NEW YORK _ Four months ago the two-screen Metrograph cinema, my new favorite place to watch a movie outside Illinois but still inside these 50 nifty United States, opened next door to a Chinese funeral home on a quiet spot near the corner of Ludlow and Canal streets on the Lower East Side.
It's Manhattan's first new independent movie theater in a decade, a decade marked by steady closings of other theaters. The place has an unassuming street presence for the moment. Also, no marquee. "It's coming," says artistic director and programming director Jacob Perlin, on the sidewalk in front of the Metrograph. "Marquees are expensive! But it's coming."
The coolness factor of the Metrograph has already arrived, thanks in large part to the audacious breadth of its programming. A John Cassavetes retrospective shares the same nutty, jampacked July/August calendar with "Can't Stop the Music" (part of a multifilm celebration of disco); "Jackass 2"; the forgotten '80s arcade sex comedy "Joystick" (one of the video game-themed titles in an ongoing tribute); and, slightly higher up the food chain, Hitchcock's "Rear Window." Both theaters are equipped for 35 millimeter projection. On the Tuesday night I visited the Metrograph, my options included a hardy, vibrant 35 print of "North by Northwest"; a supple and exquisite 35 print of Hal Ashby's 1970 directorial debut, "The Landlord"; and a state-of-the-art 3-D presentation of the Stephen Chow fantasy "The Mermaid."
Metrograph founder Alexander Olch explored different locales for several years, while fundraising for a venture Perlin says cost "several million dollars." They settled on a 5,400-square-foot food storage warehouse in Chinatown. Olch is a filmmaker as well as a designer. (He owns a menswear boutique around the corner from the Metrograph.) He hired Margulies Hoelzli Architecture to gut the building at 7 Ludlow St. and fill it up again. The larger, 175-seat auditorium boasts that rarity, an actual balcony. The smaller, 50-seat auditorium, like the larger one, is outfitted with seats built with reclaimed wood pulled out of a Domino sugar factory in Brooklyn.
Upstairs, the Metrograph has a restaurant and bar, known as the Commissary (from old-studio parlance), and a film-themed bookshop. Downstairs, along with a free-standing box office staffed by several of New York's more intriguing-looking cinephiles, a wee candy and concessions counter sells popcorn with a variety of seasonings (turmeric and cayenne is one combo) alongside a slew of Asian snacks in tune with the neighborhood.
It all works very nicely together. Olch told an interviewer back in March that the goal was to "bring glamour, excitement and prestige back to the exhibition experience." Perlin, a longtime Brooklyn Academy of Music and Film Society at Lincoln Center programmer and foreign/specialty distributor in various capacities, puts it this way: "This is the place we would want to go to ourselves." Aliza Ma, from the Museum of the Moving Image, is the Metrograph's other curatorial force, and their program notes for the bimonthly booklet (60-plus pages!) are shrewd and genuinely witty. The concepts just plain work: One summer series goes by the name "This is PG?!" and includes famously mis-rated blockbusters ("Jaws," "Poltergeist," "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom") as well as lesser-known affronts to taste and sense such as "Burnt Offerings" and "Tourist Trap."
Much of what goes on at the Metrograph can be found in Chicago, at the Music Box, the Gene Siskel Film Center, Facets, the Northwest Chicago Film Society, Block Cinema at Northwestern and Doc Films at the University of Chicago. So far, Perlin and company are doing it all under one roof. "Gena Rowlands is coming on Friday," Perlin notes, as part of the Cassavetes retrospective. Later this year, Spike Lee's picking his two favorite political films. The March opening of the Metrograph brought out a Chinese dragon, Jim Jarmusch, Sofia Coppola, Greta Gerwig, Dustin Hoffman, Keegan-Michael Key and many others. Attendance figures, Perlin says, have exceeded projections. It's a for-profit operation, so "we hope to attract an audience that trusts what we're doing," he says.
The location of the Metrograph aches with poetic meaning: The theater's entrance sits across the street from the backside of the long-shuttered Loew's Canal, a 2,500-seat relic of an earlier moviegoing epoch. Something may yet happen with that building. For now, though, what's happening on the other side of Ludlow is enough.
