How Do We Choose Which Films We Show?

I’m the one who books the films. That means I’m always doing research. I read the trade magazines. I keep a file of printouts and tear-outs of reviews from consumer magazines and from the weekly online reviews I get from the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Seattle Times, the San Francisco Chronicle and the Chicago Sun-Times. I go online and watch all the trailers of upcoming releases. I look at additional reviews posted at Internet Movie Database and Rotten Tomatoes. I follow up on patron suggestions. I scour my sources for local films or films that have been hot on the festival circuit. Sometimes I even talk a local movie-maker into putting together a film to premiere at The Clyde. Finally I’ve got my list of possibilities.

I used to book films three months at a time, then 6-7 weeks at a time. Now I sometimes have to book on a Monday for the the next weekend. The big studios now decide how long you play a film. If it makes at least a certain amount over the weekend, you must hold it over another week, even if you know attendance will die off. Those are the new rules we have to play by.

So on Monday I talk with my booker, Bruce, at Northwest Diversified Entertainment. We did our own booking and negotiating for the first 20 years, but it got to be more and more tiresome. Bruce can bundle our booking dates with those of other theaters and get us a film sooner than we could alone, especially small independent films. Plus Bruce goes to all the Seattle exhibitor screenings of movies, so he has a chance to review all the films for us, knowing our demographic and local preferences. Some films I book directly, especially event films like Beneath the Salish Sea, Outsourced, Good Food, and Paddle to Seattle—where I’m dealing directly with the filmmaker rather than a studio.

After 40 years of booking for The Clyde, I have a fair idea of which films will play well here. Quite often a film that’s #1 at the box office nationally will not do well here, especially if it’s aimed at males 18-30. We don’t have as many of them, and they generally prefer to see those movies as soon as they open. We usually have to wait 3-4 weeks before we can get a movie since we book for shorter periods of time.

Bruce and I keep a running list of the films we want to play at The Clyde. On Monday and Tuesday he talks with sales reps from the studios in question about which films might have prints we can open on Friday. We pick the best of what’s available and jump right into arranging for film transport (Blake’s job) and ordering advertising materials, making up newspaper ads, writing the weekly e-blast, posting on Facebook, updating the website, and writing the script for that week’s phone message (all my jobs). The next Monday we rinse, repeat.