The Aidikoff Screening Room is a legend in the annals of Hollywood with a direct lineage from the days of silent film right up to the cutting edge of the digital age.
It began with Max Aidikofff in New York back in the early 1900′s who was the projectionist for RKO. The films were silent then and made of combustible cellulose nitrate, which meant that the projectionist had to be part fireman, part engineer. Charles Aidikoff is 96 years old and learned the profession from his father.
Charlie worked for Warner Brothers and the Lytton Center for The Performing Arts as well as many theaters throughout Brooklyn.
He ran the “The Jazz Singer” first motion picture with sound in 1927, “God forbid a truck should go by and make the record skip and we’d have to start the damn thing from the beginning again!”
Another revolutionary moment in film history was “Cinerama” that featured three projectors worked by two projectionists that were locked in the room under guard to prevent the possible theft of the “one of a kind” priceless film. Pinkerton guards never let them out of their sight.
Charles opened his First Screening room on Sunset and Doheney in 1966 to give all the other film makers in the world a chance to have their films screened and distributed without the difficulty of dealing with studios and studio screening rooms.
The first LA Times article was written by Charles Champlin in February 1968 stating that Charles’ screening room “serves the independent film market as well as the foreign”
Over the 75 years Charles has been in the industry, he claims to have seen over 50,000 movies. ” When I first started out, the thrill was to be able to see all the films that were to be coming out. After that, I looked forward to meeting all the celebrities when they came to my room. The thrill hasn’t gone because every day is different, Ill never loose that feeling.” During that time top dogs such as Marlin Brando, Gregory Peck, Charlton Heston, Heady Lamar, Kirk Douglas, and even the late Orsen Wells sat in cushy seats eating cookies and candy watching their movies on the big screen. Even the Beatles stopped by in 1972 to catch a movie by the late Harry Nilsson. Charles was the first person to screen “Star Wars” for George Lucas.
26 years after The Charles Aidikoff Screening Room was built on Sunset Boulevard Charles knew he had outgrown his small 30 seat theater and decided to make the move to Beverly Hills. In 1991 Charles found an empty space located at 150 South Rodeo Drive in The William Morris Building. It was perfect, discreet and private, the best location in town. The room was now centered in among the major Hollywood talent agencies, William Morris, UTA, ICM, CAA, and the list goes on. The screening room is now in a prime location for independent and foreign film makers to show their work to the people who make dreams come true.
Grandson Josh Aidikoff has been around the movie and screening industry for as long as he can remember, even remembering watching movies like “Little Monsters” in the old Sunset screening room to the construction of the new room in 1991.
Josh started manning the projectors when he was 13 and started professionally at age 15 running his first film “Evita”. learning interlock by age 16 josh stepped up to the plate to start working for his family business to take on anything the industry could throw at him. Because I was so young when I started, people really didn’t take me seriously at first and tried to take advantage of my age, but it made me more aware of how precise every show has to be run so that there was little error tied to my performance”.
*When Josh was 19 he took over as manager of the Screening room. At this time technology threatened to break the family’s cinematic dynasty as digital projectors and distribution systems were poised to eradicate film from the movie house. In 2003 the studios stated that they expected to save about 1 billion a year by eliminating film, no more bills for making thousands of prints, no more bills for shipping the prints around the world, and no more bills for destroying mountains of celluloid, and gone too will be the art of projecting, a class of blue-collard craftsmen who were once the highest paid industrial workers in California now are few and far between. Josh says, ” In 5 years I don’t expect to be handling film at all, just digital tapes and computer servers”
*The Aidikoff family has spent a lifetime keeping up with evolving movie machinery and technology, and today continue to lead the frontier of digital cinema with Lightyear Digital, A company that promises to become the next generation of exibition and distribution for all the independent and foreign film makers out in the world. The filmmakers will always need an exquisite theater to show the work to all sorts of producers, agents, investors and people who can turn their work into blockbusters. The Charles Aidikoff Screening room is still the pinnacle of show business where the top people congregate and have their work seen, bought and distributed.