Music films specifically? I’m sure at some point, but there’s nothing in the hopper right at the moment. But between the team here and our booker on the other coast, we have gotten pretty good at packing as much content as we can into that one space…the only “dark day” on the calendar every year, by design, is Christmas Eve.
PEARL JAM LETS PLAY TWO THEATERS MOVIE
On its best days, booking a one-screen, 1,400-seat movie place is a juggling act. Again, we had another broken week due to Snap Judgment live show, hosting the Theatre Tampa Bay Awards, and then the Scott Frieman lecture, so there was a perfect hole for it on Tuesday, October 3. And given the success (read: sell-out crowd) we had with their first concert film a couple of years ago, we jumped at the chance. The Pearl Jam film popped up - again, courtesy of our booker - a few days after that. Right around that same time, we got a distributor e-mail offering bookings of Chasing Trane, and voila! A music mini-series was born. Once Turn It Around was locked in for Wednesday, we asked our booker about another Deconstructing the Beatles title, knowing it would be a great opportunity to promote his upcoming live performance. During broken weeks, we look for opportunities to do short, two to three day runs and/or “one night only” screenings of specialty films. The timing worked out perfectly, as that is the week after WineFest weekend, which means we have a “broken” schedule that week – ie: interruptions that would prevent a standard Friday-Thursday film week. With the upcoming hat trick of music films, Turn It Around came to us through the booker: the distributor was looking for dates and screenings in our area, and our film booker asked if we wanted to play it.
When it comes to the classics series, we come up with that schedule and list internally, and then send it to her to make the requests and confirm the bookings. Sometimes (but not as often), we will see an e-mail from a distributor with something that looks interesting, and we’ll send it to her with a request to please schedule it for us. Often, she will e-mail us that we are going to play a certain film on a certain date or run of dates.
We do work with a film booker in California who books the bulk of our first-run films. Our film calendar builds in a couple of different ways.