Steve Hoffman
02-11-2008, 08:40 PM
From Jeff Joseph of SabuCat:
This is, of course, no surprise; we all have been discussing for years. Pretty sad anyway, though.
======================================== =============
San Francisco Chronicle 2/1108
Audience fading for repertory movie theaters
by Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle Movie Critic
On Thursday, when an estimated thousand people pack the Castro Theatre to
see a 40-year-old movie - Franco Zeffirelli's "Romeo & Juliet" - it will
seem like classic repertory programming is alive and well in San
Francisco. Olivia Hussey, the film's star, will be interviewed on stage.
There will be photos snapped and autographs signed, and in all likelihood,
one of those only-in-San-Francisco feelings will pervade the air.
But when it's all over, producer Marc Huestis - after three months of work
leading up to the big night - will net only a modest profit. And that's if
he's lucky.
For more than two decades, ever since the arrival of VHS tape, San
Francisco exhibitors have been scrambling to find a business model that
supports classic repertory programming. Exhibitors have devised and
revised workable survival strategies, but time after time, those
strategies have been undercut by new threats - such as the advent of DVD,
Netflix and now downloadable movies. They've tried longer runs, shorter
runs, themed festivals, celebrity guests, relatives of deceased
celebrities, autograph signing parties and live entertainment, all to less
and less effect. Some look ahead to digital projection as a possible
panacea, but that's a few years away.
All exhibitors concur that the prospects for repertory in San Francisco
have become downright bleak, and that just within the past year business
has gotten even worse. In movie-loving, cineast San Francisco, the
repertory audience seems to be drying up.
"Last year everything changed," Huestis said. "There was a drop
everywhere, whether due to the economy or just the culmination of the new
technology that exists right now. The old models are losing audiences.
It's really scary."
Just look around. The Roxie Cinema, which in the 1990s had the best
retrospectives of any commercial theater in the entire country, has all
but given up repertory programming. The Castro Theatre's calendar was once
wall-to-wall classics and foreign masterpieces, during the reign of its
nationally respected programmer, Anita Monga. Then Monga was let go in
2004, and today the theater relies mostly on its outside festivals and
nonfilm events to maintain its profit margin.
Perhaps the most telling example is the most recent. Gary Meyer, a
co-founder of Landmark Theatres and one of the savviest and most energetic
exhibitors in the area, did his best to make a go of repertory at his
Balboa Theater. He gave the Balboa a gorgeous renovation and programmed it
with adventurous retrospectives, such as a Paramount pre-Code series in
2005 and a Boris Karloff tribute in 2006. The theater had everything going
for it but audiences, and Meyer had to abandon repertory programming by
the second half of 2006.
"To have Boris Karloff's daughter there, at the biggest Karloff
retrospective in history, with an audience of just 50 people," Meyer said,
"that's pretty disconcerting."
Fifteen years ago, that Karloff tribute might have been a success, and 30
years ago, there would have been lines around the block. And that has been
the story everywhere. For every "Sing-Along Sound of Music," there are a
dozen disaster stories, sometimes involving formulas that were once
surefire. For example, in 1993, director James Toback came to the Roxie
Cinema and talked to a sold-out crowd following a screening of his 1978
classic, "Fingers." The energy was electric and continued out onto the
sidewalk. But in 2006, when Toback came to the Roxie for an ambitious
retrospective of his films, the spectacle was downright embarrassing. He
stood in front of the house talking to no more than 20 to 25 people.
"In the mid- to late '70s," said Bill Longen, events producer at the
Castro, "you could run a Bette Davis double feature and pack the theater -
and they didn't even have to be good Bette Davis pictures."
In those pre-VHS days, the business was pretty straightforward. Repertory
theaters would show a different double feature every day. Movie lovers
kept track by pasting programming schedules of the various theaters on
their walls, and these schedules were consulted often: Aside from the Late
Show, rep houses were the only means by which people got to see old
movies.
