Some moments in cinema history transcend the screen and become part of our moviegoing heritage. Few images capture that nostalgic magic quite like the animated dancing snacks that cheerfully invited audiences, “Let’s all go to the lobby.” It’s a tune ingrained in the collective moviegoing memory, but the story behind the animation has largely remained untold—until now.
Enter Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Justin Atkinson, whose latest documentary, Let’s All Go to the Lobby, uncovers the fascinating history of Filmack Studios—the Chicago-based company behind some of the most iconic pre-show advertisements in American cinema. Though only a few seconds long, the animated short has become a beloved moviegoing symbol and a cheerful reminder that a night at the theater is about more than just the feature.
Atkinson is on a mission to shine a light on Filmack, the role theaters play in our collective experience, and the small moments that make them unforgettable. Through a crowdfunding campaign, Atkinson is inviting audiences to help bring Let’s All Go to the Lobby to life. He hopes to tell the Filmack story where it all started—on cinema screens. Boxoffice Pro caught up with Justin Atkinson to discuss the origins of the documentary, the importance of preserving film history, and what the iconic jingle can still teach us about the power of the theatrical experience.
When did you first encounter Filmack, and what were the origins of this project?
When I was growing up, my mom used to take me to the Vali-Hi Drive-In theater in Minnesota. I remember seeing all those really cool intermission trailers between the movies, like the refreshment countdown clock, which told you how much time you had between movies to go back to the concession stand. The animation and the music always stuck with me. As I grew up, I’d always kind of wondered who made them. Where did those come from? You never saw any company logos or anything on them.
I was watching April Wright’s documentary Going Attractions chronicling the history of the drive-in movie theater, and she answered my question. She interviewed Robbie Mack, who is the third-generation owner of Filmack Studios, the company that made the countdown clock trailers. Not only that, but they’ve also made classics like Let’s All Go to the Lobby and others that I’ve seen referenced in popular culture over the years. I looked up Filmack Studios and called Robbie. He and I started talking, and I realized nobody had ever made a documentary about the story of Filmack. It’s an amazing story spanning over 100 years of the movie industry and exhibition. I just thought, ‘Well, if no one’s made it, why not me?’
What have been some of the highlights thus far in bringing this project to life?
Bringing this project to life has been an adventure for me. I live in the Midwest, and this project has taken me all over the country doing interviews. I’ve been to Chicago to interview Robbie Mack at the historic Music Box Theatre. Then to Los Angeles, where I interviewed April Wright and rented out the Gardena Cinema there. Then to Randal Kleiser’s house, who was the director of Grease. Then it was out to Pennsylvania, to The Mahoning Drive-In Theater, where I interviewed Virgil Cardamone and Mark Nelson. They still run original Filmack trailers on film at their drive-in. I got to see Let’s All Go to the Lobby projected the night that I went out there, and the audience loved it.
I was also out in Boston where I spoke with a professor of animation who still operates the animation camera system that Filmack and Walt Disney used back in the golden age of animation, basically until computer animation arrived in the mid-’90s. They demonstrated how cell animation was done with that camera system and how Filmack used the same one to make their trailers.
Right, because it’s not only film history; it’s also animation history.
Right, it was all cell animation. That’s how they created all of those trailers. They hired animation directors like Dave Fleischer of the Fleischer brothers, the guys who created Popeye and Betty Boop. Dave Fleischer directed Let’s All Go to the Lobby. Also, Walt Disney worked very briefly at Filmack in the very beginning. Filmack started in 1919 in Chicago, Illinois. Back then they weren’t doing animation; they were putting text over a background or over a drawing of a background. He worked there very briefly before he went off and started his first animation company.
What does Filmack look like today? Does Robbie Mack maintain an archive of all this content?
The digital revolution really changed a lot of things for companies like Filmack, because now theaters create a lot of that content in-house. They would hire advertising agencies to come in and do a lot of that stuff too, but would still use Filmack to print trailers on film. When digital projection came in, there was no need for film anymore, so that dramatically changed Filmack’s entire business strategy.
Over the last decade and a half, Filmack has been licensing. Some of these trailers have become real staples of American popular culture, and Robbie, the owner, realized that all these companies want to license Let’s All Go to the Lobby or the dancing hot dog. That’s pretty much what he does today: license all these wonderful trailers. For example, the last Jurassic World movie licensed Let’s All Go to the Lobby for a clip in which the T- Rex destroys a drive-in.
That’s a great scene; it’s a shame that wasn’t in the theatrical release.
If they had opened the movie with that sequence, holy cow. That would have been amazing. When Robbie told me they licensed it, we were so excited. Then they released it online. It was so cool, why did they do that?
Director Randal Kleiser was actually the very first person to license one of the Filmack trailers, and that was for the movie Grease. When John Travolta’s out singing at the drive-in, you see the refreshment countdown clock playing on the screen behind him—the very same one I grew up with.
