Friday, May 10, 2013

Documentaries find a new theatrical home in New York City

Veteran FJI correspondent Doris Toumarkine reports on a new home for documentaries coming to downtown New York City.


“All digital, all docs, all the time, all new!” could be the rallying cry for a unique theatre planned for downtown Manhattan.

Hoping to also give a trend-setting spin to traditional movie exhibition, New York’s DCTV (Downtown Community TV), a leading documentary film education, production and resource center, broke ground Tuesday on DCTV Cinema, what is envisioned as this country’s first Academy Award-eligible “all docs/all the time” public theatre. (North of the border, Toronto’s all-doc Bloor Hot Docs Cinema has been operating for a couple years.)


DCTV141
The groundbreaking ceremony (really more a sand-tossing affair) took place at DCTV’s beautiful headquarters (bordering Chinatown and Tribeca), where the four-decades-old, nonprofit doc educational and support hub is housed in a late-19th-century French Renaissance chateau-style building that was once a firehouse.

Only two short blocks below downtown’s Houston Street, DCTV Cinema, to be built on the building’s first floor, will further establish the broad east-west Houston stretch as an indie theatre axis (although far less glittery than the marquee-lined 42nd Street of years ago), where venues like Film Forum, the Angelika and Sunshine Cinema have long attracted off-Hollywood fans.

DCTV co-founders/co-executive directors and husband-and-wife team Jon Alpert and Keiko Tsuno, who launched DCTV in 1972 and moved the facility in 1979 to the current building they now own at 87 Lafayette Street, greeted the impressive gathering of groundbreaking notables. Among those who manned the symbolic shovels after giving short speeches were doc royals Michael Moore (Bowling for Columbine) and Morgan Spurlock (Super Size Me) and several politicos like Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer and the area’s NYC Council member Margaret Chin.

In his brief ceremonial testimony hailing both the DCTV Cinema and the doc genre, ever plus-sized Moore quipped to Spurlock that “Super Size Me was a huge inspiration to me.” Moore underscored to the crowd Manhattan’s importance in the history of movie exhibition and also reminded that “people really love nonfiction, but film nonfiction [as a genre] has been treated like a weird cousin.”

In spite of the expert shoveling, the DCTV Cinema, designed by Lee H. Skolnick Architecture + Design Partnership, is not expected to open until early 2015. A spacious lobby serves as entryway to the 73-seat auditorium, which, said Alpert in an interview with FJI, will also feature a large screen. Regarding the screen size and other specs pertaining to equipment, he said that DCTV has brought in a house engineer who is working with various consultants on infrastructure. “The process is complex, like it is for a hospital.”

But many DCTV Cinema specifics are already known. In addition to fulfilling all rules for official Academy Award-qualifying runs, the venue will be fully DCI-compliant and boast state-of-the-art 3D and 4K digital projection systems. But times require a nimble approach: Alpert predicts that 8K resolution will be here in four years and 3D is losing its traction.

No matter where the technology takes DCTV Cinema, the theatre will have capabilities for the sharing of live events with millions of people around the world via the Internet and for accommodating Internet conversations amongst people anywhere in the world with those in the auditorium.

About this focus on forward thinking and hyper-interactivity for the space, Alpert states, “We’re trying to cast a very wide net, so this will be a place where the tech measures up to the quality of the work. There aren’t as many fine theatrical settings as there should be for documentaries and this is one attempt to rectify that.”

And just as DCTV’s mission has been to democratize access to digital film technology and instruction for filmmakers and students, its DCTV Cinema will go democratic for filmgoers with “reasonable” ticket prices.

Unlike so many analog/celluloid stragglers and purists in film, Alpert is a staunch digital loyalist. “We have never worked in film,” he says with pride. “I have no anachronistic nostalgia for it, no fondness whatsoever, and have always loved the low costs and instant gratification of video.” Of course, analog projectors for DCTV Cinema are out of the question.

Alpert acknowledges that with the opening a few years away and technology changing rapidly, “we’ve already revised our equipment list three times.”

The theatre’s shows may mostly go day-and-date with Web and on-demand availability, depending on licensing rights.

As for the theatre’s staff, Alpert says he’ll have a house manager and an administrative person with tech savvy who will also serve as curator and programmer. A tech staff will be both full and part-time. “But we want to raise a good amount of money to assure the staff we’ll need.”

The budget for the new cinema build and equipment is around $2.5 million, he says, and funds have come from a mix of public, private and not-for-profit organizations and foundations.

Alpert also acknowledges Sony Electronics as a longtime and “generous and faithful” supporter of DCTV that has been providing state-of-the-art equipment, especially the latest cameras. He notes, “We’re like a laboratory for them and they also know that we’re putting their equipment to good use for society.” Appropriately, Sony Broadcast president Alec Shapiro was another of the ceremony’s shovel-wielding honored participants.

DCTV Cinema has an advisory council to guide the way, a group that includes top doc filmmakers Moore, Spurlock, Liz Garbus, Barbara Kopple, Alexandra Pelosi, and Alan and Susan Raymond; HBO Documentary Film president Sheila Nevins; producer Abigail Disney; and actors Brooke Adams and James Gandolfini. DCTV’s traditional board of directors will continue to provide oversight.

Alpert and Tsuno were close to opening a theatre in 2007, but the usual funding, logistical and approval delays and other hurdles got in the way.

Alpert says his main beef about documentaries’ relationship with cinemas is that “there are too few opportunities to see documentaries in theatres.” But the genre as theatrical fare was given a huge lift by the “watershed” successes from Moore and Spurlock, he believes. “These guys are the Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig of documentaries in theatres.”

Queried about the possibility of copycatting the DCTV Cinema concept into similar doc-exclusive theatres in other downtowns where revitalization is needed (Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo, etc.), Alpert, expressing his strong NYC roots, says he’s got all he can handle in New York, but “Moore is looking into this. He really could make this happen.” (Later, Moore, with mogul-like evasiveness, told FJI that such attention now is only on his Traverse City, Michigan State Theatre, which offers both fiction and nonfiction, old and new.)

Asked how he expects to get doc fans to fill DCTV Cinema seats, considering so many small-screen options that lure all film fans to easy viewing on TVs and smaller devices, Alpert answers, “I’m agnostic about where documentaries are watched, where they’re consumed; they could be watched on fingernails. But why we’re spending so much money on this theatre, on things like equipment, comfortable seats and good food, is that we want to create a great communal experience for people into docs. You’ll want to come to DCTV Cinema.”

Build it and I’m sure we will.



No comments:

Post a Comment