“If you happen to don’t care about cash and also you simply need to do one thing cool, you are able to do it.”
When Richard Linklater thinks again on the Austin Movie Society (AFS), now celebrating its fortieth anniversary, all of it boils right down to that. A robust instance of making one thing cool that you simply love after which the cash may come later, AFS has given over $2.7 million in grants to filmmakers and boasts 20 acres of studio house with its Austin Studios — the place productions have created 37,000 jobs and over $2.6 billion of financial influence for Austin.
On the night of March 6, AFS can be celebrating its fortieth anniversary on the annual occasion it hosts, the Texas Movie Awards, which additionally touts 25 years of inducting Texans from the movie and TV world into the Texas Movie Corridor of Fame.
By way of swank and elegance, AFS has come a great distance. However in keeping with its founder, Linklater, who spoke to IndieWire by way of Zoom prematurely of the festivities, the important DNA of these early days continues to be there—and must be a lesson to cinephiles all over the place else about learn how to create a neighborhood.
That’s all Linklater was on the lookout for in 1985 when he was about to show 25, had an honest chunk of cash in his pocket from engaged on an offshore oil rig, and was on the lookout for a neighborhood of fellow movie lovers upon transferring to Austin. If there isn’t a neighborhood already there, you may create one. And Linklater did. It’s a roadmap you may comply with, too.
“I used to be privileged in that, as a result of I had labored offshore, I had cash. I’m the one one who didn’t have to have some crummy job,” Linklater mentioned. “So I might spend all my time not solely watching films, studying, writing, no matter I used to be doing, but in addition enhancing [his first feature, the Super 8-shot ‘It’s Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books’].”
“I wished to see all these movies, so I believed I’d be sending out a beacon to, who’re the movie freaks, who needs to be my buddy?”
He and his new flatmate, current College of Texas at Austin movie grad and common Linklater DP Lee Daniel, met after they had been kicked out of their respective homes. Clicking instantly, they began developing with a program sensational sufficient to pitch to Scott Dinger, the then-owner of Austin’s Dobie Theatre. So long as they may herald sufficient of an viewers to rack up first rate concession gross sales to make it worthwhile for Dinger, they may display their lineup, which they provocatively titled “Intercourse and Blasphemy within the Avant-Garde.”
The titles included had been Salvador Dalí’s “Un Chien Andalou,” Kenneth Anger’s “Scorpio Rising,” Barbara Hammer’s “A number of Orgasm,” George Griffin’s “The Membership,” and Curt McDowell’s “Nudes (A Sketchbook).”
“We had been profitable simply from the leap,” Linklater mentioned. “It’s ironic, too, as a result of it’s proper when movie societies had been form of dying out across the nation due to video, and the print high quality was dropping, and it was only a sluggish demise. However we begin one right here in Austin, and we noticed at our first two exhibits the whole lot simply … it was profitable from absolutely the starting.”
Linklater admits that “success” as outlined right here meant merely having the ability “to pay for the movie and pay for the delivery and printing the flyers at Kinkos, if we’re not getting these totally free as a result of somebody we all know works there.” This was not a approach, at first, to assist your self financially or make use of anybody — Austin Movie Society was all-volunteer for its first 10 years, and Linklater himself labored as a valet and bellhop to assist the lease for a devoted AFS screening house above Captain Quackenbush’s Intergalactic Dessert Firm and Espresso Bar on the western fringe of the UT-Austin campus.
Linklater had additionally put collectively “a board” of outstanding film-loving Austin locals, reminiscent of movie programmer and professor Chale Nafus and Austin Chronicle and SXSW founder Louis Black. Having a board meant AFS was official sufficient as a non-profit to obtain grants from arts organizations. However getting free adverts within the Austin Chronicle selling AFS screenings helped, too.
Austin Movie Society was capable of fly in a filmmaker for the primary time in 1988. The director was James Benning, given a $300 honorarium, who would introduce his experimental movie “Panorama Suicide”: “He simply acquired off the airplane with a paper sack, which is his factor, and a print in a single hand, and simply frolicked for a couple of days.” (Linklater not too long ago bumped into Benning once more on the Berlin Movie Pageant in February 2025, the place Benning had premiered “Misplaced Boy” and Linklater his Ethan Hawke-starring Lorenz Hart chamber-drama “Blue Moon.”)
