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One of my favorite movie going memories is seeing
Godard's One Plus One (1968) outdoors, on the lake, in Zurich.
Am happy to see that the idea is catching on in
the US! The Outdoor Cinema Network is dedicated to publicizing street
cinemas plus there's an extensive article in this morning's LA Times
on outdoor movies as urban renewal tools: The Street Gets Star Treatment
Outdoor movies have become the hook to draw people
to tired business districts and public spaces. The reviews have
been good.
By Shawn Hubler
Times Staff Writer
SAN FRANCISCO — Who holds a neighborhood
mixer after dark in a vacant lot in the Lower Fillmore? Junkies
were staggering around on the street. A cold wind was toppling trash
cans and rattling the movie screen some optimist had hung on the
side of an apartment building. And yet, against all conventional
wisdom, a crowd was gathering.
Here they came in thick sweaters and leather jackets,
with wine and lawn chairs and homemade popcorn in brown bags. Some
came out of curiosity. Some came with their children. Greg M, "just
M, I got the driver's license to prove it", came by accident
as the opening credits flashed on "When We Were Kings,"
the Muhammad Ali-George Foreman documentary that the city redevelopment
agency had hoped would bring someone, anyone, to this blighted corner.
So intrigued was he by the sudden spectacle that
he called his wife on his cellular phone.
"Hey, baby, they got a party going on down
here on the street. You got to come on down here," he said
with a chuckle as about 75 people whooped and cheered in the late-September
night the way people rarely do anymore at the movies. "Down!
Goes! Frazier!" barked the on-screen voice of Howard Cosell
as 75 pairs of cold hands applauded. Next to a space heater, a grizzled
man in a wool cap hollered, "Yessir! Good Lord!"
Welcome to the latest in urban renewal, outdoor
movies. Fueled by nostalgia, redevelopment grants and advancesin
technology, alfresco movie screenings have, in a scant couple of
years, quietly become a summer, and spring and autumn, fad from
Walla Walla, Wash., to Washington, D.C.
"They're the contemporary iteration of the
drive-in," said Bob Deutsch, whose outdoor movie business has
more than tripled in the three years since he launched it. Deutsch,
based in suburban Washington, D.C., said he set up outdoor movie
seriesin 14 communities in the mid-Atlantic region this summer.
He recently launched a sideline selling screens for outdoor viewing.
"The growth rate," he said, "has
been phenomenal."
In Burbank, for example, a shopping center's need
for midweek foot traffic burgeoned this year into a summer film
series that drew 3,500 people a night to the side of an IKEA building,
and into the mall, and prompted inquiries from communities as far
away as Henderson, Nev., and as nearby as Irvine.
Two years ago in Baker City, Ore., a desire to
bring locals back to a historic but neglected downtown resulted
in a summer festival centered on a singalong screening, in the middle
of Main Street, of "Paint Your Wagon," which was filmed
there. "Small-town historical events can have a hard time,"
said Beverly Calder, a board member of the Historic Baker City Inc.
economic improvement district. "But a bad musical with Clint
Eastwood? That's something different."
L.A.'s Chinatown showed Jackie Chan movies outdoors
this summer in an attempt to generate buzz. Universal CityWalk offered
a free "Summer Drive-In Movie" series near the Hard Rock
Cafe there. A James Bond film series screened in a commercial courtyard
in Pasadena's Old Town. In Colorado, so many cities have outdoor
film series that one event producer, a former dot-commer, has launched
the Outdoor Cinema Network, a Web site ( http://www.outdoorcinema.net
) to help them market themselves.
In San Jose, meanwhile, a bootleg outdoor movie
night inaugurated by bored bar patrons in the late 1990s has blossomed
into two outdoor cinema programs subsidized by downtown revitalization
money. The programs have, in turn, inspiredthe developer of a new
high-end commercial and residential project, Santana Row, to build
outdoor movies into the infrastructure of the district's shopping
strip, a move that merchants say has bumped business up by 25% or
more on film nights.
Now, with three venues where moviegoers can gather
in lawn chairs and on blankets on warm nights, officials are considering
a fourth modified cinema under the stars for San Jose's new City
Hall, which is scheduled for completion in 2005 and which will feature
a large plaza and glass-domed rotunda.
Lynn Rogers, arts program officer for the San
Jose Office of Cultural Affairs, says the aim is to give citizens
a sense of ownership of their public spaces.
"It's a great way," she said, "for
people in a community to commune."
The rise in urban movies by moonlight came just
as suburban drive-ins were being declared extinct. In 1958, more
than 4,000 drive-ins dotted the United States, but the cable and
video revolution had put all but a few hundred out of business by
about 1985.
In the '90s, city planners and others became intrigued
with the idea of open-air movies as a way to bring crowds back to
neglected downtowns, but most had imagined such events to be too
costly. The massive screens required thousands of dollars' worth
of rented scaffolding; the special projectors and speakers called
for extra security and insurance; and some theater owners feared
that the competition might cannibalize the box office at the local
art house.
Innovation, however, was underway. In Silicon
Valley, dot-commers were rigging up after-hours movies with DVDs,
laptops and office PowerPoint projectors. Ad hoc "micro-cinemas"
were appearing in bars, on college campuses and on rooftops in Los
Angeles and New York. Meanwhile, equipment was becoming more powerful
and cheaper, from the projectors to massive inflatable screens from
Europe that could be blown up on site like bounce houses at children's
birthday parties.
Ideas spread on the Internet and via word of mouth.
The outdoor screenings did not, as it turned out,
cut into audiences at local multiplexes and art houses, although
discount theaters did appear to lose market share to outdoor cinema,
Deutsch said.
