the film is extended around you by extending the world, for example, of the chocolate factory.

One of my favorite moments of yours was the bubble room where they’re drinking that soda pop or whatever that makes them float and the perspective shifts and literally the whole — we feel like we’re floating up in the room with grandpa and Charlie. So I think that that’s important to mention because for one, for listeners who haven’t had a chance yet to go to Cosm and see The Matrix or Charlie and Chocolate Factory that Little Cinema made, but I also think of it very much in context or in comparison to Wizard of Oz, which I just got to go see myself. And there, what they’re really doing is they’re losing the rectangular frame of the film and expanding it to fill the full range of the Sphere. They did a beautiful job with the landscapes where you really felt the world of Wizard of Oz. You felt so much more of the world, which a lot of it didn’t get shown in the tighter shots of the movie, and they just created it and it’s sharp and colorful and beautiful and brilliant.

JAY RINSKY:

What I admired about what they’ve done is, again, the level of effort they went at every single element, including those 4DX effects. And I also want to call out both what we’re doing with Cosm, what the folks were doing with Sphere at Wizard of Oz. It’s the future of storytelling. It’s new. It’s not about seeing the flames. It’s about feeling the heat. You’re seeing the flames on the screen, so you don’t need that as a 4DX effect. One of the biggest moments that we had of like, wow, this is new way of experiencing. We did that with the Matrix where Neo is looking down the top of the building and then we tilt the camera down. And then you have Neo’s perspective looking down the building, but because of the screen and the virtual reality tech, you get butterflies in your stomach getting a vertigo effect. You feel like you’re floating just because the environments can do that. The fact that we keep a frame of the film around makes it a little bit easier in enhancing that cinematic language because it allows the cinematic form to exist in a rectangular way that I don’t think will ever go away. Phones, streaming, airplanes, a hundred years of directors that have just mastered what to do within this rectangular form, and so much of it works. So the best stories I think will continue to be told in that format. We launched three months before Sphere. It’s also kind of amazing that we were both working on it unbeknown to one another, and all of a sudden in a single year, these are amplifying themselves by people seeing this new form of cinema. It’s really starting to prove consistent business model of taking repertoire films and turning them back into contemporary blockbusters.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

Hey, the truth is, as a culture, a civilization, we’ve always loved the retelling of our great stories. I mean, what’s the Bible? What are the Odyssey and Iliad? They’re all just the retelling of oral tales that were then eventually written down. We love to retell our stories. So this is just a modern day version of those things. We’re retelling them and reinventing them and reinterpreting them, and we love the underlying messages and morals that come with them, and we get connected to those characters. And I also think it’s a huge part of the economic model, which is you’re more likely to go to the retelling of an IP of characters in a world that you know you love, maybe than going to something you’ve never heard of before, and it’s in some wacky new format.

JAY RINSKY:

And I think that’s something I was — I used to host those early shows and get on the mic and try and set context to the format or what people are about to see, because so much of it is also about what people are accepting from what’s allowed to be done. But this happens in stories, and that’s something I’ve always preached. A book gets adopted to a movie, then that movie gets adopted to a stage production. It’s the same story, but different elements are being slightly highlighted and brought to life to represent this new medium of storytelling. What I would like to see in my lifetime though is there’s no word for it yet, but what that experiential cinema of long form, where the movie is still at the core center of it, to have an industry acknowledgement that that is a creative process that needs an adaptation and a reimagination and have a legal framework around it and a financial framework around it that will allow creators like Little Cinema and hopefully many more to dabble in this format of experiential cinema that now very much exists on the fringes of business and legal and financial because not enough of it has actually been done. This isn’t a translation conversion of making something bigger in IMAX. This is a creative adaptation.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

To me, the next step really, Jay, is that we’re not just letting people watch the show, but we’re actually letting them be characters in the show. What is it like to go that next step? And we discover that we each can choose whether we’re the Tin Man or the Lion or the Scarecrow or Dorothy, and all of a sudden now we’re literally in it instead of — and I feel like there’s a merging that’s taking place. You’re talking about the education of the audience, from how to watch a movie and not run out of the theater, to how to watch a movie that’s all around you, to maybe it’s going to be how to be a character in the show. We’d like to sing, “we’re off to see the wizard, the wonderful” — and you and I start dancing down the yellow brick road. I think that’s the next step. And it’s a big step still because most people grew up safe on their couch and it’s a big step from that to singing and dancing and skipping down the Yellow Brick Road. But the joy, the light, the emotional power of being one of the characters in the show in a world that’s now four-dimensional all around me is greater than anything that was currently happening in even 4D Cinema.

