At Last, ‘Hundreds of Beavers’ Is Ready to Rampage Through Theaters on 35MM
There’s an old gold vault just outside of Washington, D.C., that holds the kind of (national) treasures most film nerds can only dream of seeing. But when a film screens in the Library of Congress’s theater, the filmmakers can get a tour of the Library’s vault. This is how “Hundreds of Beavers” producer Kurt Ravenwood ended up getting to see one of the original prints of Edwin Stanton Porter’s early silent Western, “The Great Train Robbery.”
Now, director Mike Cheslik’s murder-fueled homage to everything from silent slapstick to Nintendo side-scroller platform games has a film print of its own. As with most things “Hundreds of Beavers” related, what started as a joke among the filmmaking team ended up being followed through on quite seriously.
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“We made this film very cheaply and part of the way we made it cheaply was by having the entire workflow be [in] 1080p. So in a way, it’s a joke to print a movie onto 35mm, but it’s also an artistic choice. The entire movie and the work that Mike did on it was an homage to a lot of these older films, [to] silent cinema,” Ravenwood told IndieWire. “But even the graininess of 16mm independent film is [an influence]. So it just makes sense.”
The key reason that “Hundreds of Beavers” has been able to follow through on striking a 35mm print is that they’ve kept control of their distribution rights, so the team can be opportunistic about new ways to exhibit and create physical copies of the film. “We don’t have to wait for a distributor who’s moved onto their next movie to keep doing things,” Ravenwood said.
But that means they need to do all the cool things — including over 200 theatrical screenings, a roadshow with in-person beaver wrestling, festival runs, and getting the film set up to stream and play on airplanes, in addition to striking a print — for themselves. Ravenwood led the charge in figuring out the where and the how of creating a print of a movie shot on a Panasonic GH4. Some independent theaters where “Hundreds of Beavers” have been shown advised Ravenwood to link up with Cinelab, a company based in Romania, which had also done a print of “The People’s Joker.”
“ They were a little confused as to why they were getting a 1080p movie file, and I explained to them that that’s what our movie is. We [had to have] a little bit of back and forth on frame rates,” Ravenwood said. “The lovely people at the Oriental Theater here in Milwaukee, which is a gorgeous movie palace that rivals pretty much any that I’ve seen in the world, they have a really talented projection team there that [ran] the movie for us [to proof].”
Watching reluctant hunter Jean Kayak (Ryland Brickson Cole Tews) attempt to slalom away from a top-secret beaver space base for the 4,000th time isn’t nearly as exciting as seeing it for the first time, of course, but Ravenwood has been excited by the ways the test print is already taking on a life of its own.
“The whites were beautiful and they had that subtle kind of flash that you get with 35mm that you don’t get with digital,” Ravenwood said. “There is something special about that flicker [and] the kind of softer look of it. It’s not as sharp as our digital projection. The sound has a more rounded quality that’s hard to describe. And I really love that, because we’re only striking one print for now, it’s going to get its own little weird patina as it travels around the United States.”
The fan enthusiasm for the film has also been sustaining throughout putting together the print. “Since the film’s first public screening in 2022, the core audience of ‘Hundreds of Beavers’ turned out to be people we never expected. The people who came out to see it over and over again, who championed it online to what it became, were the hardcore cinephiles, the Letterboxd enthusiasts. ‘Beavers’ would not have become the success story it did without them,” publicist Justin Cook told IndieWire. “Kurt and I talked and did some digging, and after some logistic bumps in the road, the print is a reality and about to premiere. To see Beavers on 35mm is a personal dream come true and a thank you to the audience who made the last few years of our lives a ride we will never forget,” Cook said.
And at long last, the “Hundreds of Beavers” film print is set to begin its cross-country odyssey — and for more than just a limited engagement but for as long as theaters will host it. To start, the 35mm version of “Hundreds of Beavers” is set to play in Dallas at the Texas Theater on February 26 and at the Somerville Theatre in the Boston area on March 7, with a March run at the New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles, more 2025 screenings planned at The Music Box in Chicago, IFC in New York City, the Cleveland Cinematheque, The Loft in Tucson, the Hollywood Theater in Portland, Oregon, and more to be announced.
The 35mm version of the film also represents something harder to come by than a merchant’s daughter’s hand in marriage: Permanence in an age of media stored digitally. “I have hard drives from 10 years ago that I have no idea how to get on anymore. All of our movies are on these hard drives and in the cloud and in all these places — I don’t know what the long-term [future] is. It’s very ephemeral. So there’s just something really beautiful about having it on this permanent physical medium,” Ravenwood said. “I love that I can deliver an actual film print of our movie to my director. That feels really cool as a producer in the 2020s.”
It’s for that same love of physical media that the “Hundreds of Beavers” team has announced a limited edition VHS version of the film. If we’re all lucky enough, then hopefully the print will still be in a vault somewhere a hundred years from now — but go see it in theaters first.
Theatrical screening information for “Hundreds of Beavers” is available on their website.
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