Lights . . . camera . . . kudos!

Some key Austin Film Society figures look back on the group's past 20 years and its impact, on filmmakers and on fans

By Chris Garcia
AMERICAN-STATESMAN FILM WRITER
Sunday, January 08, 2006

It doesn't know it, but the Austin Film Society furnished my welcome mat in Austin.

I arrived in early 1998 and lived yards from the Dobie, where the society's free cinema series "Film Noir: Masters of Shadow" was playing. I'm a sucker for noir, especially on the big screen. I got my education in those crime downers at repertory houses in San Francisco — the Roxie, Red Vic, the Castro — and having access to them the day I touched down in Austin was like having Hawaiian leis hooped around my neck on the airport tarmac.

Thanks to the Austin Film Society, which celebrates its 20th birthday this week, I'm continuing an uninterrupted diet of classic, foreign, independent and obscure films. Right after the noir series, the Summer Free-for-All began at the Texas Union Theater. There I was introduced to Vincente Minnelli's outré "Some Came Running," Aleksandr Sokhurov's densely minimalist "Mother and Son" and Budd Boetticher's flinty "The Tall T." (I've been a Boetticher devotee ever since.)

Those Austin Film Society series, which run strong today, are vital nourishment for any true movie fan. Without the group's efforts, how would I have seen Jean Eustache's mesmeric "The Mother and the Whore" on the big screen? Where would I have got my first dunk into the challenging oeuvre of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, or the films of Hou Hsiao-Hsien and Alexander Dovzhenko?

And where in the world would I and hundreds of others have been able to hang out with Quentin Tarantino during his huge QT film festivals?

Bringing these kinds of movies to curious and grateful audiences has been the mission of the film society from its dawn as a two-man hobby in 1986. Those two men are Richard Linklater and Lee Daniel. They ran the society out of their West Campus home before moving the operation to the Austin Media Arts space on Guadalupe Street. The idea was to create a resource for both watchers and doers, fledgling filmmakers seeking equipment and creative and moral support.

Twenty years later, the Austin Film Society is a community force, with Linklater, the prolific filmmaker of "Slacker," its spiritual leader. With a staff of 12 and a minor battalion of volunteers and interns, the nonprofit-that-could operates from a pair of trailers at the old airport, land it shares with one of its biggest and boldest brainchildren, Austin Studios.

Modest trappings aside, the society raises money — nearly $1.5 million in 2005 — through glitzy movie premieres, the studios, membership dues, the Texas Film Hall of Fame Awards and grants. The money goes to programs benefiting Texas filmmakers, specifically the Texas Filmmakers' Production Fund and a new high school scholarship program. The money also helps get those terrific film series up and running.

To mark its 20th anniversary, we asked people involved with the Austin Film Society, and those who have directly benefited from it, to talk about the group's history, programs and deep ties to the community.

Lee Daniel

Co-founder of the Austin Film Society with Richard Linklater, and cinematographer for the Linklater films 'Slacker,' 'Dazed and Confused,' 'Before Sunset' and others. Daniel ran the society with Linklater for its first six years.

'At first it was a pretty self-serving endeavor. We wanted to see these hard-to-find films. Local venues for foreign and art films were dropping quickly. It was in the vein of the Collective for Living Cinema in New York where you have a small theater in which you could make a little projection booth and show 16 mm films. We got distributor catalogs and started packaging thematically similar programs. We got a grant from the City of Austin Parks and Recreation Department for about $1,500 in 1985 that kind of got us going. We'd charge like $4 for screenings and try to get our money back.

'At first we ran the film society out of our house and we used our home phone numbers. Then we had this space above Captain Quackenbush's Cafe on Guadalupe we called Austin Media Arts that I wanted to be a resource center like Cinemaker Co-op used to be. Once we had that, a space and an office, we felt legit. We held all kinds of events up there. It was a gallery, performance space and cinema in one. That lasted from about 1986 to 1989. We built a projection booth there with two 16 mm projectors and a portable 35 mm projector. In that room alone, we probably showed 500 films. We actually filmed a scene from "Slacker" there. That place was the seed for the film society.

'I think the society today still fits (Linklater's) vision. I was more into the grass-roots level. The Film Arts Foundation was what I aspired to be like, with access to classes and equipment. I didn't want to become an arts administrator. The free film series and the Texas Filmmakers' Production Fund are the parts they've retained that I appreciate most. The other stuff is a necessary part, I suppose. You have to have those flashy premieres and limos to raise money to give away to filmmakers. They're two different worlds to me, but they've found a way to fuse them together.'

Elisabeth Sikes

Director of artist services, Austin Film Society:

'Ways in which the Austin Film Society has benefited the film community:

'Screenings, scads of them, many free, including everything from film noir to contemporary Iranian cinema to avant-garde films to documentaries of every stripe. Visiting filmmakers. Free money — yes, free — for Texas-based filmmakers. A multilayered cake of a Web site, newsletter, competitive internship program, after-school film program at six schools, soundstages, glitzy events. Those are the broad strokes of what we do here at AFS.