This golden era wasn't entirely golden. As Bruce Goldstein, who programs
repertory for New York's Film Forum, points out, "Repertory then was bad
16 millimeter prints, beaten to death, with scratches and splices. Studios
didn't have classics divisions in those days, and so there were no new
prints." But there were audiences, then - made up to a large extent of
young people, who'd been exposed to cinema societies in college and were
reveling in the buried treasure of classic American film.
The rise of VHS tape exerted the first culling effect. Locally, the
Richelieu disappeared and the Gateway converted into a first-run art
house. But as Bill Banning, owner of the Roxie Cinema, has said,
exhibitors could survive if they were willing to innovate. By the time he
took over the Roxie in 1984, Banning knew "you couldn't show straight
repertory and make it. You had to show top-notch films, and you had to
have a strong theme - film noir, pre-Code. That worked into the '90s."
Another innovation of the late '80s and '90s was the "long-run revival,"
the creation of Bruce Goldstein, head of repertory programming at New
York's Film Forum since 1986. "If you change the bill every day," he said,
"the studios have no incentive at all to make a print. So what we did is
we'd go to them and say, 'If you make a print, we'll give you a run, and
we'll publicize it.' That's our standard for a long-run revival - it has
to be a brand new print."
Goldstein's standard became the standard nationally, and following
Goldstein's lead, it became common in the '80s and '90s for exhibitors,
when advertising a "long run" or "premiere" revival, to talk up the
newness of the print. The promise of a fresh print inspired audiences to
flock to films they'd seen before - even TV staples, such as "Casablanca"
or "The Wizard of Oz" - for the chance to see them projected in pristine
condition onto the big screen.
The combination of long runs and inventive festivals made the Roxie Cinema
a haven for movie lovers in the mid-1990s. Under the programming of Elliot
Lavine, the theater had a Norma Shearer tribute, the U.S. premiere of the
Hong Kong exploitation film, "Naked Killer," and a retrospective of the
films of Tod Browning and Lon Chaney - and that's just a sampling from one
program calendar, from the fall of 1994.
"In the 1990s, you could still do things," Lavine said. "We still had an
audience composed of people who'd grown up seeing movies in theaters. VHS
was always a consideration. If a movie we wanted to show was on video,
we'd pair it up with something not available. But the bad quality of video
made theaters in contention."
Gradually other factors started taking a bite out of repertory. "At our
westerns festival in 1996, we showed John Wayne in 'The Searchers,' and it
did nothing, but other westerns not nearly as well-known drew four and
five times that business. Then I looked back and saw Turner Classic Movies
had shown it three times in the previous two months. So TCM hurt a little.
But the biggest demon that would come down the road - DVD - made it almost
impossible. DVD was the nail in the coffin."
Longen agrees. "DVDs have killed the rep business."
The arrival of DVD led to Netflix, which began business in 1999.
Meanwhile, the technology for showing movies at home has improved
exponentially. Video projectors have come into home use, as well as plasma
screens. TVs are getting bigger, and the picture clarity keeps improving.
High-definition televisions will soon become the norm, and eventually the
DVD as we know it will give way completely to high-definition discs.
Already we're seeing a battle for the future play out between two
high-definition DVD formats, HDTV and Blu Ray. The latter appears to be
winning.
With the home viewing experience suddenly reaching new heights of
splendor, what conceivably could be the incentive for seeing classic films
in a theater? The answer is simple and not what anyone consciously thought
of during the repertory heyday: Other people. After all, in all our
memories of transcendent theatergoing experiences, those other people -
those strangers watching with you - were part of the experience, too. A
big part.
"Movies are a group participation art form, to be in a room with 300
people laughing infectiously," Lavine said. "To see a movie at home, even
with a group of friends, is like seeing it under a microscope. These were
made to be seen by hundreds of people at the same time."
