About US

What Is The Celluloid Lounge?

The Celluloid Lounge is a developing independent cinema and film community based in Coral Springs, Florida.

TCL creates curated film experiences built around discovery, atmosphere, conversation, and the shared ritual of moviegoing.

We are beginning to create that experience through curated screenings and special film events while continuing to work toward a permanent home.

The Celluloid Lounge is designed for people who do not simply watch movies. They gather for them.

Film is the ritual. People are the atmosphere.

Our Mission

To restore the feeling of cinema as ceremony — the hush before the projector starts, the weight of a story in a darkened room, and the communal pulse that rises and falls with the screen.

The Celluloid Lounge exists to:

Celebrate film history and emerging voices
Bring repertory, independent, and specialty programming to the community
Create places where cinephiles and the curious can gather
Support filmmakers, distributors, rights holders, and local arts partners
Build a film culture centered around discovery, conversation, and shared experience

Ritual & Atmosphere

The Celluloid Lounge is a contemporary homage to cinema as ceremony — a living conversation between screen and audience. We gather for the glow, the silence, and the shared breath when light cuts the dark.

Here, film is the ritual — the sequence of light and shadow we circle around. People are the atmosphere — the charged air that gives a screening its soul.

The screen becomes a threshold. A restoration, a forgotten film, a new independent voice, or an old favorite can feel completely different when experienced together.

The room may change. The ritual does not.

Programming

TCL programming is built to complement the traditional multiplex rather than duplicate it.

Independent film
Repertory classics
Cult and genre cinema
International film
Documentaries
Filmmaker events and special presentations

Premieres, discoveries, and one-night events worth gathering for.

Whenever practical, The Celluloid Lounge works directly with filmmakers, distributors, and rights holders to bring films to an audience properly and intentionally.

Different films. Same reason for gathering.

See Upcoming Screenings

The Vision

The long-term dream is a permanent home for The Celluloid Lounge — an intimate independent theater and gathering place built around intentional programming, atmosphere, and community.

But the building itself is not The Celluloid Lounge.

TCL begins with the experience: the films we choose, the people who gather, the conversations after the credits, and the culture we build around moviegoing.

While continuing to work toward a permanent theater, The Celluloid Lounge is beginning to create screenings, filmmaker events, repertory programming, and special film experiences throughout Coral Springs.

Each event is part of the same larger goal: build the audience, relationships, programming history, and community that can one day support a permanent theater of its own.

Our Story

The Celluloid Lounge began as an idea carried from theater to theater — the desire to create a cinematic home where atmosphere mattered as much as the film.

The concept grew through years of watching, making, studying, and talking about movies; exploring repertory programming and theatrical design; and asking what moviegoing could feel like when the experience was treated with intention.

Along the way, the idea has evolved. Properties have been explored. Plans have changed. New paths have appeared.

What has remained constant is the reason for doing it: to build something meaningful around film and the people who still believe seeing it together matters.

The permanent theater remains the dream. The story has already begun.

About the Founder

The Celluloid Lounge is founded by Johnny Mariani, a lifelong film lover and former professional filmmaker whose relationship with cinema began long before The Celluloid Lounge had a name.

In his early years, Johnny was not simply experimenting with film — he was working in it, creating projects, collaborating with crews, and learning the industry from inside the craft itself.

Movies were not just an escape. They were a vocation, a discipline, and a world he lived in fully. Whether on set, behind a camera, or in the editing room, storytelling shaped his identity long before The Celluloid Lounge became a possibility.

Even as his professional path evolved, the ritual of cinema remained constant. Midnight screenings, festivals, repertory houses, and deep-cut discoveries continued to reinforce his belief that moviegoing could be more than passive — it could be communal, memorable, and transformative.

That belief drives The Celluloid Lounge.

Johnny's vision is rooted in the idea that a cinema does not need to be huge to be meaningful. It needs intention: the right film, the right atmosphere, and people willing to gather around the screen.

His goal is simple:

To build a place where people don't escape from the world — they meet the world inside the frame.

Johnny oversees programming direction, creative identity, brand development, partnerships, and the continuing development of The Celluloid Lounge.

A permanent theater remains part of that vision, but the work of building The Celluloid Lounge is already underway.

See You in the Dark

This began as a feeling: the hum before the projector starts, the way a room leans forward when the lights fall.

The Celluloid Lounge exists to protect that feeling and build something around it — a film culture rooted in discovery, conversation, and the experience of being in the room together.

See you in the dark.