Rep cinemas and film societies: how small screens survive
The best screening I went to one winter had eleven people in it. It was a Tuesday, cold enough that the sidewalk squeaked, and the film was a strange old thing none of my friends had heard of. By the end the eleven of us were laughing at the same jokes and arguing in the lobby like cousins at a wedding. Nobody made money that night. Three of us bought memberships on the way out.
That is the economics of small cinemas in a single evening. Repertory houses, community screens and film societies run on loyalty, volunteer labour and programming clever enough to make eleven people feel like a crowd. By any spreadsheet logic they shouldn't exist, and yet all over this country they keep opening the doors at seven. Here is how they manage it, and how you might start one of your own.
A few rooms worth knowing
Toronto's Revue Cinema, in the Roncesvalles neighbourhood, opened in 1912. Since 2007 it has been run as a not-for-profit by the Revue Film Society, which is about as clear a model as you will find: the people who love the cinema are the people responsible for keeping it open. When a neighbourhood takes that on, every ticket becomes a small vote.
Montreal has Cinéma du Parc. Vancouver has The Cinematheque. Here in Winnipeg I spend more evenings than I should admit at Cinematheque at the Winnipeg Film Group, in the Exchange District. Toronto also has the Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema, formerly the Bloor, where a documentary festival's name sits on a screen that runs all year.
These rooms differ in size, history and appetite, and I won't pretend to know their balance sheets. What they share, to my eye, is a belief that a cinema can be a programme with a point of view. A multiplex is a box that plays what arrives. A rep house is a person, or a committee of people, choosing.
Membership is the quiet engine
Ticket sales swing with the weather, the playoffs and whatever dropped on streaming that week. Memberships swing less. A member pays up front, typically in exchange for cheaper tickets, early word on special screenings and, in a not-for-profit, a vote at the annual meeting. That money arrives before the projector warms up, which is exactly when a small cinema needs it.
The smart societies treat members as more than a revenue line. Members bring friends, volunteer, sit on programming committees and forgive the occasional dud. They also tell you, loudly, when you have got something wrong, which is a gift if you can bear it. A cinema with lots of indifferent ticket buyers is fragile. A cinema with a few hundred people who feel it belongs to them is very hard to kill.
Keep the tiers simple. A basic membership, a student or low-income rate, and one generous level for the people who want to give more will cover most of what a small room needs. Anything fancier turns the box office into a tax form. And if you sell named seats, put the little brass plates somewhere people can actually read them, because half the pleasure is finding your friend's name on row C.
Volunteers in the booth
Plenty of small screens lean on volunteers: ushers, ticket sellers, popcorn makers and, at the lucky ones, projectionists. Running 35mm is a craft learned at the elbow of someone who has done it for years. A room that still has people who can thread a projector, splice a print and spot a damaged reel before it reaches the gate is a room worth protecting.
Digital projection is less romantic, but it isn't trivial. Someone has to load the files, check the sound, manage the digital keys that let encrypted films play and know what to do when the server sulks five minutes before showtime. Treat volunteers as staff who happen not to be paid. Train them properly, schedule them fairly, thank them in public and give them first pick of the screenings they care about. I suspect burnout ends more film societies than bad programming ever has, and it usually starts with the same two people doing everything.
Programming that gives people a reason to come
A rep cinema can't outspend a multiplex, so it has to out-think one. The double bill is the oldest trick and still one of the best: pair a film people know with one they don't, and let the first carry the second through the door. Themed series do the same thing at a larger scale. Six Thursdays of films about weather, or road trips, or difficult mothers, give an audience a habit and give the programmer cover to show something challenging in week four.
Partnerships widen the net. Festivals run for days, not months, and many like the idea of a year-round home for their audiences, while a small cinema would love those audiences on an ordinary Wednesday. Dev Raghunathan's field guide to Canada's documentary festivals is a useful map of potential partners. Local filmmakers count too. A night of shorts by people who live within walking distance will fill seats with their relatives, some of those relatives will come back, and if your town has young directors working on almost nothing, my piece on micro-budget features might nudge them toward something you can screen.
Don't underrate the printed programme, either. A folded sheet with a paragraph on each film, written by someone who loves them, does more selling than any algorithm. People keep them on the fridge. They circle dates. They bring the sheet back in March with a coffee ring on it and ask if you will ever show that Hungarian film again.
DCP or 35mm
The Digital Cinema Package, or DCP, is the standard format for theatrical distribution, and for most new releases it is what you will be sent. For a small cinema the projector and server are a serious capital cost, and like any machine they need servicing and, eventually, replacing. Fundraise for them by name. People give more readily to a projector with a photo than to a line called operations.
Then there is film. A 35mm revival screening is an event in a way a file never quite is, and audiences will cross town for the grain, the faint clatter from the booth and the little cue marks flicking in the corner before a reel change. Prints can be scarce and fragile, they cost money to ship, and archives and collectors lend them carefully, as they should. For rooms that can manage it, the sensible answer is both: digital for the week-to-week programme, film for the nights that should feel like occasions.
A cinema is a social space
I have made more friends in cinema lobbies than anywhere else, with the possible exception of the washroom line at a long festival screening. That is the thing streaming cannot copy. A small cinema is where strangers find out they laugh at the same moments, where a neighbourhood sees itself in the dark, and where you can turn to the person beside you afterwards and say, quietly, what on earth was that.
Good small screens build for this on purpose. Someone introduces the film in two minutes, not twenty. The lights come up slowly. There is coffee, or a bar, and a place to stand and argue. It is why this magazine files pieces like this one under culture rather than business: the room matters as much as the film.
How to start a film society
- Find five people who will turn up even when it snows. A society with one organiser is a hobby. With five it is an institution in waiting.
- Find a room. Libraries, community centres, church halls, galleries and the back rooms of cafés all work if you can make them dark and keep them quiet. Sit in the worst seat before you commit.
- Sort out the rights before you print a poster. Owning a disc does not give you the right to screen it to the public, so book each title through its distributor or rights holder and keep the permission in writing.
- Choose a format you can project well. A good disc on a bright projector with proper speakers beats a muddy file every time. Borrow equipment from a co-op or library before buying anything.
- Pick a rhythm and keep it. The same night every month, say the second Thursday, builds a habit faster than clever scheduling.
- Set a simple money model: a modest annual membership, pay-what-you-can tickets, or both. Keep the books tidy and open, and look into incorporating as a not-for-profit if you want a bank account in the society's name or plan to apply for grants.
- Programme in series rather than one-offs, so each night sells the next.
- Partner early with a library, a festival, a film co-op or a school. Shared audiences grow faster than new ones.
- Make the evening social. Introduce each film briefly, leave time after the credits, and ask people what they want to see.
- Share the work. Rotate the jobs, write down how each one is done, and recruit your replacement before you need one.
And buy folding chairs that stack. Some night around eleven you will be putting them away while somebody asks what you are showing next month, and that question, asked by a near stranger with their coat half on, is the whole business model.