New Yorkers haven't forgotten this. Under Bruce Goldstein's brilliant
programming, Film Forum's repertory is doing better than ever. "DVD hasn't
hurt at all - DVD may have helped us," he said. "It has certainly
jump-started studio restorations - there are great prints of just about
everything now. And it's created a whole new generation of movie buffs."
But just by virtue of being in Manhattan, Film Forum has some advantages
that San Francisco theaters don't have - a massive population, cheap and
ubiquitous taxi service, a rapid subway system, a tremendous concentration
of media, and a tradition for nightlife surpassing that of any other city
in the country. If repertory is ever going to be reborn in San Francisco,
exhibitors are going to find a formula that can work here.
Longen doesn't see much hope. "I hate to say it, but as the years go on,
it's going to die a very slow death, and I love classic films," he said.
"I think Gary Meyer proved it (at the Balboa). The audience isn't there."
But Meyer doesn't agree. "It's very difficult at this time," Meyer said.
"But I have hope that in a couple of years, when digital becomes more
available, we might be able to do it. With film, there are $150 shipping
costs, and I have to pay a projectionist $16 an hour to work from noon to
11. Digital would reduce the cost and make it feasible."
"With digital," Lavine said, "the studio could send you a transmission -
or a DVD for 41 cents shipping instead of $150. You want a business model?
Throw out your projectors and invest in the best video projection you can
get. You could even play store-bought DVDs, if you contact the right
holder. You could charge five or six dollars admission instead of 10. And
you might be able, if you're personable enough, to play this stuff at a
very reduced rate. Run the Universal logo on-screen as people come in.
Sell DVDs in the lobby. There are creative ways. Exhibitors can either go
to bed angry or wake up and change, because this is what it is."
In the meantime, Huestis is preparing for his "Romeo & Juliet" show on
Thursday, putting everything he's got into it. "I'm going to hotels,
giving postcards to concierges, doing clip reels, arranging ground
transportation for the star, answering phones, accumulating the Will Call
list, stuffing Will Call envelopes, and making the signage for Will Call
and reserve seats," Huestis said. "This one's make or break."
This is, of course, no surprise; we all have been discussing for years. Pretty sad anyway, though.
======================================== =============
San Francisco Chronicle 2/1108
Audience fading for repertory movie theaters
by Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle Movie Critic
On Thursday, when an estimated thousand people pack the Castro Theatre to
see a 40-year-old movie - Franco Zeffirelli's "Romeo & Juliet" - it will
seem like classic repertory programming is alive and well in San
Francisco. Olivia Hussey, the film's star, will be interviewed on stage.
There will be photos snapped and autographs signed, and in all likelihood,
one of those only-in-San-Francisco feelings will pervade the air.
But when it's all over, producer Marc Huestis - after three months of work
leading up to the big night - will net only a modest profit. And that's if
he's lucky.
For more than two decades, ever since the arrival of VHS tape, San
Francisco exhibitors have been scrambling to find a business model that
supports classic repertory programming. Exhibitors have devised and
revised workable survival strategies, but time after time, those
strategies have been undercut by new threats - such as the advent of DVD,
Netflix and now downloadable movies. They've tried longer runs, shorter
runs, themed festivals, celebrity guests, relatives of deceased
celebrities, autograph signing parties and live entertainment, all to less
and less effect. Some look ahead to digital projection as a possible
panacea, but that's a few years away.
All exhibitors concur that the prospects for repertory in San Francisco
have become downright bleak, and that just within the past year business
has gotten even worse. In movie-loving, cineast San Francisco, the
repertory audience seems to be drying up.
"Last year everything changed," Huestis said. "There was a drop
everywhere, whether due to the economy or just the culmination of the new
technology that exists right now. The old models are losing audiences.
It's really scary."
Just look around. The Roxie Cinema, which in the 1990s had the best
retrospectives of any commercial theater in the entire country, has all
but given up repertory programming. The Castro Theatre's calendar was once
wall-to-wall classics and foreign masterpieces, during the reign of its
nationally respected programmer, Anita Monga. Then Monga was let go in
2004, and today the theater relies mostly on its outside festivals and
nonfilm events to maintain its profit margin.
