The beloved shop, which was featured in an  short  last year, repairs students’ school instruments across the district: taking in, fixing up and and sending back school pianos, tubas and drum sets on a daily basis.

It’s been operating for 65 years, and now the shop needs to raise $15 million to ensure it keeps functioning well into the future, said Ben Proudfoot, who co-directed the Academy Award-winning documentary about the shop and co-chairs its fundraising campaign. 

This month, the Chuck Lorre Family Foundation gave the shop a big start on its ambitious goal, with a $1 million gift. 

And to celebrate, cellist Yo-Yo Ma visited and played a couple riffs at a party held in the shop’s slightly ramshackle, downtown L.A. warehouse digs.  

“That’s the thing with this particular project, it’s hard to argue with,” explained documentary co-director Proudfoot, who is also campaign committee co-chair for the repair shop’s fundraising efforts; and why it attracts such support. “It’s just really an important thing.”

And the shop itself, a windowless warehouse encircled by a security fence, is due for an upgrade. 

Surrounded by blocks of choking traffic and not so far from skid row, the shop’s entrance is marked by a pair of fireproof doors and an unassuming sign reading  “Musical Instrument Repair.”

Many people had no idea about the shop, and even those who used it didn’t quite grasp its significance, said Proudfoot. 

But what stood out to him was that it was the last of its kind. 

The country’s second-largest district is the only one left where students could have full access to music education without spending their own families’ money, Proudfoot said. That’s in part due to the repair shop that keeps their instruments working.   

That’s a big deal for a school district where about 80% of students live in poverty.

Proudfoot said music education is important for all students, not just the ones particularly wealthy, lucky, or skillful.

“You learn discipline, you learn to listen, you learn you play a part in a whole,” Proudfoot said. “There are so many great lessons in music education.”

But Proudfoot said he noticed immediately why the shop needed help. There weren’t enough employees to cover the work. Only a dozen district employees were tasked with repairing and maintaining about 130,000 school instruments.

Amid the pandemic, L.A. Unified used federal relief money to purchase roughly 32,000 new musical instruments for students. The repair shop was busier than ever. 

With many employees on the verge of retirement, the shop needed publicity to bring in skilled technicians or job seekers willing to learn. 

So, Proudfoot and co-director Kris Bowers decided to put their filmmaking skills to use to help the shop. The plan worked, with the documentary garnering massive national attention — and also winning an Oscar.  

Now the pair is helping with fundraising for the shop. Proudfoot said 90% of the money raised will go to apprentice programs to train the next generation of repair shop workers.

As an extra incentive to get big donors, sections of the repair shop can be named in their honor or for their loved ones. 

The Chuck Lorre Family Foundation was the first to make a donation; now a new sign in the repair shop reads “The Lorre Family Strings Department” in honor of their donation. 

That $1 million is more than all of the other donations thus far combined, and will allow the district to begin training the next generation of repair shop workers. 

To make the celebration even more spectacular, the students and faculty got a visit from cellist Yo-Yo Ma, who underscored the shop’s importance. 

“The young people that are getting these instruments, they will probably see the world in the year 2100,” Ma  “We may not see that world, but we can help make it possible that world is actually a good world.” 

Proudfoot said the best part of fundraising is seeing small donations from over 30 states where people have no connection to the shop, but feel compelled to help in any way they can. 

Those small donations, added to the $1 million, have brought the total to $1.7 million in less than a year. 

Proudfoot said Ma was no different, and getting him to come to the event was as simple as showing him the documentary about the shop. 

“We told him, ‘Do you want the little girls in this film to have a violin or not?,’” Proudfoot said. “If you do, then you gotta show up. That’s our campaign.” 

This article is part of a collaboration between The 74 and the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

The ABCs of Book Banning, directed by Trish Adlesic, Nazenet Habtezghi and Sheila Nevins, spotlights texts that have been challenged and/or restricted at school libraries across the country in recent years. In several sequences, students address the camera directly, read aloud from the publications, and share their thoughts on the furor surrounding the books. 

You can . Here’s recent footage from a lively post-screening panel discussion at the New York Public Library: 

Elsewhere today at The 74, Ben Chapman spotlights another nominated film: The Last Repair Shop, which spotlights the four-person team who maintain and repair some 80,000 musical instruments provided free of charge to any and all public school students in Los Angeles. 

You can learn more about the film, and stream it for free, right here. 

The 96th annual Academy Awards air at 7 p.m. ET Sunday night on ABC. 

