TLA Entertainment Group is a privately held corporation based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It was founded in 1981.
Originally formed to operate a repertory movie theater, the company has expanded to catalogs, retail stores and licensing businesses. The catalog began as an adult mail order business and grew to include gay and lesbian non-adult films and is now supplemented by the website TLAvideo.com.[1]
Contents |
TLA stands for Theater of the Living Arts. Now a concert venue, it was originally founded as an experimental theater group in the 1960s [1] under the direction of Andre Gregory (of My Dinner with Andre fame). The group included Danny DeVito, Judd Hirsch, Sally Kirkland and Ron Leibman who performed exclusively in the Theater of the Living Arts on South Street in Philadelphia.[2] By the mid- to late-60s, funding for the Theater was running out and the theater was converted to a movie house showing an eclectic mix of classic and foreign films.
In 1981, the founding partners of TLA Entertainment Group met and subsequently ran the theater. For the next six years the TLA was a leading repertory art movie theater. In addition, for four of those six years, the partners ran a small, first-run art house, the Roxy Screening Room, also located in Center City Philadelphia.[2]
In 1985, the first video store was opened next door to Theater of the Living Arts. The stores expanded into a chain, and by 2005 it had expanded into four stores in Philadelphia and one in New York [3]. Starting in 2007, the stores began closing, with the New York store falling first, followed by the Chestnut Hill and Society Hill locations in 2009, [4] and the Rittenhouse Square location in 2011. The final store, TLA Bryn Mawr will remain open until at least October of 2012 [5].
TLA Video stores have been known locally for their knowledgeable staff and varied selection of obscure, independent, foreign, and adult films in addition to mainstream titles. Most titles are arranged by genre, actor, director, and country to provide the personalized feel of a neighborhood store as opposed to the more sterile environments found in larger nationwide chains.[1]
A few of the store policies include encouraging customers to put advance reserves on titles that are either out of stock or pending release to ensure that the store will have what the customer wants when they come in and DVD trade-ins for store credit. They maintain a varied stock of VHS tapes, DVD, and Blu-ray discs to cover titles that may not have been released in other formats.
TLA maintains a relationship with The Criterion Collection that sees them stocking every Criterion titles for rental. Their retail stock was discontinued in 2011, but used items still remain on sale and customer orders are still available.
The chain also regularly features monthly rental specials throughout the year in addition to a permanent 3-for-2 rental special that applies to everything in the store. Cash, credit, debit, and check are accepted forms of payment, and rentals can be put on an account balance to be paid at a later date. In addition to standard cash rentals, the store also offers blocks of rentals (referred to as 'punches') and 'sub-plans' that allow customers to rent as many movies or games as they want over a period of a month without late fees, as long as they have only a certain amount of rentals a time, depending on the type of plan is purchased.
TLA Bryn Mawr keeps a schedule of 12 p.m. to 10 p.m. 365 days a year.
TLA Entertainment Group launched TLAvideo.com in 1997. This is one of the largest video websites in the US, and one of the world's leading retailers of Gay & Lesbian films. It also offers American Independent, International, Hollywood Hits and Adult DVDs. It also offers gay and lesbian books on TLAbooks.com.
In 1994, TLA Entertainment Group President Raymond Murray decided to begin the Philadelphia International Gay & Lesbian Film Festival. The 12-day festival is the third largest gay–lesbian film festival in the country.
In 2001, TLA Entertainment Group assumed management of the Philadelphia Festival of World Cinema, now called The Philadelphia Film Festival. The two-week festival shows over 100 feature films from around the world. In order to better fund these events, in August 2001 TLA Entertainment Group spun them off and created the non-profit Philadelphia Film Society. In 2002, with a larger staff and more venues, the Philadelphia Film Festival had over 45,000 attendees, up from 17,000 in 2000.
TLA Releasing is the licensing division of TLA Entertainment. It is focused on the acquisition of distribution rights of international, independent, and gay and lesbian films to theaters and on DVD/VHS. TLA Releasing currently releases two films a month for the home entertainment market and has several films playing in theaters. The catalog of films is available online.
TLA Entertainment Group has published two books: