Three Times the Movies Changed Us Forever: Spielberg, ‘Backrooms,’ and 12-Year-Old Me

Movie lovers are flying high right now. It all goes back to feeling like a kid again.

Welcome back to Projections, a newsletter about movies that suddenly feels prescient given that popular cinema has re-emerged in the consciousness in a way that not even I could have pretended to see coming when I started thinking about doing this.

Today I am tangling with that feeling of rebirth, and the origins of movie love for young people. Let’s go back to the beginning.

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You may have heard that Steven Spielberg joined Bill Simmons and me on The Rewatchables this week to discuss Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

For a lifelong movie lover, Spielberg allegiant, and inveterate analyzer, this was Valhalla. I was so indescribably happy, and you can tell because my beet-red face is getting memed. Part of what made our discussion so special is that 2001 arrived at a time in Spielberg’s life when it could be transformative, as his moviemaking mind was as open as it could possibly be. When he saw it, he was 21, still a student at Long Beach State, on the precipice of getting his first professional assignment to make his short film, Amblin’. And to hear him talk about the movie—not just from a technical perspective, but an emotional, almost religious way—is to hear true awe collide with scholarship. Spielberg eventually went on to create some of the most astonishing science fiction films ever made, and in his hopeful, wondrous way, responded to Kubrick’s darkened vision over the years. They later became friends and collaborators and hearing him recount their relationship in detail is an experience I will cherish forever.

The timing of this episode and Spielberg’s return to sci-fi later this month with Disclosure Day is eerie, given the way 2001 impacted young people and their relationship to moviegoing and what is happening right now. 2001 is not typically lumped in with Bonnie and Clyde (which was released eight months earlier) or Easy Rider (which arrived 14 months after), the two films that ushered in the transition to the New Hollywood. Both are iterative reimaginings of classic movie stories—the crime drama and the biker picture. 2001 shattered conventions of what a movie could be. Non-narrative, visually audacious, and glacially paced. It’s difficult to write about these movies without slipping into bromides about “culture changing”—but it did. And while Arthur Penn applied jump-cut editing techniques culled from the French New Wave and Dennis Hopper applied a shambolic, there-as-it-happens mischief in their respective films, Kubrick was after something far more existential and grand. It cracked open the heads of many of the filmmakers who would follow in its wake. (Completely useless but meaningful-to-me fact: Stanley Kubrick was born on July 26, 1928. I was born on July 26, 1982.)

Spielberg described the ways in which he sought answers for how Kubrick achieved his vision—the models and effects work he applied with Douglas Trumbull (a genius and an underrated figure in Hollywood history), the color and lighting choices, how he filmed zero gravity, the rotating Discovery centrifuge, the front projection that illuminated the leopard’s eyes. The movie is unlike anything before it, but also a deconstructible blueprint for a new cinematic language. Commercially it had a dual effect—for young people who liked to get high and vibe out, it was a magical three hours in the dark. For high-minded teetotalers (of which Spielberg was one), it was a feast for the soul. And for many who split the difference, it radicalized what an afternoon at the movies could feel like. 2001 famously did not open strong at the box office—it was only in its second week when younger audiences caught on to the trippy nature of the film and it became a phenomenon, going on to be the second-highest grossing film of 1968 and cementing Kubrick as the architect of a new kind of cinema. Part of the reason he is not often associated with the New Hollywood is he started before it, withstood its rise and fall, and kept on making his own thing until the end of his life. He worked in the studio system for decades but never seemed to play by anyone’s rules.

I bring this up because we are at some sort of turning point right now, too. I don’t believe it is on the order of 2001, but the success of Backrooms and Obsession, two horror films made by 20-something phenoms, augurs something exciting. A door is cracked open again. Moon-Watcher has learned to swing the bone. Curry Barker and Kane Parsons are not the first YouTube-native filmmakers, and they’re certainly not the first 20-something directors to blaze a trail into the business. On The Big Picture this week, Amanda smartly noted that Spielberg himself, Paul Thomas Anderson, and Ryan Coogler all made movies in their mid-20s.