There have been other snags, though. Even at lowered
costs, promoters say, outdoor movies can run as much as $3,000 or
more per film depending on the size of the venue, and not all films
will bring out the crowds. (On the other hand, some films have taken
on new life as outdoor cinema classics, "Willy Wonka and the
Chocolate Factory" has become a standard on the blanket-and-lawn-chair
circuit.)
Some communities aren't receptive: In Jacksonville,
Fla., for example, a preservation group's effort to revive a historic
but long blighted neighborhood with an outdoor cinema fizzled in
2001 after a few movies. The preservationists blamed Sept. 11, saying
no one felt like coming out after the terrorist attacks. But Tim
Massett, the film buff who helped set up the program, offered a
different view: "Only the residents would come out, and not
even some of them because they didn't want to be out on Main Street.
It was fun while it lasted, but it was a very tainted neighborhood."
Then there are the audiences, which sometimes
need to bereminded to silence mobile phones, keep the view clear
for the people down on the grass and leave pets at home if the animals
are inclined to yelp should someone trip over them in the dark.
"At one of our events, I think it was a showing
of 'Top Gun' in Fairfax, Va., a man was smoking and a lady asked
him to quit, and when he said no, she grabbed the cigarette out
of his mouth and the dude turned around and slapped her," Deutsch
said. "We had to throw the both of them out."
For all that, however, the form appears to be
spreading, particularly in temperate venues where screenings can
run well into the autumn months. There are outdoor cinemas on Main
Streets and in warehouse districts, in Rust Belt cities and in Sun
Belt suburbs. None charges more than a modest admission, in fact,
most are free, underwritten by public subsidies, sponsors or corporate
marketing budgets. Some are seasonal, some are year-round.
Foreign Cinema restaurant in San Francisco became
a dot-com-era magnet in the late '90s with outdoor classics screened
during dinner. At the boutique hotel Habitat in Mexico City, guests
at a night reception watched from the rooftop bar this summer as
a Charlie Chaplin movie played on the wall of an adjacent mid-rise.
In Silicon Valley, Chris Esparza, who owned a
jazz club in languishing downtown San Jose, became an outdoor cinema
booster in 1998 after he and some regulars got into a conversation
over the paucity of local urban night life. Someone asked: Why couldn't
San Jose be more like the town in "Cinema Paradiso," the
beloved Italian film in which everyone gathers to watch movies under
the stars on hot nights? One thing led to another.
"We borrowed some equipment from a guy I
knew who did videos for raves," said Esparza, now 36 and the
owner of an events planning business that specializes in nonprofit
and civic projects. "We got some speakers on sticks, and someone
we knew happened to have a 35-millimeter copy of 'Blade Runner.'
"We showed it at dusk in the back of this
parking lot that had walls on three sides. We didn't have a permit,
and we were probably in violation of that FBI warning you see when
you play a rented movie. But the whole thing probably cost us a
hundred bucks, and even without anyadvertising, about 75 people
showed up."
Today, Gypsy Cinema is an annual six-film summer
event underwritten by about $12,000 in public funds from the city's
redevelopment and cultural affairs budgets. A second outdoor film
series, featuring more mainstream titles, has been spun off and
is being run by another events company.
Esparza's firm, Giant Creative Services, meanwhile,
has helped the developers of Santana Row launch their own outdoor
summer film program, designed to make shoppers look at the freshly
minted complex asa sort of neighborhood rather than a mundane mall.
Old and new classics, "Casablanca," "Bridget Jones's
Diary," "The Matrix", have been shown each Wednesday
during the spring and summer for the last year on a massive screen
in a grassy plaza surrounded by cafes and restaurants.
"The idea was mainly to say welcome, not
necessarily 'Bring your wallet' but 'We're here for you when you're
ready to shop,' " said Bill Billings, an areadirector for Maggiano's
Little Italy, a chain that operates a restaurant abutting the plaza.
The eatery's 17 cinema-view patio tables quickly became the hottest
Wednesday night ticket in San Jose.
"It turned a Wednesday into a Saturday for
us, which is a big deal in the restaurant business," he said.
"I'd say we had a 20% to 25% increase in business, easy. People
were almost bribing the maitre d', and local celebrities and politicians
were coming to us, asking for [those tables] as favors. Folks were
asking for packages of food to go so they could eat outside on the
plaza. There was an early wave that would come and eat before the
show started at sundown."
Billings said the festive atmosphere spilled over
to neighboring merchants, tripling sales at the nearby Starbucks
and creating an opportunity for other food vendors who set up booths
for popcorn and snacks. Audiences for the shows have ranged from
300 to 500 a night, he said. They come not just for the picture,
he said, but to be together "under the stars in some of the
best weather in the world with your neighbors, who, until now, you've
never met."
In San Francisco, redevelopment authorities hope
that such a mood will help resuscitate the Lower Fillmore, the onetime
jazz mecca where the Ali-Foreman film was screened in a vacant lot.
"It's all about creating buzz," said
Don Capobres, senior project manager at the San Francisco Redevelopment
Agency. "Outdoor cinemas create such a dramatic scene: The
sun's going down, this huge screen is going up, even the weather
plays into the drama here, because you have these flames from the
space heaters. People go by in cars and buses, and it makes them
want to stop and ask, 'Why are all these people hanging out in the
fog here? What's going on?' "
It's a long shot, the district has been singing
the blues for decades, and yet it seems to be working. On the night
of the boxing film, the biggest topic of conversation was what had
become of, and what could be done about, the neighborhood. One man
noted that this corner had housed a Black Panthers office in his
boyhood; another noted the calming effect the blue light of the
cinema seemed to have on the local street people.
"This is like something you'd see in,
well, the movies," said Rebecca Atwater, a 44-year-old firefighter,
"where a bunch of strangers end up in some barren place and
actually end up having a good time."
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