The typewriter, in this movie, is at once a simple writing tool and a totem of the 20th-century mind.
#TYPERIDER TROPHIES MOVIE#
The movie is a quaintly ingenious meditation on what the digital era is doing to us - how it has taken us a step away from reality, even as it’s made everything easier. There will always be people who cling to outdated technologies, but the theme of “California Typewriter” isn’t archaic. “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.” The actor’s wryly antiquated fixation on typewriters is infectious, even as you watch him tap-tap-tapping away and realize that Hanks - unlike, say, you or me - probably has someone on hand to deliver his hand-made thank-you notes. Nichol talks to self-avowed typewriter obsessives like Tom Hanks, who owns 250 vintage typewriters and writes on at least one of a them a day. “I hate getting e-mail thank yous,” says Hanks, because those e-mails take people “seven seconds” to write. Why does a clunky Imperial now seem sexier than an IBM Selectric? That’s part of the film’s antique mystique. It’s a playful piece of Luddite fetishism, in thrall to the fuddy-duddy designer chic of old typewriters, most of them manual. It’s sort of like a documentary about people obsessed with custom cars - though in this case the models that get them going are ’60s Smith Coronas that glide and ping with seductive precision, or bulky old Royals, with keys like chopping blades, that might have come out of a ’40s newspaper comedy. Directed, photographed, and edited by Doug Nichol, “California Typewriter” isn’t a dry and dutiful history-of-the-typewriter movie.
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