But it’s quite rare these days, and, as I wrote last week, their digital roots signal new ways of thinking about talent and possibilities.

What excites me the most, though, is who is going to the movies. 86 percent of the audience for Backrooms in its opening weekend is under 35 and 43 percent are between 18 and 24. This defies a lot of settled social wisdom about how young people won’t let go of their screens, fail to interact with the real world, and want to be super-served content in the most convenient way possible. Going to the movies isn’t easy—it costs money and time, it necessitates strategy and planning. But it’s fun. The same way seeing 2001 while blitted out of your mind (or just simply and soberly enjoying its majesty) was in 1968. The aftermath of these movies will be fascinating. Spielberg went and built one of the most staggering bodies of work in the history of the medium. Fans of these two horror films (and Iron Lung and Talk to Me and I Saw the TV Glow and a dozen other films touching these worlds) are going to be able to iterate them on a variety of platforms and connect them to gaming and short-form vertical video and memes and forms of media that do not yet exist.

Hearing Parsons tell me last week that he was blown away by what the users on his Discord server are doing to recreate and build upon the worlds he’s devising—for free, and with their own ingenuity—was an intellectual breakthrough for me. That the way we once played with action figures and Barbies quietly in our bedrooms has now evolved into a publicly observed free-for-all of creativity, a waterfall of “OK, but what if we did this?” is a rare not-terryfing vision of the future.

All of this has me thinking back on the way I transformed into a movie freak, and reminding me that online movie fandom is far from a new thing. In 1994, my family got our first personal computer, a Gateway 2000 desktop. We had very few accoutrements. A copy of Microsoft Encarta was one. Solitaire, of course. A word processor. An AOL CD-ROM that guaranteed “1000 Hours Free!” Eventually, I received an early edition of You Don’t Know Jack, an irreverent trivia game that formed roughly 17 percent of my personality.

One of the first things I did when our dial-up modem was connected was try to download as many things related to Quentin Tarantino as I possibly could. Images and posters from his films, snippets of songs featured on soundtracks, and most especially the then-massive QuickTime video files of the trailers for his films Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction (and True Romance and Natural Born Killers). I would tie up the phone line in my mom’s house for hours trying to obtain these two-minute videos.

I watched the above piece of media thousands of times. I didn’t own the movie. I certainly couldn’t stream it. Hell, I wasn’t even supposed to have seen it. (Even then, at 12, I had my ways.) There were not many Tarantino-related artifacts online in ’94, at least not that I could find. Interviews transcribed on GeoCities sites. A BBC documentary that was circulated in chunks. Copies of screenplays that would pop up on message boards and disappear. The level of lore that was discussed was surprising to 12-year-old me—hearing that Vincent Vega from Pulp Fiction and Mr. Blonde, a.k.a. Vic Vega, from Reservoir Dogs were brothers, and could one day meet on screen melted my mind. These were my backrooms. The place where you see an image or hear a snatch of dialogue and the spindle in your mind begins unraveling string everywhere. The monolith and its mammoth imperceptibility did this for Spielberg. Kane Parsons’s visualization of a world beyond our own that draws us in, absorbs our frailties, and reprocesses them in terrifying ways, is like this, too. They’re individual creations that are peeled off and take on a life of their own. I didn’t grow up to make Close Encounters, not close. But the kid who was nervously bouncing his knee while seated before a computer waiting waiting waiting for that trailer to download is sitting before one 30 years later, still chewing on what dragged me to the feeling in the first place, still unpacking, still thinking through. I’ll be a Star Child yet.

Physical Media Corner

Speaking of wunderkinds-turned-masters, today is the day when Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another arrives on 4K SteelBook from Warner Bros. Home Entertainment. My favorite movie of 2025 took its sweet time getting to this format and packaging, but it is worth it.

I’ve watched the film eight times in seven ways.

