Late last summer, the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema—the Austin-based theater chain set to open its first North Texas franchise in Richardson this month—offered an enticing invitation to local movie writers and bloggers: a one-day charter bus trip from Dallas to Austin to experience firsthand the movie theater chain that was coming to North Texas. The bus ride alone drove home what was in store. On it were a collection of movie nerds, horror geeks, comiccon habitues, and self-professed cinephiles. We weren’t just the press. We represented the Alamo Drafthouse’s target audience.
Since its founding as a second-run movie theater in Austin in 1997, the Alamo Drafthouse (now a first-run movie theater) has distinguished itself not only by serving food and craft beers in the theaters, but by staging events that have turned going to the movies into an interactive experience. At first, these included themed dinners (one of the most popular these days is a daylong, multicourse Hobbit-themed meal served during all three Lord of the Rings movies), live bands performing scores for silent films, and cult-dedicated programming such as Terror Tuesday and Weird Wednesday. Now there are also Def Leppard, Madonna, and Whitney Houston music video sing-alongs; Master Pancake Theater, a live-comedy riff on the TV show Mystery Science Theater 3000; and the ever-popular Austin Air Sex, which is best described as a night of watching people play air guitar onstage (another Alamo event), but with mimed coital acts substituted for rock-and-roll gyrations.
The centerpiece of all of it is the annual Fantastic Fest, a film festival focused on cult, horror, offbeat, quirky, weird, and eccentric films. In the past decade, it has quietly become one of the most important fi lm events in the country, coinciding, not coincidentally, with new cult and fanboy movie websites that have developed rabid, plugged-in audiences around fringe and eccentric tastes in movies. This 21st-century breed of cinephiles respects classic fi lms by Kubrick and Kurosawa but allows for healthy indulgences in films like Burt Kennedy’s Suburban Commando or Ishiro Honda’s Mothra. And the Alamo has become the poster boy for the movie theater ready to satiate the appetite of the newly galvanized posses of nerds. In 2010, Alamo founder Tim League launched Drafthouse Films, a movie distribution company that handles the movies that often launch from Fantastic Fest.
On the bus trip to Austin, Bill DiGaetano sticks out. DiGaetano is leading Alamo’s franchised expansion into Richardson. He is handsome and fit, with bulging pectorals and well-tamed, jetblack hair. In the film version of the bus ride, DiGaetano might be played by Luke Wilson, and you’d expect to see him in an Uptown sports bar rather than this sea of movie scribblers. The former Green Beret earned his undergrad from St. Edwards University in Austin, and while he says has always loved movies, there’s no secret he’s opening an Alamo Drafthouse franchise because it’s a solid business enterprise.
The fact of the matter is, for all the seemingly fringe and cult-love at the Alamo, the chain’s Austin locations hold the top three box office slots for gross revenues per screen in that city. At a time when movie distribution is in disarray and studios have turned to tried-and-tested blockbuster brands, copious sequels, and endless remakes, Alamo has created a model that seems to get audiences out from their home theaters and back into movie theaters.
“We didn’t want to live and die by what the studios are putting out,” DiGaetano says of Alamo’s strategy. And there’s another perk to all the food, beer, and themed events, he says: increased profit margins.
In Austin, we are treated to a screening of Conan the Barbarian featuring live spoofing from a local comedy troupe. The comedians score a few laughs, but after 45 minutes or so the novelty of rewatching a young and ripped Arnold Schwarzenegger in briefs fumbling through dialogue in a thick Austrian accent wears off. I have seen the movie a dozen times, mostly on TV on Saturday afternoons in the late 1980s. Like a lot of the Alamo programming, ironic distance or juvenile nostalgia (or both) is a required ingredient the audience must supply to season the entertainment. There’s also a particular fascination for the trash of the 1980s, a period once derided by movie critics as a dismal creative impasse that has now been resurrected as a beloved golden age of cheesy gore and campy comedy.
As we head back to Dallas after Conan, DiGaetano puts on a hair metal karaoke sing-along video, to keep the party going. Yet an hour into the bus ride home, the beer provided by the organizers just seems to make everyone tired. A young, makeup-smeared Bret Michaels is peering out from the TV shrieking the lyrics to “Nothin’ But a Good Time,” but no one sings along. It’s a reminder of just what makes the Alamo work in the first place. Theaters used to be content showing what Hollywood kicks out each season and sell overpriced popcorn to cover the overhead. That won’t cut it anymore. But neither, apparently, will the Alamo’s own programming, shown to a captive, target audience, do it every time either. At least not on a bus. The bottom line for movie theater industry: it’s all about creating the right atmosphere.
Image: Alamo Richardson’s Bill DiGaetano
