Every seat was taken, and folks were standing in the back.

And a very thoughtful and on-the-ball crowd this was, too.

I opened up the evening with a few remarks on how a second-run indie art house like ours gets by: how we cover our expenses, how we look to blockbuster “Indiewood” movies to float the less remunerative parts of our program; how many seats we need to fill to just break even (and for those of you who think we “belong” to the Arts Center, we don’t—we pay a room rental fee each time we screen a movie); and how we have reckoned the impact of Bow-Tie’s program on our balance sheet. The point wasn’t to demonize Bow-Tie Cinema—we’re all thrilled we’re going to have a first-rate movie house in our downtown. But Bow-Tie’s opening will profoundly change our programming, and we wanted to show how. The first-run indie films that will show on Bow-Tie screens next fall will mean big changes for our line-up.  We need to get prepared.

No longer will the Film Forum be showing movies like Midnight In Paris, The Iron Lady, Magnolia Hotel, or Silver Linings Playbook. We won’t be showing them because Bow-Tie, a first-run theater, will get them first, and by the time Bow-Tie is done with them, our local market will be saturated. Right now these kinds of profit-making films comprise half or more of our regular program—the same half that pays the rent.

So how do we fill the gap? Or should we try to fill it at all? Is this the moment, after 20 years, to hang up our hats and say, go to, Bow-Tie, we’re passing you the torch? Or does Bow-Tie’s arrival suggest an opportunity to refresh our mission so we move away from mainstream indies and more towards a less commercial, more edgy and adventurous, “value-added” program?

This was our big question for our Town Hall audience. Booking terrific offbeat movies is no hardship. The challenge is staying in the black. Is there sufficient public interest to support this move? Can we rely on friends and patrons to stay committed to the Film Forum if our line-up isn’t as familiar or commercially accessible?

The ready show of hands in favor of the Film Forum hanging in there with a reinvigorated mission was gratifying, but to be expected. People tend to be more frank on paper, so the answers people gave us on written questionnaires held, I felt, more weight. In answer to this question, “With Bow-Tie screening indies downtown, do you feel our work is done?,” not one person suggested that the Film Forum shut its doors. Nine out of 10 would support our program if it shifted from widely known indies to “lesser known movies, documentaries, classics, foreign films and special events.” Eighty-one percent believe that “value-added” movies (with post-film talks, performances, presentations) should be central to our new mission. A majority indicated they would support a subscription series for films in certain genres.

The flexibility of our supporters also extended to their views on our venue. While great affection for our old theater space was evident (and relief at the future installation of theater seats from Wilton Regal was palpable), most people indicated they could see us occasionally showing movies elsewhere, too—like Skidmore, UPH, or at Bow-Tie.

For our board, our staff, and our volunteers, this strong show of support for an expanded, more aggressive mission was welcome and emboldening. It’s the mandate we were hoping for—but how much better to hear it from our friends and patrons than to impose it “top-down” from a board!

Nor did the usable input stop with general support. “Town Hall” participants came up with a busload of very specific, good ideas to diversify our program. Show movies during August to take advantage of the tourist presence. Launch movies with a PRE-film conversation to privilege the “forum.” Introduce high-quality streaming to our theater. Show great videos and shorts before our features. Follow movies with a concert! Go for foreign films a little off the beaten path. Package more events with local businesses—bookstores, restaurants, coffeehouses. How about more silent movie with live piano accompaniment? Promote a series dedicated to emerging film makers in our region! Work with other regional film festivals—Lake Placid, Chatham, Williamstown—to rent or borrow festival programs whole-cloth, or to come up with our own, a long-time objective of the Film Forum whose time, perhaps, has finally come. Book not just to our own local tastes but reach out to wider film-savvy audiences!

With this eager feedback from our Town Hall participants, we are ready and game to bring some real creativity and daring to our programming for fall and beyond.  You’ve got our back, and we’ve got yours.  The Saratoga Film Forum will not go away.

