Marquees are seldom the focus of marquee events.
But a village proud of its untraditional traditions will at 8 p.m. Friday dedicate a new marquee and celebrate a renaissance of the 96th year of the Little Art Theatre, an institution as central to its culture, history and character as its location among the shops on Xenia Avenue.
The event will place a cherry atop a process that began two years ago when Katherine Eckstrand read an unsolicited email regarding a “$100,000 Theater of Dreams” grant offer from a company she’d never heard and nearly dismissed it as a scam.
A closer look persuaded her that Plex is a not only a legitimate, cutting-edge streaming entity but that its initiative to support non-profit, independent community theaters held big potential for the Little Art.
“About half of our income comes from donations, sponsorships and grants,” said the theater’s then executive director, whose introduction to the Little Art came 61 years ago while watching cinema’s most numinous nanny, Mary Poppins.
Same wine, different bottles
Though Plex uses the toney word “concierge” to describe the way it connects cinephiles with films and fellow fans in digital space, Creative Director Meghann Bass says the essential goal is the same as the Little Art’s: “to foster and create human connection by bringing people and entertainment together.”
Although a challenge to the theater business, the argument is that online spaces in which fans discuss movies they’ve just streamed are the 21st century’s version of impromptu talks that have for decades taken place on the front sidewalk of the Little Art after a particularly interesting film. (In a time of social fissure, the theater bills itself as “the best place to watch a movie together.”)
Meanwhile, back in the theater offices, the immediate challenge of the grant offer was its tight application deadline.
With six figures on the line, recalled Eckstrand, “we had just two months” in which to create a locally produced video and historic essay that were required.
And because Plex expected something splashier for its money than “We’re going to upgrade our ticketing system,” she said, the Little Art was forced to do what non-profits with drum-tight budgets can rarely afford to do: think big.
Thoughts eventually ascended to the theater’s highest point – the aged marquee with enough curb appeal that it has been nudged by trucks snugging their way between cars parallel parked on both sides of U.S. 68.
Credit: AP
Credit: AP
The no-brainer choice to lead the video team was Academy Award winning documentary filmmaker and village home boy Steve Bognar. He charmingly supplements his emcee duties with a testimonial to one of the great joys he and partner in film and life, Julia Reichert, shared in their youth: “Getting on our bikes … coming down here, jumping into our seats … holding hands and watching a movie.”
Eckstrand quickly identified Elyria’s Wagner Electric Sign Company as the marquee contractor and went to work with Cait Bothwell and Terry Fyffe collecting material for the essay, which, combined with the video amassed enough information for portraits of both the village and theater.
A ‘Mannly’ shadow
Once upon a time in the early 20th century, the essay tells us, “local car mechanic and filling station owner Dick Denison, sensing cinema’s potential” introduced silent films to the Yellow Springs Opera House.
Soon, recognizing the allure of ‘talkies,’ Denison sold his filling station and in 1929 — a notoriously bad year for banks — bought the vacated quarters of the Citizens Bank for a theater. On Feb. 21, 1930, he rang in the Great Depression by screening the first films in the Little Theater without its now-familiar middle name.
It took five years for the college founded by Horace Mann to voice its utter disappointment with the new medium’s failure to live up to its potential to educate and edify.
And while “The Antioch Movie Project for the Selection and Showing of More Interesting Movies in Yellow Springs” was destined never to sell a T-shirt bearing its name, it did establish what the essay calls the local theater’s “lasting tradition to screen independent films.”
An event press release promises that Eric Mahoney, the organizing force of the current Yellow Springs Film Festival, will pay tribute to that tradition Friday when he co-hosts the dedication and honors “independent filmmakers past, present, and future - with a heartfelt tribute to Yellow Springs’ own.”
Melissa Heston, a theater board member once involved with the Sundance Film Festival, said that while “not on the scale of Sundance” the local one offers the same quality, adding that support of it “is exactly what we should be doing.”
Credit: AP
Credit: AP
Panoramic vision
Reflecting another strong tradition in village life, the essay notes that in 1942 “the theatre’s inclusiveness (advanced) when it was integrated after a peaceful sit-in by Antioch (College) and Wilberforce University students.”
And it’s in that some spirit that the rainbow colors of the Pride movement regularly fly at the theater and across the village year-round.
Both elements of the village’s love for education and progressive politics appear on the marquee with its reference to Antioch student Elizabeth “Tommy” Morss (later Graf), who in the mid-1940s designed the glass Art Deco fixtures that have hung inside for decades.
New board member Shayna McConville says the artist “was undoubtedly influenced by the Mexican Muralism movement and the contemporary art of her time” and wrote in her senior project paper the degree to which the college “opened her mind to all kinds of things, including art, literature and a bigger perspective on the world.”
McConville said that while growing up in the village, the Little Art engendered the same for her by screening films like director Sally Potter’s adaptation of feminist Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando.
Starring the distinctive Tilda Swinton, it tells the tale of a nobleman who wakes up from a night’s sleep as a woman and, according to a plot description from Britannica, “returns to England and savors intellectual London society (as Woolf did) … but turns to bawdy street life for relief from this cerebral life.”’
Recent board addition but seasoned patron Wendy Delong said the Little Art answered a question that she had long pondered in its screening of Taken for a Ride, director Jim Klein’s documentary arguing that when General Motors dismantled streetcar transportation in the 1930s to line its pockets, it both moved the automobiles to the center of American life and crippling the future of mass transportation.
“So, that’s what happened,” she said.
Delong also treasures the theater as a space in which the movie experience is not interrupted by the intrusive sound of a clothes dryer indicating that it has completed its assigned duties.
As for the continuing story of the theater’s value to Yellow Springs children? It’s told dramatically in the grant award film by Kurt Miyazaki, the manager of a village coffee and wine shop who found himself moved to tears when his 2-year-old son — clad in pajamas and standing on his lap — was mesmerized by the sense that he was among a flock of flying ducks while watching the documentary Winged Migration.
Final credits
Nor should the theater’s survival stories go unmentioned as it approaches its centennial.
Among the heroes of those stories are:
- Louis Sher of Sherpix of the Art Theatre Guild, who not only owned and changed the name of the Little Art but was a major distributor and supporter of art films in the United States and Canada.
- Antioch College president Alan Guskin, who in 1987 decided that, despite its own struggles, the college should briefly own the theater Sher was abandoning because its loss “would have been too great” for the culture of university, the village and the Miami Valley.
- Jenny Coppwerthwaite, who started working at the Little Art in 1970 and became the owner and person most associated with it from 1998 to 2009.
- The “Mother Board”: With a name that clearly places it in the digital age, the group was midwife to the theater’s rebirth in 2009 as a 501-3C nonprofit, a move that generated funding for and interest in a 2013 interior renovation that brought the theater into the digital projection and eventually was the platform that made it eligible for the Plex grant.
HOW TO GO:
What: Dedication of Little Art Theatre Marquee
When: 8 p.m. Friday, Aug. 15
Where: Xenia and Short Streets, Yellow Springs
Attractions: Popcorn, drinks, Looney Tunes shorts
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