Film is the great democratizer. You don’t have to go to film school to become a cinephile. All it requires is the voracious consumption of movies.
Join the fun
Every Friday at 7 p.m., the Palm Theatre presents its handpicked selection for Flickerhead Fridays, a series focused on a specific theme or director. October featured horror films. November is all classic film noir. Visit thepalmtheatre.com for advanced $12 tickets. Pro tip: Mention Art After Dark on the first Friday of each month to get a $3 discount at the box office.
“Film was one of my first loves as a kid,” Palm Theatre manager Michael Lipari explained in the projection room of the downtown SLO movie theater. “It was like film and music. That was it, you know? Once I saw Star Wars for the first time—a pretty classic introduction to film—I was hooked. Classic sort of thing, grew up, didn’t really know what a director was. I thought the actors sort of made all the movies happen. I thought Arnold Schwarzenegger just did everything. Then eventually I got to know some directors, people like David Fincher or Martin Scorsese.”
Like many cinephiles, Lipari is an autodidact, and part of his self-taught education happened at the theater he now manages. He grew up in Templeton and had been coming to the Palm as a patron since he was a kid, and he had some friends who worked for Jim Dee, who founded the theater that’s now operated by the SLO Film Center under the aegis of the San Luis Obispo International Film Festival (SLOIFF). Lipari started working at the Palm in 2013. When the Film Fest took over in 2024, Lipari was made manager, so he took over curation of Flickerhead Fridays, a monthly film series that focuses on a specific theme or director.
“Flickerhead started in October of 2023. [Former theater manager] Matt McGill, Ryan Burr, and I all approached Jim Dee with a proposal to do a retrospective, because we all love the old Rainbow calendars,” Lipari explained, referring to Dee’s original art house theater known for its eclectic film choices. “We had seen them back in storage and we just all fell in love with them, thought it was this great idea. And post-COVID, it was really hard because movie theaters were not doing very well, as everyone’s aware.”
In a story last October, “Are movie theaters dying? A Look at the struggle to keep cinema alive,” Dee credited Flickerhead Fridays as one of the things that kept the Palm afloat.
“When the Film Fest took over, I was really unsure what direction they were going to go,” Lipari said. “I was very open to all of it. I knew I wanted to keep working at the Palm. But, yeah, I wasn’t sure. And then [SLOIFF Executive Director] Skye [McLennan] graciously let me keep my series.”
Lipari has done Flickerhead on director David Fincher, known for films such as Se7en, Fight Club, Zodiac, and Gone Girl. He did a series on what he calls “weird Westerns,” films like Hud and Cool Hand Luke.
“The themes—it’s really weird. It’s always organic. This last year, I had my whole schedule done, but before that, I really just thought a lot about movies that I had previously forced people to watch,” he laughed.
Flickerhead Fridays has a devoted core audience who like Lipari’s film choices and how he curates them, but he’d like to see more people attend. One of the difficulties in growing an audience with a series like the upcoming film noir one is that many of these films turn up on TV channels such as Turner Classic Movies.
“I think the difference of watching it in a movie theater is that you have the human-to-human connection, the person sitting next to you, maybe a loved one or a perfect stranger,” Lipari explained. “When you’re both simultaneously laughing, crying, or screaming, or whatever it is the movie is presenting to you, there’s a sense of community there. And I think also just the fact that it’s so big. Last night we screened Scream (1996), and I ducked my head in to see it. I hadn’t caught it in theaters [when it was first released], and it was just such a different experience to see it up on the big screen like that.”
If you aspire to know more about film, Flickerhead Fridays is a good place to start. You’ll be watching with an audience that shares your interest in cinema.
“I’ve always found film to be this very important art form, and I think it’s one of the greatest achievements in human history,” Lipari said. “There’s just something in me that I want and need to show movies to people. And I really do take the time to try to curate the thing so that it’s an experience in and of itself.”
He equates his curation to putting a mixtape together. The way the songs are ordered and arranged is as important as the songs themselves.
“There’s maybe a building of the sequence or something that you might miss out if you just handpick each one,” he noted.
If you’re wondering about what’s in store for December, Lipari is subverting holiday expectations and screening Italian giallo cinema—slasher, thriller, psychological horror, supernatural, and sexploitation films.
“It’s a genre that I’ve gotten into the last couple of years, and I really enjoy it. I just think presenting it at Christmas time is ridiculous because everyone’s doing It’s a Wonderful Life, and all those movies are so great, but I like to give something back to the weirdos every once in a while, you know?”
November films
Nov. 7: Double Indemnity (1944) is co-writer/director Billy Wilder and co-writer Raymond Chandler’s take on James M. Cain’s novella about insurance salesman Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray), who plots with Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) to kill her husband for the insurance, raising the suspicions of claims manager Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson). (107 min.)
Nov. 14: White Heat (1949) is director Raoul Walsh’s gangster picture about Arthur “Cody” Jarrett (James Cagney), a ruthless psycho who’s overly attached to his equally psycho mother, “Ma” Jarrett (Margaret Wycherly). As he plans to rob a chemical plant’s payroll, he begins a slow descent into madness that leads to an iconic rooftop scene. (114 min.)
Nov. 21: The Killing (1956) is the third feature-length film by Stanley Kubrick about career criminal Johnny Clay (Sterling Hayden), recently released from prison, who plans a racetrack heist. Between his shady coconspirators, femmes fatales, and bad luck, things go awry. Quentin Tarantino called the film his inspiration for Reservoir Dogs (1992). (85 min.)
Nov. 28: Touch of Evil (1958) is Orson Welles’ entry into the noir genre with Charlton Heston in the lead as Miguel Vargas, a Mexican special prosecutor who’s honeymooning in Texas with his new American wife, Susan (Janet Leigh), when a car bomb kills two. Vargas goes head-to-head with bigoted police captain Hank Quinlan (Welles). (95 min.) ∆
Contact Arts Editor Glen Starkey at gstarkey@newtimesslo.com.
This article appears in Nov 6-16, 2025.