So thanks for coming, thanks for sharing, and if you couldn’t make it, please contribute to the ongoing conversation about our future at our website.   We remain indebted and grateful to our moderator, Dale Willman, who deftly fielded the conversation, and thrilled with all of you who turned up to ponder our changed future with such great ideas and good cheer, and grateful, too, to those of you who couldn’t make it but who wrote in anyway with notes of concern, support, and encouragement.

Pass this info along to anyone you know who had been planning to attend.

Thanks!

The first Town & Gown event will feature Skidmore artist-in-resident Robert ParkeHarrison and his wife Shana, who is also an artist (visit them online at www.parkeharrison.com), presenting and talking about one of their favorite films, Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire.

The ParkeHarisons are really impressive, stunning photographers who command a national reputation. They share a publisher—Twin Palms—with the likes of Robert Mapplethorpe, Danny Lyon, Bruce Davidson, Dennis Hopper, Herb Ritts, William Eggleston, and other giants in contemporary U.S. photography. (Click here to read a New York Times review of Robert ParkeHarrison’s “Earth Elegies” exhibition.)

One look at some of images in The Architect’s Brother shows why the ParkeHarrisons have such an affinity for Wim Wenders, specifically Wings of Desire.

Come March 4th at 7:30 p.m. to the Dee Sarno Theater at the Saratoga Arts Center to screen Wings of Desire, and see and hear how the film and its director influenced two contemporary artists.

This program received funding from the Skidmore College Office of Community Relations, and from Saratoga Program for Arts Funding, administered by Saratoga Arts, and made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Gov. Andrew Cuomo and the New York Legislature.

The Board of Directors of the Saratoga Film Forum invites Film Forum members, friends, patrons, volunteers and members of the community to an important, open town-hall meeting in the Dee Sarno Theater at the Saratoga Arts Center, 320 Broadway, on Tuesday, March 19, at 7 p.m. This moderated meeting will be a public forum on the future of the Film Forum in the age of pay-per-view and online movies—and Bow-Tie’s planned 19 screens. Unimaginable even a few years ago, these developments suggest the pressing need for a reconsideration of our relevance, our special value, and our future. How do you see us evolving? Is our mission now accomplished, or is there more for us to do? As a membership-supported, grassroots community organization, we welcome your visions and your thoughts and we deeply value your participation. See you on the 19th!

UPDATE (03/19): Due to snow, this meeting has been postponed to Wednesday, March 27th, same time, same location.

A special Academy Awards celebration open to the public is set for  Sunday, Feb. 24, beginning at 5 p.m. at The City Tavern on the corner of Caroline Street and Maple Avenue. The Red Carpet fundraiser will benefit the non-profit Saratoga Film Forum, which has been showing independent films and hosting relevant film-related discussions and events in Saratoga Springs for 20 years. Creative, fundraising Oscar parties at various venues have drawn revelers every year, but this is the first time The City Tavern has hosted the event, which will feature the TV coverage on a 100-inch screen. Private homes in Saratoga are also hosting Oscar parties; an Oscars fundraiser at Longfellows Restaurant is sold out.

This Sunday, The City Tavern has offered its entire third floor to this special Oscar event. Pre-Academy Award coverage starts at 5 p.m. The awards  presentations begin at 7 p.m. Admission to this mini-fundraiser is $10; additional donations will be gratefully accepted. Dress is “finest or fun-nest,” according to the organizers.

The tavern will donate 10 percent of the evening’s proceeds to the Film Forum. Members and friends of the Film Forum, as well as passersby and the general public all are welcome to attend.

The Gala will take place Sunday, February 24th at 7 p.m. Longfellows proprietor Steve Sullivan has donated the Courtyard at Longfellows for Oscar Night, and the Longfellows chef will cater the event with a three-course gourmet dinner—still just $35 per person. Wine and soft drinks will be available, and the Oscars will be viewable on wide-screen TV.

