In 2017, Freemason and filmmaker Johnny Royal released 33 and Beyond, The Royal Art of Freemasonry, the result of a seven year project that gathered more than one hundred forty hours of interviews and inside lodge footage across several countries. The film premiered in San Francisco that October and reached streaming audiences in January 2018, drawn from Royal's own years inside the fraternity as both a member and a documentarian.
The film follows the American Masonic system degree by degree, tracing a member's path through the Blue Lodge and into what the fraternity calls its appendant bodies, the Scottish Rite and the York Rite. Unlike the Scottish Rite's single sequential ladder, the York Rite is presented as it actually functions: a grouping of three separate bodies, the Royal Arch, Cryptic, and Templar degrees, unified by a shared requirement that a candidate profess Christian faith to advance through its final orders, a distinction the film uses to explain why American Freemasonry is not one uniform path.
ABC News called it perhaps the most important documentary ever made on Freemasonry, and lodges have since used it for member screenings and discussion nights. Reception outside Masonic circles has been more mixed, with some reviewers describing it as closer to an invitation than an investigation, an honest tension for a film made by a member, about his own fraternity, largely for other members to watch together.