Linklater by no means confirmed his personal movies at AFS till he found one other factor to have the group “kick up one other notch” financially: The profit premiere. “When ‘Slacker’ got here out [in 1991], I used to be Like, ‘Oh, let’s present it at The Paramount [Austin’s classic 1,200-seat movie palace] and have all of the proceeds go to the Austin Movie Society. And it’s like, wow, we simply made a bit in a single night time.”
Admitting that his mindset was “poverty mode” nicely into the ’90s and that he and people in his orbit had lived “like a poor pupil by your complete 20s,” Linklater fretted about elevating AFS ticket costs for the profit screening of Quentin Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction” in 1994.
“It took me some time to appreciate Austin was altering,” Linklater mentioned. “I grew up within the Despair period ’80s. $2 was our charge. I used to be nonetheless caught in that period. Nobody I knew, or nobody in Austin, had any cash. You possibly labored at [UT-Austin’s] Burger Middle. It was actually no financial system exterior the college within the state.”
“When ‘Pulp Fiction’ got here out, I mentioned, “God, will individuals pay $10 a ticket?” And we offered out. That is pre-digital ticket. It offered out like ‘Growth!’ I mentioned, “Oh, we must always have charged much more.” The remainder of the ’90s was a time of extraordinary development culminating within the hiring of eventual CEO Rebecca Campbell in 1998, the opening of Austin Studios in 2000, the inauguration of the Texas Movie Awards and Texas Movie Corridor of Fame, and AFS beginning to award its filmmaker grants itself. In 2017, Austin Movie Society opened its personal AFS Cinema, the town’s solely nonprofit arthouse theater.
Linklater now strongly believes that this can be a roadmap cinephiles in different cities can comply with. “If you happen to don’t care about cash and you will get a reasonably good association with a theater, you can also make it occur,” he mentioned. “I all the time say, you and some buddies [can make it happen]. Everybody has their very own talent set. Oh, they’re good at making the flyers. Oh, they like placing up flyers. Oh, they’re good at reserving the movies. It’s not likely that onerous. It’s administrative. You’ve acquired to ship a verify, you bought to ship [the print], you bought to obtain [the print], all that. One individual can truly do so much [of this on their own]. I do know that. However it’s extra enjoyable to do it with a bunch. It’s like being in a punk band besides we had been displaying movies or placing up flyers late at night time throughout city. I feel we’re due a renaissance.”
If you happen to had requested Linklater three or 5 years in the past if he was bullish about cinephilia he may need mentioned no. However post-pandemic, he senses a shift that exhibitors want to acknowledge.
“I’ve been to a whole lot of locations during the last years — simply festivals and campus conditions — and I really feel an actual starvation now. And I see our audiences on the Movie Society and different locations I’ve been: younger. Younger. Cinema’s not ageing out. There’s younger individuals, I’m speaking beneath 25, student-age and little bit past who’re filling out theaters to observe films of all types. Present films, previous films. I’m so enthusiastic about that as a result of simply if you’re considering children lately, they’re their telephones; they’d slightly watch two hours on YouTube, it’s not likely true.
“People have a necessity for neighborhood. Movie individuals, you discover that neighborhood in your movie show. That’s your church. That’s your gathering spot. That’s your fowl feeder. If you happen to’re a hungry fowl, that’s the place you go.”
Was this one thing simply distinctive to Austin? Linklater doesn’t assume so, both.
“I actually need to create a system that makes it simpler for individuals to get began [creating their own film screenings],” he mentioned. “Possibly we’ll have starter kits for these movie societies, assist them out with the bookings, no matter. It’s an early thought, nevertheless it’s actual. We’re engaged on it proper now.”
If the Austin Movie Society mannequin might be exported to the remainder of the nation, cinephilia’s future must be vivid certainly. It’s a roadmap for what’s doable. You’ve simply acquired to be prepared to construct the highway.