"THE LAST REPAIR SHOP"
REPAIRING THE SOUL W/MUSIC
“The Last Repair Shop” co-directors Kris Bowers, left, and Ben Proudfoot, right, with one of the film’s stars (@bgproudfoot)
(If you’re spoiler-wary, be forewarned, but I also think this review will spur you to see the film, which is available on YouTube.)
Not since Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma and Chloe Zhao’s The Rider has a film tugged at my heartstrings and caused my soul to soar as has The Last Repair Shop.
This 40-minute documentary co-directed by Kris Bowers and Ben Proudfoot can’t compare cinematically with Cuarón’s epic tale about life in Mexico City in the turbulent 1960s or Zhao’s semi-documentary about a Lakota Sioux rodeo star in the Badlands of South Dakota—nor does it need to.[1] Simplicity without any fancy trimmings is one of the keys to the wonderment of a film about a musical instrument repair shop tucked away in a warehouse in downtown LA—a city rarely treated in film and TV as other than the glamour & glitz capital or the breeding ground of noir.
The repair shop has been run since 1959 by the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) and is indeed the last remaining shop of its kind in the nation, due to the recent draconian reduction in public school funding for the arts. Nor has the shop itself had an easy go of it. With a handful of technicians struggling to keep up with the 80,000 student instruments in need of repair, LAUSD, inspired by the Oscar-nominated film, has launched a $15 million fundraising campaign to hire additional personnel.[2]
Struggle is also a by-word for the film’s cast of 4 student musicians and 4 repair technicians. The students obtained their instruments for free thanks to a decades-long LAUSD program for youth from low-income families, and the technicians, also thanks to LAUSD, provide their services free of charge to the students. Paralleling the symmetrical 4 x 4 pattern and The Last Repair Shop’s musical theme, the film is divided into 4 “movements”—in both the orchestral sense and because each segment is deeply moving.
Apropos the musical motif, each movement follows a call and response format, in which each student’s introduction of their particular instrument is “answered” by a repair technician who handles that instrument’s orchestra section: violin/strings, tuba/brass, saxophone/winds, piano/pianos. The piano technician, who doubles as shop supervisor, also acts as the film’s “conductor” by shifting attention from the solo instruments to their corresponding sections.
What makes this rhyming scheme come to life, and makes the film so special, are the cast members themselves, and the often harrowing but ultimately uplifting stories they tell about their relationship to the instruments they play or repair, and the role the instruments and music in general have played in helping them overcome obstacles and enriching their lives.
For the young violinist (the students’ names were withheld for privacy reasons), the violin has helped her deal with the loneliness caused by persistent health issues in her family. For the tuba player, the horn’s expense was the problem. “It’s you or the tuba,” his mother bluntly told him, until the LAUSD program came to the rescue. The saxophonist and pianist both stress how their instruments helped them cope with mental health issues, with the saxophonist flatly stating, “It saved my life,” as the violinist had also implied.
The technicians, meanwhile, having gone through some rough times themselves, empathize with the students’ problems and know how important musical instruments can be in surmounting them.
“It’s not easy being a kid,” Dana Atkinson, the strings technician, remembers, and if you’re “broken,” as he was, it’s not easy gluing the pieces back together. It took Dana until he was 27, on the verge of suicide, to finally come out gay, thanks to the encouragement of his musician mother who told him it’s like swimming: “There’s a rhythm and if you stop, there’s no music. So don’t give up, keep going, persist.” Dana went on to wed a gay man, with whom he’s been married for 23 years and has raised a son.
Pam Moreno, the brass technician, breaks into tears recalling her ordeals as a Mexican immigrant and single mother with 2 young children. Her 1st job in a music store taught her useful skills but still left the family in dire poverty. Then she learned about an opening at the LAUSD shop and became its first female employee, with a union-scale salary and benefits. The personal connection she feels with the students is enhanced by the trinkets they stuff in the horns: candy, marbles, little toys, which become “like a secret communication between the kids and myself.”
Duane Michaels, the winds technician, found that for some children, “one instrument could change their whole life.” Bullied as a kid for being different, he identified with the Frankenstein monster played by Boris Karloff. And after seeing how moved the monster was in a scene where a kindly old blind man takes him in, gives him a cup of tea, and plays the violin, Duane became obsessed with the instrument. He later formed a bluegrass band and went on to front for Elvis Presley and perform at Knott’s Berry Farm and Disney World.