Surrounded by blocks of choking Los Angeles traffic, homeless encampments and garbage, a windowless warehouse encircled by a security fence is the unlikely setting for “The Last Repair Shop,” an  now  on March 10. 

“You don’t see it in the movie,” said Ben Proudfoot, one of the directors of the documentary that brought the workshop so much attention. “But next to the repair shop is the LAUSD locksmith, and there’s people building windows, and a metal shop and people painting signs. All of the crafts are there, in this sort of fenced-in block.”   

The fanciful short film that focuses on the Los Angeles Unified School District’s throwback music instrument repair operation, which 20 years ago employed 60 and is now staffed by fewer than a dozen workers, has sparked an outpouring of public support that will go even beyond the workshop itself. 

The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation is an early contributor to a new, $15 million capital campaign run by the district’s foundation that aims to get the repair squad a better ventilation system, a new ultrasonic cleaner, more instrument cases and an apprentice program.   

Not that anybody on the workshop’s small-but-mighty team is complaining about their no-frills setup just south of Skid Row. They arrive before sunrise, said shop supervisor Steve Bagmanyan, and do their jobs quietly. 

“At the end of the day, you know that the student in the school ends up with an instrument in his hands,” said Bagmanyan, who started more than twenty years ago as a piano tech. “The music programs go on, and we’re part of it. That’s all that matters.”

Since the documentary was released, things have changed.

Bagmanyan’s inbox is filled each morning with emails from people wanting to donate instruments or money, or volunteer, or just saying how the shop and film inspired them to keep teaching. 

One person who saw the film donated a harp. Others have given violins, guitars and drums. Proudfoot, Bagmanyan and the district have capitalized on the attention with a fundraiser announced last month seeking to raise the $15 million for the operation, which is the last of its kind in the nation. 

Still, the shop is the same as ever.

A pair of fireproof doors and a sign reading “Musical Instrument Repair” mark the entrance to the unassuming warehouse, which is sheathed in unpainted fiberglass panels. 

But a crooning bassoon, a lilting flute, or tinkling piano might be filling the air. 

Burnished saxophones hang from the walls of the shop, where stacks of bass drums, violins in their cases, french horns, guitars and pianos line a long hallway leading to an inventory room crossed with rows of shelves bearing new instruments headed for schools. 

Beyond that, there’s a woodshop for fabricating obsolete parts, and the piano room, where a half-dozen uprights and baby grands are getting tuned and having their soundboards cleaned and hammers balanced. 

It smells of sawdust, polishing compound and coffee. Bagmanyan’s office is next to a bullpen populated by workstations manned by technicians working on string instruments and horns. 

Proudfoot calls the workshop a “North Pole” for school instruments, because it resembles the gift shop run by Santa Claus. The documentary caught fire when it was released last year, drawing more than 464,000 views on Youtube and landing on Disney’s streaming platform. 

Dozens of  and  about the shop and film followed.

Bagmanyan’s team was honored in January at a ceremony at Los Angeles’s City Hall. Shop workers gave a musical performance at a school board meeting, where the superintendent sang their praises for keeping music education alive in the nation’s second-largest district.

Sara Mooney, interim president and CEO of the LAUSD Education Foundation, the district’s affiliated nonprofit charity, said the funding will not only go to modernize the shop, but to help support the district’s burgeoning offerings in music education for all students. 

A 2022 California law increased state funding for music classes in Los Angeles and districts across California. Amid the pandemic, L.A. Unified used federal relief money to purchase roughly 32,000 new musical instruments for students. The repair shop is busier than ever. 

“We need an investment to meet the moment, and meet the needs of expanded music programs,” said Mooney. “This is a moment to build on the momentum of the documentary and expand the impact of the repair shop.” 

It won’t be easy. Bagmanyan said it’s getting harder to find skilled luthiers, windsmiths and braziers who can fix the instruments that arrive at his shop daily, with all sorts of damage. Most of the staff have been there for years. 

The shop is now hiring to replace a string technician profiled in the film who recently retired. Bagmanyan hopes the publicity will attract candidates, but he doesn’t know how many have applied. 

Many of the district’s instruments date back to the 1930’s. Bagmanyan said old instruments are higher quality, but they require expensive upkeep. 

A few of the schools in Los Angeles even have pipe organs on campus, he said, but when they break they’re too costly to repair. One job at a local school got an estimate of $2 million, after kids got into the organ’s works and broke some pipes, Bagmanyan said.    

Titus Campos, administrator of LAUSD’s Arts Education branch, said the district’s goal is to offer band electives at every middle school and high school, and to provide music education at every elementary school. 

