Not Sexy Problems

“It was a mission statement….”

Jerry Maguire is a dated film, especially in its portrayals of women, people of color and relationships. But the great premise of the film hinges on the lead character’s creation of a mission statement for his company. “The things we think but do not say, the future of our business”.  Eventually people refer to the document as “The Manifesto”, which Maguire sheepishly reminds people throughout the movie, “It was a mission statement.”

Mission statements are important. They are an organization’s North Star. Veer too far from it and you are off course, operationally and financially. Get it right from the start and stick with it, you are golden. Ignore current conditions, leave it like a plant without amended soil, it grows stale. It is not to be ignored.

The entire field of independent production and exhibition is looking for its new North Star. People either expect the past to return, are treating the present as the past, or hoping someone else will reinvent the wheel while they are busy answering emails.

The boards of both the Film Festival Alliance and the Art House Convergence are working with few resources and mostly all volunteers towards our first conference in forever. Re-branded Indie/Ex in Chicago this coming June, it will bring together distributors, programmers, operations and marketing, virtually everyone who has a role in either or both fields, so we can discuss best practices and what those look like today and celebrate all of us who have survived the moment.

As we prepare, I read almost daily the demise of different great, longstanding organizations I have admired. I read criticisms and lamentations. I read endless whining about keeping things as they are without acknowledging people who are working hard to drag the entire field into the future (Yes, AHC Google Group, I am looking at you). Occasionally new solutions and new ideas emerge that are the result of hard work and creative thinking (Hello, The Popcorn List!). And frequent voices like Ted Hope and Brian Newman are always encouraging us all to MOVE FORWARD.

So, I take one long last look backward at things I hope we don’t forget as we move proceed. These are the many different parts of the independent exhibition ecosystem that warrant attention that are, let’s say, less sexy? But very necessary for our survival.

1.     The projection booth

There is no comprehensive system in the US to train and maintain expertise among our amazing projectionists. You can go to film school or you can become a theater tech, and some small programs exist, but they are mostly on the coasts and hard to reach. Beyond properly preparing (financially and physically) to buy new equipment to keep up with the field, if you are in a cinema lucky enough to screen 16 or 35 mm, you are probably relying on one maybe two individuals who have no way to formally share or update their knowledge. The equipment they are using is aging, often in disrepair, and relies on folks who scour salvage sales to buy replacement parts that are in short supply and may not even still be made. The last place I worked called our senior projectionist MacGyver. That tells you everything.

For the 2K’s and 4K’s out there, no crash book exists. If a film goes down, it goes down. A built-in crash book, programmed by the manufacturer or the dealer could save a lot of headaches. Masking, keystoning, sound upgrading, not to mention new ADA compliance from closed captioning to audio description all demand training. We need a way to harness the great expertise of our existing talent pool to create the next generation of projectionists and fully resource the ones we have.

2.     Archiving great work

Archives are not sexy; no one loves the idea of funding them, and yet, we rely on a canon of work that is turning to dust and is expensive to archive. I have been in conversation with multiple Oscar winning filmmakers after screenings where their masterpieces are in terrible condition, and these coming from The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences or other worthy libraries. And they are the lucky ones that have their work saved! Few universities, libraries or important national organizations have enough resources devoted to this work.  At the fundraising level, many other priorities take precent over archives. Yet, without them, we are lost. To preserve the epic works of the past we need large amounts of funding yesterday. The Smithsonian may love to acquire a great archive of work, but without a benefactor, they can’t. (DA Pennebaker’s archive? Rock stars, presidents, the first handheld cameras and more, all await preservation.)

We also need to think about preserving the work early.

What I mean by this is if you are say, CAA, and your client is the first woman to win the Oscar as a director, could it partially be in your interest to urge that the studio holding her work digitize it? Let me not be coy; many cinemas across the country have tried to screen the 1990’s dystopic Kathryn Bigelow film STRANGE DAYS, only to discover that it was made by 20^th Century Fox, which means Disney now owns the film, and Disney, if they have not digitized a film, (and they have not), forbids you to screen the film on a Blu Ray, only on 35mm, and the prints are not in good condition.

This is not an exception. Repertory can’t exist without strong archives.

3.     Front of House Best Practices

So much has changed in how we operate a cinema. We need to be prepared for how to handle emergencies, from active shooters to fire drills, and we need staff ready to interact with service animals, special needs patrons and strong DEIA training from the minute patrons walk in the door. We can say our cinema is open to all, but we need to help those that work directly with the public know how to handle a more diverse, and often more contentious world. This requires resources which small organizations often do not have or do not have access to. It is also an area where many venues have high staff turnover.

Some things have not changed but have been lost in the transition, from closed cinemas during COVID to new staff dealing with an old way of watching film. Front of house must be first to know if temperatures are correct in the houses, if sound and picture are working from the audience perspective, if someone is doing something disruptive or (yikes) obscene in the dark, or lastly, if someone is filming the screen and engaging in piracy, which I have witnessed firsthand. As one cinema director said, “We pay (staff) twenty dollars an hour to sell popcorn for fifteen minutes and read a book for two hours”. Oof. Front of house is hard work. But I hear over and over from cinemas that this has become a difficult role to fill. How best to commit to best practices across the nation and keep institutional memory?