Many of us have memories of the Filmack snipes—did you come across other archival materials that surprised you or were new to you?
It’s amazing to me how few photographs we’ve actually been able to track down. Filmack doesn’t really have an archive of pictures and animation cells, but I was able to contact a couple of people who had relatives who worked at Filmack, and they had photos. We have photos of everybody sitting in the screening room for what was the first screening of the Let’s All Go to the Lobby trailer. I’ve acquired all these great photos that nobody has ever seen before. They’re just waiting to be unearthed and shown to the world for the first time in this movie.
How long have you been working on the project, and what are some of the goals and initiatives of the Indiegogo campaign?
We started shooting Let’s All Go to the Lobby in the summer of 2022, and we’ve just been going around the country shooting interviews and as much B-roll footage as I could find and editing it all together. I’ve learned, as you’re making a documentary, there’s always something new to discover. ‘Oh, we should interview that person and put that into the movie, too.’ We’ve been doing that over the last couple of years, but now we’re at a stage—because we don’t have a lot of archival materials—where I had the idea of adding animated recreations of the events being talked about, but in the style of animation from the classic Filmack trailers.
We’ve hired a really talented group of animators in Chicago to create these animations for us, and that’s where the crowdfunding campaign comes in. Robbie and I have been self-funding this endeavor, but we’re looking for additional funding to complete the animation that we need. Once we have the animation completed, then the film will be completed and ready to be shared with the world.
You’re taking it right back to its roots in Chicago.
Yeah, exactly! It’s funny; that was something that happened by accident. We were looking for [an animation] team, and Robbie came across a man named Ron Fleischer—no relation to the Fleischer brothers, but his name is Fleischer. This was meant to be. It had to be this guy. Ron is an animation professor in Chicago, so he loved the project. This is very much going back to his roots as a former animator, too. [Ron Fleischer worked on animated series such as “Tiny Toon Adventures,” “Taz-Mania,” and “Animaniacs.”] He found some former students of his who were really excited to work on something like this. It’s been a really great collaboration.
What are some of the challenges ahead? What other post-production aspects do you need some help with?
Animation is the big one. Right now we’re using a lot of temp music, too, so hiring a film composer. We want to do some licensing as well for different kinds of clips and things that we want to show. And there’s color correction, color grading—all those kinds of post-production technical elements to finish the movie in a more complete way. A lot of the work is done; the editing was all done by me. Sweetening the sound mix, licensing additional material, and other post-production aspects will help us finish the film. We’re excited to show this as soon as possible to everybody who wants to see it.
What are some of your goals for the finished film?
We hope to do the film festival route, but then we also really want to exhibit it theatrically, because theatrical exhibition is so important to us. This whole film is a tribute to the theatrical experience. These trailers played such a big part in the history of exhibition—encouraging people to come to the concession stand and buy concessions.
That’s where most theaters make their revenue from, and I think these trailers played a huge part in the growth of theatrical exhibition over the last 100 years. We definitely want to show it in theaters, at drive-ins, and get it to as big of an audience as we possibly can. One really cool thing people will learn about in the documentary is the history of concessions and how these trailers were a big part of promoting the concession stand.
All of these trailers and snipes really feed into our nostalgia about the movies and about concessions. Variations of the Let’s All Go to the Lobby characters and that kind of nostalgia have been popping up in lots of places over the past few years.
Oh, for sure. We even do a montage [in the documentary] of all the different movies and TV shows that have referenced it, like “The Simpsons,” a Geico commercial, and The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part. It’s been referenced so much. What’s funny about that jingle is that it’s really just “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow,” but with the different lyrics over it.
Were there any prominent moments at the movies that sparked your interest in filmmaking?
When I was a kid, my mom took me to the Vali-Hi Drive-In to see a lot of different movies. I remember seeing the original Batman there. That really blew my mind as a very young kid. It was the first time I’d ever seen a movie that created, in a live-action way, a whole other world. I didn’t know anything about Batman, so to go into a movie like that and see that whole world was almost like how people describe seeing Star Wars for the first time.
My mom took me to see the original Jurassic Park at the Vali-Hi Drive-In. I remember that it was paired with Free Willy. Quite a double feature, but Jurassic Park just blew my mind. I had never seen anything like it. It was the first movie I’d ever seen that felt like a roller-coaster ride. It was funny, it was scary, and it was just jaw-dropping. That was the movie that made me want to be a filmmaker. I wanted to make movies that had that same impact on an audience. Steven Spielberg was a big influence, and the Vali-Hi Drive-In was such a huge part of my childhood. So much so that when I made my first movie, Bobby’s Intermission, I wanted it to be a love letter to drive-ins.
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