“We’re almost there,” said Campos. But not quite. The district is contending with a shortage of music teachers, and about ten music teaching slots in LAUSD remain unfilled, he said.  

Meanwhile, Bagmanyan and his team are enjoying the attention from Hollywood.   

Estella Patricia Moreno, who repairs bass instruments in the shop, said she can’t believe she’ll soon be attending the Oscars.

“I’m a little nervous, because I don’t have hair or makeup,” said Moreno as she sat at her desk cleaning a french horn. “I’m just doing my job. Something that I really like, and enjoy. And on top of that, I was pretty much rewarded. It’s an overwhelming experience.” 

Paul Giamatti is among the most talented actors of his generation. He has a particular gift for portraying loners, losers and oddballs like cartoonist Harvey Pekar in American Splendor and an angst-ridden wine snob in 2004’s Sideways. His distinctive, drooping everyman face is marked by expressive eyes and a receding hairline that radiate world-weary disappointment.

He was born to play a teacher.

Wait. What!? But Hollywood loves teachers, you’re thinking. Yes, but only a certain type of teacher: mavericks and rule-breakers who are allied with students against authority, conformity, structure and the system, man! Think Dead Poets Society, Freedom Writers, School of Rock, Mr. Holland’s Opus. Hollywood’s hero teachers are invariably iconoclasts who barely teach at all. They inspire students, unlocking the hidden natural talents that schools keep tightly bottled up.

Standards? Rigor? Hard work and high expectations? Box office poison. Teachers who love their subject and make demands of their students are at best figures of fun in the movies. At worst, they are tyrants.

The Holdovers is up for five Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay. Giamatti earned a Best Actor nomination for his portrayal of teacher Paul Hunham, a figure of scorn and derision at Barton, a New England boys’ boarding school. Hunham is a pitiful loner, acerbic and anachronistic, with no friends or close colleagues. He teaches (naturally) ancient civilizations. His students hate him, and one senses he’s kept on staff only out of a sense of obligation by the headmaster, one of his former students. Hunham is the only character who talks unironically about the qualities the school is trying to instill in “the Barton Man.” He refuses to pass a failing student who is the son of a senator and a school benefactor. “We cannot sacrifice our integrity on the altar of their entitlement,” he sniffs at the headmaster. “I’m just trying to instill basic academic discipline. That’s my job. Isn’t it yours?”

Ordinarily, this refusal to pay obeisance to power and privilege would be portrayed sympathetically, even heroically. But The Holdovers is the latest in a long line of movies to thumb its nose at tradition, character and high standards. Driving home the point, the headmaster calls Hunham “hidebound” to his face. Even the setting — boarding school! single-sex education! 1970! — unsubtly telegraphs the anachronism of the entire model of education. The movie takes place over Christmas break; the title refers to students unable to go home for the holiday, of whom Giamatti’s character is given reluctant charge. Five holdovers are quickly winnowed to one, a defiant and rebellious kid (another teacher-movie archetype) named Angus Tully. 

The last performer to be nominated for Best Actor playing a teacher was Robin Williams for Dead Poets Society (1989), which shaped the maverick teacher trope (and convinced a generation of credulous Teach For America corps members that the key to engaging indifferent students is standing on your desk). Poetry teacher John Keating orders his students to tear pages from their textbooks and encourages them to think for themselves and live their best lives. Convention dictates that where there is a hero teacher there must also be an antagonist. Keating’s is the school headmaster, a former English teacher and (naturally) a strict traditionalist who opposes his methods. The school’s four pillars — tradition, honor, discipline and excellence — are invoked not as worthy ends or aspirations, but as a straitjacket. Carpe diem, y’all.

The list of movie teachers and administrators who are authoritarians, tyrants, martinets or simply tintype foils to maverick educators and their free-spirited students would fill volumes, stretching back to John Houseman’s Oscar-winning turn as a demanding law school professor in The Paper Chase (1973). There’s Dolores Umbridge in the Harry Potter series, Miss Trunchbull in Roald Dahl’s Matilda, Ferris Bueller’s high school principal Ed Rooney and the assistant principal who torments the detention-serving students of The Breakfast Club. If The Holdovers breaks new ground, it’s in making such a teacher the central role, not a supporting figure of derision.

