California Typewriter (2016)

(On Cable TV, July 2020) Why should you watch a documentary mythologizing typewriters? Well, how about if I tell you that it features Tom Hanks at his meanest? It’s true! The noted typewriter enthusiast has cutting words for anyone who dares think that an email is a replacement for a typewritten note: “I hate getting email Thank Yous from folks. ‘Hey, we had a great time last night.’ Or, ‘Hey, I really appreciated it.’ So, really, you appreciated it so much that you took seven seconds to send me an email. Now if they take 70 seconds to type me out something on a piece of paper and send it to me, well, I’ll keep that forever. Otherwise, I’ll just delete that email!” Hanks is at ease in Doug Nichol’s California Typewriter, as the film becomes an overwhelming 103-minute-long paean to the lost romanticism of typing on paper. It’s sometimes overdone—some interviewees describe their limitations with computers with details that I can’t even make sense of. Later, the film makes parallels with Spiritism by extolling how their creative process is mysteriously changed by a machine and once again I’m left wondering that they’re thinking. (Or why the typewriter-machine is better than the computer-machine.) Oh yes, this is a feature-length portrait of a few eccentrics, selling typewriter, repurposing their pieces for art, digging into their history and getting together at conventions. All stories are meant to be uplifting—the artist getting known for his art, the repair shop picking up customers and the historian getting his hands on a coveted machine in a museum. The film does start on a strong note, with the death of a typewriter as thrown from a moving car. Now, let’s make something clear: I’m curiously sympathetic to the idea of typewriters—I learned how to type on one, I own an Underwood as objet d’art, I’m even arguably trying to recreate much of the feel of a typewriter by using a very loud mechanical keyboard even as I type this review. But there’s a limit to that affection and California Typewriter frequently went beyond it. Yet don’t let me discourage you from having a look: Sam Shepard and John Mayer show up in talking-head interviews, and there’s a great segment on a typewriter orchestra. One could even argue that of all the topics in the world ripe for a documentary, typewriters are not a bad premise at all. Just prepare yourself for exactly what California Typewriter is meant to do: make you think that typewriters are the most important thing in the world.