Space is limited to 32 people only, and we do expect to sell out. Please reserve your seat with a $35 check made out to the Saratoga Film Forum, 320 Broadway, Saratoga Springs, NY 12866, ATTN: Oscar Night at Longfellows. If there is more than one person in your party, please indicate everybody’s name in full. For more information, please call 518-584-3456 (FILM). (Note: please do not make reservations by commenting to this post.)

This will be an elegant evening at an intimate and lovely venue. Please join us and support the Film Forum at this cozy fundraiser–or click here for information on the Oscar Comes Home mini-fundraiser benefit dinners many Saratogians are hosting in their homes.

And thanks for your support!

Carol Joyce
Saratoga Film Forum Board of Directors
Oscar Benefit Gala Chair

UPDATE (02/13/13): The Oscar Night Gala at Longfellows is now SOLD OUT! 

For a second year, the Saratoga Film Forum is producing its popular annual fundraiser, Oscar Comes Home, a series of dinner parties all over Saratoga Springs hosted by our friends and fans to raise operating funds for Saratoga’s only not-for-profit independent movie house. From Friday to Sunday on Oscar weekend, our supporters will be hosting dinners, brunches, high teas, cocktail hours—you name it!—and asking guests to contribute $35 per person to the not-for-profit Film Forum.

Would you like to be an Oscar Comes Home party host? Or perhaps you would prefer to be a guest at our mini-gala dinner at the Spring Street Gallery (110 Spring Street) on Oscar Night, February 24 (by reservation only, and limited to the first 30 who sign up)! For more information, please call 584-FILM and leave your name and phone number; we’ll get back to you as soon as possible. Thanks for your support!

UPDATE: The Film Forum’s “mini-gala” has been moved from the Spring Street Gallery to Longfellows Restaurant. See here for more details.

UPDATE: Due to overwhelming public interest in this film, we have added an additional screening on Monday, October 15th, at 7:30.

It would be relatively easy to get the title To Rome With Love confused with other, similar titles…To Sir With Love, From Russia With Love, and so forth. The title, actually, was a compromise, and Allen supposedly hates it. His original title was Bop Decameron, reflecting the fact that it was vaguely based on Boccaccio’s 14th-century compendium of love tales The Decameron. However, supposedly no one understood the title—including the Italians who financed the movie, so he changed it to Nero Fiddles. Again, crickets… (This is the problem with using distinctly American idioms if you hope to be understood overseas.) So…To Rome With Love it was; nice and generic.

Allen hit a bit of a slump in the 1990s and early 2000s, but his globetrotting films of the past half decade have put him back on the map (so to speak), and last year’s absolutely wonderful Midnight In Paris even got Allen an Oscar for Best Screenplay.

Back in Rome, TRWL comprises four separate, generally unrelated storylines. In one, a normal joke wakes up to suddenly find himself a celebrity; in another, an architect takes a trip back to the street he lived on while at university and meets a young man who seems strangely familiar…; in the third, a young couple on their honeymoon find their new marriage put to the test; in the fourth, an undertaker who has a talent for singing in the shower—and only in the shower—gets his chance to go on stage…but not before some, shall we say, unique set design is required.

It is Allen in top form—a mixture of the sweet, the sentimental, and the downright funny.

Please join us for a Film Forum Fall Volunteers Appreciation & Information Night (and movie!), Tuesday, Sept 18, at 6 pm, at the Film Forum, Saratoga Arts Center, 320 Broadway. Meet our new Volunteers Coordinator, Richard Vallone, enjoy pizza and refreshments, get to know your fellow volunteers, hear some new ideas on how to volunteer for the Film Forum, and after the meeting stick around for the wonderfully affecting Canadian drama Monsieur Lazhar, about an Algerian exile in Montréal who takes a job as a schoolteacher and discovers the possibilities and limits of his new vocation…