Eugene art cinema hits on novel strategy for funding film series

Never miss a headline! Sign up to get the latest Lane County news delivered straight to your inbox every weekday for free.

• Morning Lookout
• Lookout PM
• News Alerts

Sign up

Starting next week, a retrospective film series screening the works of director Michael Mann — who helmed classic crime thrillers such as “Heat” and “Thief” — may be coming to Eugene.

Emphasis on “may.” 

The Art House, the two-screen independent cinema at 492 E. 13th Ave. in Eugene, was $2,465 shy of its goal to put on the Mann series. In all, $5,450 is needed to pay the pricey licensing fees necessary to screen the films. 

Art House managing director Edward Schiessl first turned to Kickstarter a few years ago as a way to put on film series with less risk. He uses the crowdfunding website to presell tickets and guarantee the small theater can afford the licensing fees, without eating the cost of empty seats. If a campaign doesn’t meet its funding goal, the series is canceled and all of the money is returned to “backers,” in Kickstarter lingo.

It is a novel strategy for the theater. It’s also a sign of how precarious the economics still are for independent movie theaters, years after many closed across the country — including the Art House’s predecessor, Bijou Art Cinemas — during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We’re really conscious about taking any kind of risks in our programming,” Schiessl said, pointing to the high cost of entry for showing classic and older films. “So if we’re not selling a fair amount of tickets pretty consistently, we’re going in the hole very quickly, and it makes it harder and harder to climb back out.”

Gauging support (and paying the bills)

Theaters typically pay a minimum guarantee to a studio like Paramount for the rights to screen a specific movie. That costs somewhere between $300 and $500, Schiessl said, plus the cost to actually ship the film. While the Mann films and most series picks aren’t on physical film, they’re huge encrypted files — 200 gigabytes or more — shipped on external drives.

Those costs are traditionally recouped through ticket sales. But when a scheduled film flops and leaves empty seats, the theater takes a loss. For a series, where rights are often gathered piecemeal for a slate of films, costs easily rise into the thousands. 

The Kickstarter model was partially inspired by empty seats at a few series more than a decade ago at the Broadway Metro in downtown Eugene, which Schiessl also runs. A Stanley Kubrick series lost a little money. A series of silent classic films featuring Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd was a “total flop.” A run of spaghetti Westerns was disastrous.

“We lost our shirts on that one,” Schiessl said. “It was like almost every show was an empty auditorium. We had archive prints of ‘Once Upon a Time in the West’ and all these great classics, and we’re playing them to like, two or three people.”

That’s been avoided with the Kickstarter strategy, which Schiessl first used in 2022 to program a run of director David Lynch’s feature films and shorts. Previously, he had used the website to fundraise for new seats at the Broadway Metro and a digital projection conversion for the Bijou when it was still open.

Donations include options for admissions for screenings, series passes to every programmed film and a $500 pledge for a private screening of a film in the series for up to 40 guests. 

Successfully crowdfunded series at the Art House include runs focused on Kubrick, horror maestro John Carpenter, Italian auteur Federico Fellini and a blockbuster slate of Steven Spielberg and Robert Zemeckis movies. A Wes Anderson series was such a success, funded for almost $8,000 for a $5,100 goal, that the theater added extra showtimes.

So far, the only unsuccessful campaign was a series of Quentin Tarantino movies, but that wasn’t due to a lack of support. The Los Angeles wildfires led to a lack of communication with the constellation of producers who held distribution rights to Tarantino’s films, Schiessl said, thanks to the implosion of The Weinstein Company in the wake of #MeToo revelations around Hollywood superproducer Harvey Weinstein.

Schiessl said the Art House tries to put on series that appeal to film lovers from their 30s to their 50s. He’s sure the Tarantino series would have been a lock to fund in a different situation.

Mann, a respected director whose work spans decades and bridges the gap between cinephiles, action film fanatics and hyper-online film fans, seemed like a natural fit for that demographic. 

He was a popular request for a director to program a series around, in addition to filmmakers like John Waters (“Pink Flamingos,” “Hairspray”), the Swedish director Ingmar Bergman (“Persona,” “The Seventh Seal”), the Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky (“Stalker,” “Solaris”), as well as genres like Italian giallo and Japanese horror.

But for now, support for the Mann series is lacking. The Kickstarter ends Sunday night. If the goal isn’t met by then, the series will be canceled.

How to support the Art House

The Kickstarter to fund the Mann series ends at 11:59 p.m. Sunday, July 20.

The theater is also having a yard sale this weekend, from noon to 6 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, with film reels, memorabilia, audio-visual equipment and more for sale.