'Ways in which the Austin Film Society has benefited me personally:

'It has made me an unrepentant film snob. My childhood years were happily filled with multiple screenings of "Smokey and the Bandit" and palpable excitement over "Swamp Thing." Now I notice things like print quality, and I had to warn my boyfriend that other than "I am choking to death on Milk Duds," it is not acceptable to talk in a movie theater. I have found solidarity at AFS screenings.

'Also, because of the film society, I got $2,500 to make my short film about cantankerous movie actor Lawrence Tierney. And I became close friends with a couple of society volunteers, which eventually led to my participation in an informal kickball league and the creation of a Journey cover band.'

Louis Black

Founding board member and past board president of the Austin Film Society and editor of the Austin Chronicle:

'It started totally grass roots. I had met Rick (Linklater) at Liberty Lunch and he said some nice things about something I'd written on (director Sam) Peckinpah. He was just a kid and said he was going to start showing some films and asked if the Chronicle could help. Of course we did because we're total film fanatics. We were completely into what he was doing.

'It was always driven by Rick and Lee (Daniel) in the early days. Once it became more of a structured organization, Rick was the driving force. He kept coming up with new ideas and innovations. What was amazing was this sense of commitment to the community, and there were no bounds to that commitment. It never stopped. We wanted to show tons of films, support filmmakers. We wanted to support documentary films, which is where the Texas Documentary Tour came in. Seven or eight years in, we've probably brought most of the major living documentary filmmakers to Austin.

'Every step of the way was fun, but it became more difficult, too. Two or three times along the way the organization became misshapen in major ways. . . . A few years ago it began to feel like we had grown out of touch with the local filmmaking community in some ways. The new film community felt like the film society had become so big and bureaucratic that they felt alienated from it, like we had become what we didn't want to become. . . . The film society's whole purpose is to nurture. It's to educate filmmakers, to give filmmakers money, to show films once they're done, to bring filmmakers in to talk to other filmmakers. The purpose is to reach out to the community.

'The film society has always bitten off more than it can chew, then catch up to itself. It seems to me in the last two years, in a very sensible way, it's really been concentrating on doing what it does better and not tackling too many new projects. They have started giving scholarships to high school students, so it's not like they're sitting still. But I think it's going through a period of consolidation. What people don't get is that the film society is there for them. We have this insane, kind of naive, optimistic utopianism about working together and taking care of each other.'

Kyle Henry

Austin filmmaker, whose latest film, 'Room,' screened at the Cannes International Film Festival and is nominated for two Independent Spirit Awards:

'I wouldn't have made my last three long-form films without the film society's Texas Filmmakers' Production Fund. They got their initial funding from it. For narrative filmmaking in America, the hardest money to get is the first money in, especially on risky projects. The film society and the production fund are really the National Endowment of the Arts for Texas filmmakers. Projects are chosen based on challenging, risk-taking, breathtaking work, and they're chosen by other filmmakers on a panel. Rarely do filmmakers choose what films get produced. It's normally a group of lawyers and dentists and whoever else funds movies looking for a return on their investment.

' "Room" would never have got made without the two production fund grants. I've probably over the years received $20,000 to make my films. I don't think I would have made my films without it. I really think that the stamp of approval from other filmmakers led to bigger producers being interested in my work. They say to them that these projects have merit.

'One of the big reasons I came to grad school at UT was seeing all the repertory film programming going on. Along with the film society's series, there were all sorts of screenings going on at different venues. That was a big supplement to my film education.'

Rebecca Campbell

Executive director of the Austin Film Society:

'When I started in 1998 we had two phone lines, and the second phone line was also the Internet connection, so you would yell to the other office to make sure they weren't online before you made a phone call. A great benefit of how much we've grown, from four staff and eight board members, then to 12 people and 20 board members now, is that we've been able to open it up a lot more to the general public. It's not only cinephiles anymore. It makes the film society a crossroads for all these people who wouldn't otherwise come together. We've got socialites and business people and slackers and indie film folks and academics, and they all meet at the film society. The films might not always be that accessible, but we still welcome everybody to come check them out. We're not too cool for anyone.'

John Pierson

Producer's rep for 'Slacker,' author of 'Spike, Mike, Slackers and Dykes: A Guided Tour Across a Decade of American Independent Cinema' and film professor at the University of Texas:

'The Austin Film Society has bucked every depressing, downward-spiraling national trend in terms of movie exhibition and funding for the arts. It's thriving. It's absolutely something other cities should use as a model, though it would be hard without a Rick Linklater starting it and staying in town and throwing his serious support behind it to take it to another level. I wish other filmmakers would emulate the Linklater model in their towns, supporting other things besides your own film production career.

'To me, it's all about the film programming and the production fund. Virtually nobody else bothers to put together original film programs anymore. If you look at the programs from just the film society's first 10 years, it's mouth-watering. Having access to that kind of programming was a reason I moved out here. The Texas Filmmakers' Production Fund is the best film funding organization that I've come across in America.'

cgarcia@statesman.com; 445-3649