4.     Programmer Training

So much of the arts is based on apprenticeship, but like projectionists, programmers, too, desperately need access to institutional memory to be proficient at their jobs. We ask so much of them: to program for their individual communities, diverse as they are, to program new work and be aware of all work that is available, and then there is knowledge of the film canon. Even with a PhD in film, the years it takes to be a truly proficient programmer should not be ignored. How can we help this process? In the festival world, there is a clear apprenticeship hierarchy. These positions are low paying and hard to sustain. Great programmers are intellectually and artistically curious, they are detail oriented, and they have strong opinions. Those opinions are best when backed by a huge knowledge of the art form married to a willingness to program outside of their own preferences. Programming is subjective and exclusive by nature, so it demands someone studied. Hard to do: you can’t read the Cliff Notes to a movie and really curate it well. Still, perhaps a formal apprenticeship between the large festivals and cinemas could help the field? Guest curators are always helpful. So are healthy travel budgets for festival passes and field trips to see other works. We can’t complain about younger curators knowing less work if we don’t invest in training them up.

5.     Marketing

This is such a lengthy topic, but in short, the loss of local newspapers, national film criticism, the move to streaming, and the post COVID habit of at home watching all can be, and need to be, counteracted with marketing. This starts with the distributors giving longer lead times for art houses to market their films and dates.

An example of one such failure: a film made by a mini-major that was meant for the art house audience that never made its way past the chain houses was because the head of distribution stated “I am not interested in cashing small checks from theaters across the country”. The film ended up being seen by most on the back seat in an airplane.

Until distributors grant the local theaters time, or better yet use their own marketing campaigns to urge people to see the film in the theater, and then move into their other strategies for selling the film, people will continue to wonder why they never saw (insert title of award-winning film here) until after the Oscars, even if you played it months ago. Also, connect online, not just with big movie chains, but with art houses in that zip code who are playing your movie, either via google or fandango.

6.     Discussing older work through a new lens

There is a great resurgence in some cinemas of young audiences embracing older titles, which is hugely exciting. But, there are some places where titles remain unexplored due to a lack of context. Understanding why a film was groundbreaking in its day, for its time, or how it set the tone for an entire genre (aka THE GODFATHER) is helpful both from a content angle as well as a cinematic/technical one. Many of our great film works suffer when viewed through the lens of today’s mores. If we know Hitchcock was a monster to women, do we not screen his work? Or do we instead re-frame and discuss the work inclusive of what we know about him today? Film is perhaps 120 years old as an art form. Much of the work was made when misogyny and racism were the norm. How do we reconcile this for audiences without making every film the third rail?

7.     Education

Education programs exist at many cinemas, but we don’t approach these programs with much pedagogy. The best people to do this are teachers, yes, educators! The people who wait tables to make ends meet and buy their own pens and notebooks! They actually went to school to create study guides, and many of them love film. Hire them to work with you! There are materials to help make film watching impactful both with existing curriculums as well as to create empathy or aid in discussions.

Cinemas tend to not share their successes in this arena. They may do one screening a year for youth, or a month, but they don’t build on these programs year by year, nor in the main do they create future cinema lovers. There is so much fallow ground in this arena, and it helps with my last point, which is

8.     Fundraising

Whether an independent cinema or a nonprofit, we have to educate people to know that cinema is like all the other art forms. Your ticket does not pay the rent. Depending on the distributor fee, it doesn’t even pay for itself! Boards and staff need to understand how little revenue comes in just from the box office, and that we serve communities, not shareholders. We are not your AMC. Communities lament when a cinema closes, but how often have they been deeply involved with that film organization?

Love the ballet? You donate. Love the orchestra? You donate. Museum? Theater? How many of your local art donors make their largest annual gift to their local cinema? Probably not many outside the coasts. And even there I know a founder of a cinema for over 40 years with many academy voters as members who has no retirement benefits. After forty years!

Cinemas and festival thrive like all arts organizations when they have a healthy mix of funding streams: earned revenues plus grants, donations and sponsorships. We have to tell this story as a field, so funders of all stripes strongly consider the importance of local cinemas. Our umbrella organizations have no funding from the largest foundations nationally. Take the regional theater, for example. Their national organization, TCG (Theater Communications Group) was founded in part by a million dollar grant from The Ford Foundation. It is rare for large foundations to help organizations in this way now. Instead we rely on members who are all part of the same suffering ecosystem. That’s crazy.

Sundance, Tribeca, SXSW are giant organizations who can have voices alongside other festivals like Camden, Tallgrass or Atlanta. Festivals and Art Houses and yes, distributors and independent filmmakers will thrive when we realize together that all boats rise. Together we can build infrastructure so our collective voices can create positive change for our art form, which is as deserving of support as sculpture, dance or a string quartet.

So maybe it was a manifesto after all, Jerry.