1. September 7, 2025: On 35mm (I think?) at the Directors Guild of America, the very first public screening of the film. It was there where Steven Spielberg first compared the movie to Dr. Strangelove, threading a needle perfectly from Kubrick to himself to Paul, three generations of American filmmakers sorting through fear, desire, and confusion in this life.

2. September 8, 2025: The next day, at the film’s Los Angeles premiere in digital IMAX at the Chinese Theatre in Hollywood.

3. September 24, 2025: In 70mm IMAX at the AMC CityWalk, the first publicly sold screening in Los Angeles. I sat in the fourth row all the way to the right and simply couldn’t see all of the screen!

4. September 26, 2025: In VistaVision at the Vista Theater on my 16th wedding anniversary lol. The reel ran out and had to be reset twice. Eventually, the projectionist pivoted to digital and saved the screening. VistaVision is finicky.

5. October 22, 2025: Again in VistaVision with several friends at The Vista. It didn’t break this time.

6. February 3, 2026: In VistaVision on the Warner Bros. lot before I moderated a discussion of the film with PTA, Leonardo DiCaprio, and producer Sara Murphy. Apparently there are only six operational VistaVision projectors in the world and only two in California, and I’ve seen it on both. This one featured a highly memorable post-event conversation I’ll keep to myself.

7. March 15, 2026: Streamed on HBO Max. I watched the film immediately after getting home from recording our post–Academy Awards Big Picture episode in which we discussed One Battle winning Best Picture.

8. June 2, 2026: At home on 4K in my garage.

I list these out to enumerate the various ways we can see something we love, the ways it can change in different environments at different times, and to mark the first year of a relationship with a work of art that impacted me deeply. PTA’s film has been picked over ever since it was first released, but it stands clearly as a major work of middle-aged reflection, watching your descendants grapple with the mess you inherited and somehow made a little worse. The movie is completely legible to me, narratively and emotionally, but it also has phases of mystery and ecstasy. When the Gringo Coyote sits Ghetto Pat down to explain their new identities and how the transponders work, I can feel myself going somewhere else, as the mechanics of a movie shift me out of one feeling and into another seamlessly. It’s a specific but ephemeral quality. Eight times down, it still happens.

On the disc, there is a pristine 4K transfer that captures Michael Bauman’s sun-glazed photography. I paused on the sequence in which Tony Goldwyn’s Christmas Adventurer sits with Colonel Lockjaw and when he says they “live by the Golden Rule,” he is illuminated by a piss-golden light. The whole room is a stomach-churning shade of yellow. It’s a beautiful example of lighting and production design underlining a character’s insidious nature.

The special features are modest but unique and essential for fans of the film. There are camera and lighting tests that spotlight the cast and the late producer and assistant director Adam Somner, to whom the film is dedicated. The camera really seems to love Teyana Taylor, especially, whose ease staring down the barrel is evident given her years of experience as a pop star. Chase Infiniti’s screen test opposite DiCaprio is included, which operates like a two-handed stage play. It also features a brief verite sequence that shows the way the Vista Theater prepared to show the film on opening night, including loading the enormous VistaVision reels, conversations with the masses lined up to see it, and post-screening reactions. And then the coup de grace is Learning, Studying … Always Perfecting: The Making of One Battle After Another, a 52-minute documentary that I believe is the first officially commissioned piece like this on a PTA movie since the essential and often heartbreaking That Moment: Magnolia Diary. The energy in this one is dramatically sunnier, a collection of B-roll, behind the scenes observations, and scenes framed differently than what we see in the film. There is a marvelous brief moment in the doc where the baby girl who plays little Willa is seen gently cooing and relaxing to the strains of “Loving You” by Minnie Riperton, who, of course is PTA’s late mother-in-law.

This disc has been in high demand for months and is hard to find right now, but even if you can’t get it, I suspect WB will print up more soon. OBAA is one of the movies of our time. I’m happy to finally slot it on the shelf.

Until next week, when things change forever again, I’ll see you at the movies.