Here’s how much Hollywood believes and rewards the tyrant teacher archetype: The last actor to take home an Oscar playing a teacher was J.K. Simmons, who won Best Supporting Actor for 2014’s Whiplash portraying a music teacher so demanding that he literally drives students to madness and suicide. Giamatti’s Holdovers character, Hunham, is no less inflexible, seeming to take perverse delight in failing students. Tellingly, he becomes a sympathetic character only when he takes Tully to Boston in violation of school rules, and in front of the kid tells bald-face lies about his life and career to a former classmate at Harvard, where we learn he was expelled over a plagiarism accusation. So, you see, it’s all a sham: the high standards, academic discipline, personal integrity, “Barton men never lie.” Teacher and student (naturally) are now free to form a close personal bond for the remainder of the film.

Schools in the movies are invariably oppressive places that limit students’ potential and deny their gifts. The one notable exception to the rule that tough teachers must be villains, Stand and Deliver (1988), paints a picture of a high school where math teacher Jaime Escalante, played by Edward James Olmos in another Oscar-nominated role, is viewed with suspicion by other faculty members. AP calculus? Those kids?! 

There is a consistent exception to the Hollywood rule that good teachers must be rebels and rule-breakers. Show me a sympathetic portrayal of a tough teacher who pushes kids relentlessly and accepts nothing but their best efforts, and I’ll show you … a coach. In Hoosiers (1986), a high school basketball coach played by Gene Hackman is a strict taskmaster. He drills his team hard and forbids them from shooting baskets during practices, to work instead on passing, defense and stamina. In their first game, he orders his teams to make four passes before shooting, and benches his star player who disobeys. Even after another player fouls out, he continues the game with just four men, ​​to ensure the lesson sticks. Better to lose the game than to lower one’s standards. Later, when the town tries to fire the coach, that same selfish-but-talented player, who has come to see the light, saves his job. Note the contrast: The headstrong kid adopts the coach’s methods and mindset, not the other way around. Ditto The Karate Kid (1984), Remember the Titans (2000), Miracle (2004) and Coach Carter (2005).

The Hollywood rule is good coaches push kids to greatness while good teachers inspire them, but never the other way around: The sports movie has never been made — and likely never will be — in which the school wins a state championship after the coach calls off practice and stops being a hardass. But in the classroom, it’s just the opposite. Hollywood coaches win by holding their charges to the highest possible standards and expectations. Classroom teachers win over audiences only when they drop theirs.

These fundamental issues of identity, autonomy and parents’ ever-evolving points of view will be center stage Sunday night at the 95th Academy Awards. While none of the year’s Oscar nominees explicitly focus on the educational system, several entries spotlight the pivotal life lessons shaping kids beyond the classroom walls and provoke deeper reflections on the precarity of a young person’s developmental stages. 

Across several of this year’s honored stories, parental involvement and oversight is depicted as a delicate tightrope act, in which tipping the balance towards overbearing or detachment can cause harm in equal measure. 

Two Disney films – Le Pupille, nominated in the Short Film (Live Action) category, and Turning Red, nominated in the Animated Feature Film category – lightheartedly poke fun at the strict disciplinarian type of upbringing. Incidentally, grownups in both deem pop music to be an unsavory influence that corrupts young minds.

In Turning Red, teenaged Mei (Rosalie Chiang) secretly raises funds behind mom’s back toward a boyband concert ticket. In Le Pupille, the nuns briefly leave a group of girls unattended in an orphanage during a war bulletin (presumably WWII) broadcast, when the radio signal drifts to Alberto Rabagliati’s pop ditty “Ba-Ba-Baciami Piccina,” with scandalous lyrics like: “k-k-kiss me/little baby/with your l-l-little tiny lips.” The girls dance and sing along until Mother Superior Fioralba (Alba Rohrwacher) angrily bursts in and proceeds to wash their mouths with soap. Little Serafina (Melissa Falasconi) declines because she did not sing along like the others; but when the prioress quizzes her on the lyrics, Serafina recalls them verbatim. For this reason, the abbess brands Serafina a bad girl. When a local toff donates a luxurious English pudding made with 70 eggs (obscene considering the backdrop of wartime scarcity) in exchange for the girls’ prayers, the mother superior asks them to make a sacrifice and forego enjoyment of the delicious treat – with the ulterior motive of regifting the cake to the bishop. Serafina again declines, citing that she is a bad girl. So, the mother superior begrudgingly cuts her a slice. 

While the two Disney productions are whimsical and insouciant, they do instill the notion that a strict authoritarian rearing can easily backfire. Kids ought to have fun, the filmmakers seem to say; even if you think they shouldn’t, they are going to anyway. Excessive abstinence and discipline only set the stage for disobedience, purposely in Mei’s case and innocently in Serafina’s.

