Microcinemas: Big Screen, Little Risk

Image Gallery image by Stephanie Glaros

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

From the outside, the Trylon “microcinema” in Minneapolis looks more like a vacant office space than a movie theater. But past the front door of the short, bland brick building and through an upstart gallery space, lovers of vintage film can see Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert thumbing a ride in It Happened One Night, Walter Matthau scrambling to stop Robert Shaw’s hijacked subway train in The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, or Debbie Harry shoving a Betamax tape into James Woods’ oozing gut in Videodrome.

Thanks to Netflix and online streaming, movies have never been more readily available. Still, the increasing scarcity of repertory cinema has left small but devoted audiences hungry for the experience of watching classics in rooms full of like-minded strangers rather than at home alone.

The Trylon is testing the theory that the best—and perhaps only—way to put old movies on a big screen in the cash-strapped, video-on-demand era is on a small scale. Microcinemas like the Trylon, with its mere 50 seats, and the All Saints Cinema, located in a train station in Tallahassee, Florida, have sprung up or survived where traditionally sized repertory houses, with their hundreds of seats and huge overhead, have been struggling or shuttered. A map at Wayfaring.com pinpoints the locations of 47 microcinemas throughout the country.

The Trylon’s owner and manager, Barry Kryshka, got into indie theater when a beloved local rep house, the Oak Street Cinema, closed. He founded the nomadic Take-Up Productions—and named it accordingly—to pick up the slack.

“We started by showing Melvin Van Peebles’ Watermelon Man in the alley behind a coffee shop, on the side of a white brick building,” recalls Kryshka. “Whenever a character in the movie was standing in front of a white wall, it turned into a white brick wall.”

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print