Perhaps the most telling example is the most recent. Gary Meyer, a
co-founder of Landmark Theatres and one of the savviest and most energetic
exhibitors in the area, did his best to make a go of repertory at his
Balboa Theater. He gave the Balboa a gorgeous renovation and programmed it
with adventurous retrospectives, such as a Paramount pre-Code series in
2005 and a Boris Karloff tribute in 2006. The theater had everything going
for it but audiences, and Meyer had to abandon repertory programming by
the second half of 2006.
"To have Boris Karloff's daughter there, at the biggest Karloff
retrospective in history, with an audience of just 50 people," Meyer said,
"that's pretty disconcerting."
Fifteen years ago, that Karloff tribute might have been a success, and 30
years ago, there would have been lines around the block. And that has been
the story everywhere. For every "Sing-Along Sound of Music," there are a
dozen disaster stories, sometimes involving formulas that were once
surefire. For example, in 1993, director James Toback came to the Roxie
Cinema and talked to a sold-out crowd following a screening of his 1978
classic, "Fingers." The energy was electric and continued out onto the
sidewalk. But in 2006, when Toback came to the Roxie for an ambitious
retrospective of his films, the spectacle was downright embarrassing. He
stood in front of the house talking to no more than 20 to 25 people.
"In the mid- to late '70s," said Bill Longen, events producer at the
Castro, "you could run a Bette Davis double feature and pack the theater -
and they didn't even have to be good Bette Davis pictures."
In those pre-VHS days, the business was pretty straightforward. Repertory
theaters would show a different double feature every day. Movie lovers
kept track by pasting programming schedules of the various theaters on
their walls, and these schedules were consulted often: Aside from the Late
Show, rep houses were the only means by which people got to see old
movies.
This golden era wasn't entirely golden. As Bruce Goldstein, who programs
repertory for New York's Film Forum, points out, "Repertory then was bad
16 millimeter prints, beaten to death, with scratches and splices. Studios
didn't have classics divisions in those days, and so there were no new
prints." But there were audiences, then - made up to a large extent of
young people, who'd been exposed to cinema societies in college and were
reveling in the buried treasure of classic American film.
The rise of VHS tape exerted the first culling effect. Locally, the
Richelieu disappeared and the Gateway converted into a first-run art
house. But as Bill Banning, owner of the Roxie Cinema, has said,
exhibitors could survive if they were willing to innovate. By the time he
took over the Roxie in 1984, Banning knew "you couldn't show straight
repertory and make it. You had to show top-notch films, and you had to
have a strong theme - film noir, pre-Code. That worked into the '90s."
Another innovation of the late '80s and '90s was the "long-run revival,"
the creation of Bruce Goldstein, head of repertory programming at New
York's Film Forum since 1986. "If you change the bill every day," he said,
"the studios have no incentive at all to make a print. So what we did is
we'd go to them and say, 'If you make a print, we'll give you a run, and
we'll publicize it.' That's our standard for a long-run revival - it has
to be a brand new print."
Goldstein's standard became the standard nationally, and following
Goldstein's lead, it became common in the '80s and '90s for exhibitors,
when advertising a "long run" or "premiere" revival, to talk up the
newness of the print. The promise of a fresh print inspired audiences to
flock to films they'd seen before - even TV staples, such as "Casablanca"
or "The Wizard of Oz" - for the chance to see them projected in pristine
condition onto the big screen.
The combination of long runs and inventive festivals made the Roxie Cinema
a haven for movie lovers in the mid-1990s. Under the programming of Elliot
Lavine, the theater had a Norma Shearer tribute, the U.S. premiere of the
Hong Kong exploitation film, "Naked Killer," and a retrospective of the
films of Tod Browning and Lon Chaney - and that's just a sampling from one
program calendar, from the fall of 1994.