Steve Bagmanyan, the piano technician / shop supervisor / maestro, had it hardest of all. An Armenian raised in Baku, Azerbaijan (see below), he and his family became embroiled in the anti-Armenian uprising of the mid-1980s (similar to that which erupted again in 2023). His father was killed in the violence and Steve and his mother barely managed to escape to the US. In America, the husband of the couple that sponsored them offered Steve a job in his piano shop and the rest is history—some of which intersects uncannily with the The Last Repair Shop.
Co-director Bowers, an A-list film and TV composer obviously drawn to the The Last Repair Shop’s subject for its musical content, also hails from LA.[3] But he wasn’t prepared for the uniquely personal connection he’d end up having to the film’s material, and Steve Bagmanyan in particular.
In preproduction, Bowers learned that Bagmanyan, through the LAUSD program, had tuned pianos over the years at Bowers’ own elementary and middle schools, presenting Bowers with the opportunity “to literally thank someone who’d had a hand in my progress as a musician.”[4] Besides featuring Bagmanyan in The Last Repair Shop, Bowers and co-director Proudfoot, along with the film’s producer Searchlight Pictures, launched LAUSD’s fundraising campaign by donating a restored 1913 Steinway & Sons K-52 piano to Bowers’ alma mater, Third Street Elementary School.[5]
(Photo by Molly O’Keefe)
It’s also fitting that Bowers wrote musical themes for the film, culminating in The Alumni symphony, which we then see performed in the film-ending coda.[6]
In this rousing crescendo, with the end credits superimposed on the action, we open on a CU of the student violinist playing The Alumni’s first notes, then pull back to reveal a full orchestra joining in with a flourish. Unsurprisingly, the other 3 students are among the players, and the 4 technicians are on hand as well. Duane Michaels’ Repair Shop Hoedown is even inserted into the larger symphony, with Michaels himself fiddling away.
But the crowning touch is that all the other orchestra players are actual or future alumni from a range of LA schools whose names and “Class of” years are prominently displayed among the credits.[7] This of course broadens the film’s scope and heightens our awareness of the numerical and chronological extent of LAUSD’s musical enhancement program.
Altogether, if you’ll forgive one last musical metaphor, The Alumni finale allows The Last Repair Shop—and deservedly so!—to toot its own horn.
(Photo by Todd Williamson)
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NOTES
For donations to the LAUSD campaign go to thelastrepairshop.com.
[1] Prior to The Last Repair Shop’s Oscar nomination for Best Documentary Short Film of 2023, Proudfoot had already taken home the statuette in the same category for 2020’s Queen of Basketball, and he and Bowers had teamed up in 2021 on the Oscar-nominated short doc Concerto Is a Conversation.
[2] Lily Moayeri, “LAUSD Education Foundation Launches $15 Million ‘Last Repair Shop Fund’ Inspired by Oscar-Nominated Doc,” Los Angeles Magazine, February 21, 2024, https://lamag.com/film/last-repair-shop-oscar-nominated-documentary-lausd-fund.
[3] Bowers wrote the scores for 2018’s Best Picture Oscar-winner Green Book, 2021’s King Richard, and 2023’s The Color Purple, as well as music for the series Bridgerton (2022-24), Mrs. America (2020), When They See Us (2019), and Dear White People (2017, 2019-21).
[4] Quoted in Brian De Los Santos, “‘The Last Repair Shop’: Co-director Kris Bowers is an LAUSD alum,” LAist, February 27, 2024, https://laist.com/brief/news/how-to-la/the-last-repair-shop-lausd-kris-bowers-los-angeles.
[5] Moayeri, “LAUSD Education Foundation.”
[6] Katya Richardson wrote the film’s score.
[7] The schools listed are Grant High, Class of 1966; Venice High, Class of 1970; 32nd St. Performance Arts, Class of 2009; Hamilton High, Class of 2011; Renaissance Arts Academy, Class of 2013; Roosevelt High, Class of 2025; Palms Middle School, Class of 2028; and Hale Charter School, Class of 2030.