Nominated in the Documentary Short Film category, How Do You Measure a Year? illustrates rebellion and boundary-testing as a natural rite of passage. Jay Rosenblatt interviewed his daughter, Ella, on her birthday every year between ages 2 and 18. Though title cards stated that he posed the same questions each year, the proceeding showed some discrepancies. A question like “What is power?” was so obviously loaded that he couldn’t possibly expect a young child to fully grasp it. (To his surprise, 3-year-old Ella actually responded “it’s for vaginas” – then he realized she must have gotten “power” mixed up with “powder,” as in baby powder.)

To be sure, nothing here indicated Rosenblatt was particularly stern, except that he didn’t allow 7-year-old Ella to watch Hannah Montana. Whereas in Turning Red Mei did not receive parental support for her artistic endeavors, Rosenblatt seemed to encourage Ella’s pursuit of singing. But as Ella entered her tweens, it becomes evident that she regularly broods over mounting disagreements and fights with her father. 

Her development and rebellion seems typical during the fraught teenage years. The more she learns about the ways of the world, the more she seems to have adjusted her hopes, fears, and expectations accordingly. Perhaps she is lashing out at times due to these disappointing life lessons – that one can’t sustain oneself on a diet of sweets – and Rosenblatt simply bore the brunt of her broader ire about the facts of life. 

At merely 28 minutes, the film is more interested in chronicling Ella’s answers and charting her year-by-year growth than in offering any sweeping conclusions about the nature of father-daughter relationships. But in keeping its gaze focused so squarely on a single child, and underscoring just how much can change in her world and paradigm during brief 12-month increments, How Do You Measure a Year? might lead adult viewers to think more deeply about how they can meet teens where they’re at and better help guide them through this time of profound growth, frustration and self-actualization. 

Kids naturally resent overbearing parents, but uninvolved ones can be just as problematic, posit Best Picture nominee The Fabelmans and Best International Feature Film nominee The Quiet Girl. In both, parents are so preoccupied with their own lives that they do not have the bandwidth to properly care for their children. Each includes an adulterous parent whose prioritization of self-fulfillment comes off to the audience as selfish. 

The Quiet Girl contrasts its 9-year-old protagonist’s unloving home with a more nurturing environment when parents send the seemingly troubled Cáit (Catherine Clinch) away to live with distant relatives for the summer. Being doted on seems to have a profound effect on Cáit, as, for starters, it evidently resolves her longstanding bed-wetting problem. 

Emotional support is critical for children confronting traumatic events. Bullying is often inescapable; this casual cruelty surfaces in The Fabelmans, Turning Red, and Close, another Best International Feature Film nominee. Children often can be hypersensitive, as depicted in The Quiet Girl when Cáit seemingly finds even the accidental spilling of a cup of milk triggering. In Close, once inseparable best friends begin to drift apart in their teens after classmates suggest they are a dating couple and hurl homophobic slurs at them. Despite the presence of caring parents, the boys choose to navigate this themselves, perhaps out of shame and embarrassment.  

Regardless if adults get involved, solutions to bullying always seem to be untenable – indeed, even grownups sometimes face it in their workplaces. As mentioned, Close is hardly the first to spotlight this societal blight, though it refuses to sugarcoat the issue with a feel-good Hollywood ending as do Turning Red and The Fabelmans. While the protagonist in The Fabelmans, presumably a young Steven Spielberg, manages to turn his fortunes around with his gift for the magic of cinema, the boys in Close aren’t as enterprising or lucky. The harsh reality shown here challenges viewers to keep striving for a solution. 

The majority of these Oscar nominees show us that the kids will be alright. Indeed, in a couple of quasi-autobiographical instances here (Fabelmans and Turning Red), they even turn out to be immensely successful filmmakers. But for those who live or work with young people, the films hopefully will provoke some deep thinking around reward vs. punishment, and the tradeoffs between support and protection. As we watch some of the adults in these stories arguably overreact to minor slights, it’s hard not to think: There are things a whole lot worse than a cake, a Disney Channel celeb, or a boyband concert. 

Sometimes kids deserve a break too. 

Children must be afforded some freedom of movement to experience the world and express their changing selves — but they still aren’t equipped to shoulder growing pains on their own. As many of these Oscar nominees show us, young people should be able to speak their minds without being dismissed. But in many cases, adult intervention is still clearly needed, and kids should remember that asking for help is often a better course than taking matters into their own hands. 

And there is a larger lesson for all of us: Sometimes it takes a village. When the parents are failing in their duty, when children refuse to recognize their need for help, sometimes it’s on us other grownups to take stock, step up and set things right. 

The 95th annual Academy Awards will air at 8 p.m. ET Sunday on ABC.