"In the 1990s, you could still do things," Lavine said. "We still had an
audience composed of people who'd grown up seeing movies in theaters. VHS
was always a consideration. If a movie we wanted to show was on video,
we'd pair it up with something not available. But the bad quality of video
made theaters in contention."
Gradually other factors started taking a bite out of repertory. "At our
westerns festival in 1996, we showed John Wayne in 'The Searchers,' and it
did nothing, but other westerns not nearly as well-known drew four and
five times that business. Then I looked back and saw Turner Classic Movies
had shown it three times in the previous two months. So TCM hurt a little.
But the biggest demon that would come down the road - DVD - made it almost
impossible. DVD was the nail in the coffin."
Longen agrees. "DVDs have killed the rep business."
The arrival of DVD led to Netflix, which began business in 1999.
Meanwhile, the technology for showing movies at home has improved
exponentially. Video projectors have come into home use, as well as plasma
screens. TVs are getting bigger, and the picture clarity keeps improving.
High-definition televisions will soon become the norm, and eventually the
DVD as we know it will give way completely to high-definition discs.
Already we're seeing a battle for the future play out between two
high-definition DVD formats, HDTV and Blu Ray. The latter appears to be
winning.
With the home viewing experience suddenly reaching new heights of
splendor, what conceivably could be the incentive for seeing classic films
in a theater? The answer is simple and not what anyone consciously thought
of during the repertory heyday: Other people. After all, in all our
memories of transcendent theatergoing experiences, those other people -
those strangers watching with you - were part of the experience, too. A
big part.
"Movies are a group participation art form, to be in a room with 300
people laughing infectiously," Lavine said. "To see a movie at home, even
with a group of friends, is like seeing it under a microscope. These were
made to be seen by hundreds of people at the same time."
New Yorkers haven't forgotten this. Under Bruce Goldstein's brilliant
programming, Film Forum's repertory is doing better than ever. "DVD hasn't
hurt at all - DVD may have helped us," he said. "It has certainly
jump-started studio restorations - there are great prints of just about
everything now. And it's created a whole new generation of movie buffs."
But just by virtue of being in Manhattan, Film Forum has some advantages
that San Francisco theaters don't have - a massive population, cheap and
ubiquitous taxi service, a rapid subway system, a tremendous concentration
of media, and a tradition for nightlife surpassing that of any other city
in the country. If repertory is ever going to be reborn in San Francisco,
exhibitors are going to find a formula that can work here.
Longen doesn't see much hope. "I hate to say it, but as the years go on,
it's going to die a very slow death, and I love classic films," he said.
"I think Gary Meyer proved it (at the Balboa). The audience isn't there."
But Meyer doesn't agree. "It's very difficult at this time," Meyer said.
"But I have hope that in a couple of years, when digital becomes more
available, we might be able to do it. With film, there are $150 shipping
costs, and I have to pay a projectionist $16 an hour to work from noon to
11. Digital would reduce the cost and make it feasible."
"With digital," Lavine said, "the studio could send you a transmission -
or a DVD for 41 cents shipping instead of $150. You want a business model?
Throw out your projectors and invest in the best video projection you can
get. You could even play store-bought DVDs, if you contact the right
holder. You could charge five or six dollars admission instead of 10. And
you might be able, if you're personable enough, to play this stuff at a
very reduced rate. Run the Universal logo on-screen as people come in.
Sell DVDs in the lobby. There are creative ways. Exhibitors can either go
to bed angry or wake up and change, because this is what it is."
In the meantime, Huestis is preparing for his "Romeo & Juliet" show on
Thursday, putting everything he's got into it. "I'm going to hotels,
giving postcards to concierges, doing clip reels, arranging ground
transportation for the star, answering phones, accumulating the Will Call
list, stuffing Will Call envelopes, and making the signage for Will Call
and reserve seats," Huestis said. "This one's make or break."