JAY RINSKY:

People dabble in that, right? One would argue secret cinemas dabbled in inviting you to be a character of the film before the film takes place. But also, I think as writes or being able to adapt these films and work with the studios, part of the challenges is also legal. You’re working with big IP, but what you’re talking about in theory at the Sphere, The Wizard of Oz, this version that you’re describing, you get assigned whatever character, you’re seated, you’re watching the film, you’ve got all these 4DX effects, and then a prompt or something happens where a few actors actually come and take you from the aisle and actually take the whole audience even from the aisle and dance them around the venue for —

CHARLIE MELCHER:

Well, this is a Rocky Horror Picture Show where we all stood up and did the dance and threw the rice. But I think that where I’m suggesting is that we take it one step farther where we lose the screen altogether and we are actually in the world. It is like a secret cinema or a great example, Galactic Starcruiser where we were in Star Wars. I mean, I can’t tell you how great the door shut on the cabin room that I was staying in. It sounded just like it does in the movies and look out the window and it looks like space. And every detail was so rich. I mean, it was incredible to be in, after all these years of sort of dreaming of it, to actually be in a starship.

JAY RINSKY:

I’m aligned. Actually, for any creators listening to this podcast, I think there is a gold mine in licensing big cinematic IP and stories that people know, not doing what Little Cinema’s doing, which is keeping the movie, but building an experience with the characters that people know about. It’s cinematic immersive theater from seeing how guests and fans come to our screening in events and they dress up and they just eat up those elements of the pre-show where they get to be in character and they get to interact with characters, there’s a huge thirst for people to feel like they play a role in movies that they actually love.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

Is there a next big step coming from Little Cinema? Something — well, you have a big release coming out. Of course.

JAY RINSKY:

We got a big relief. We got Harry Potter. It’s as big as it gets.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

Harry Potter. I haven’t heard of it. What is that? Yeah.

JAY RINSKY:

It’s a great story rooted in magic that reminds you that magic is all around you wherever you look, even when you aren’t aware of it and to always believe in yourself. May 7th, Harry Potter coming out at Cosm, it is one that I will need to pinch myself of just like, oh my God, it’s such an incredible story and it’s such an incredible story that also invites the audience to feel the magic all around. That’s a big one. And knock on wood, I do feel that with the impact Cosm is making, with the impact Sphere’s making, with the impact that Screen X and 4DX is making, and with the fact that there’s a proven business economics to experiential cinema, this will continue to become more of a growing industry with norms and standards and hopefully an abundance of creativity from ourselves and others that can continue to be poured into it. And my dream is with what we’re doing now at Cosm, and just throw the kitchen sink at it. The 4DX elements, the aerialist, the apples, the wind effects, the visuals, just everything everywhere, all at the same time.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

I think that’s great. And if I take one thing from this conversation, Jay, it’s that you can still run a business and keep that passion for creativity and innovation that comes from inside your soul, that wants to express and create, and you don’t have to lose it just because you’re doing projects with big IP or officially licensed and sanctioned work, but you can in fact have a bigger palette and richer tools to play with. But I’m just so excited for you to continue to bring your creativity and desire to honor and innovate to the work you do. So fun to be with you today and thank you.

JAY RINSKY:

Thank you, Charlie. It’s been a blast.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

Once again, I’m Charlie Melcher, and this has been the FoST Podcast. Thank you to Jay Rinsky for joining me today. If you enjoyed this episode, I’m sure that you’re going to enjoy my book entitled The Future of Storytelling: How Immersive Experiences Are Transforming Our World. It’s available in stores and online wherever books are sold. And if you’re feeling inspired and want to expand your knowledge of cutting edge storytelling, please consider joining the FoST Explorers Club. It’s a global membership-based community, bringing together creative leaders for speaker sessions, curated trips, and much more. The FoST Podcast is produced by Melcher Media in collaboration with our talented production partners, Charts and Leisure. I hope to see you again soon for another deep dive into the world of storytelling. Until then, please be safe, stay strong and story on.