The Street Gets Star Treatment

Who holds a neighborhood mixer after dark in a vacant lot in the Lower Fillmore? Junkies were staggering around on the street. A cold wind was toppling trash cans and rattling the movie screen some optimist had hung on the side of an apartment building. And yet, against all conventional wisdom, a crowd was gathering.

Here they came in thick sweaters and leather jackets, with wine and lawn chairs and homemade popcorn in brown bags. Some came out of curiosity. Some came with their children. Greg M -- “just M, I got the driver’s license to prove it” -- came by accident as the opening credits flashed on “When We Were Kings,” the Muhammad Ali-George Foreman documentary that the city redevelopment agency had hoped would bring someone, anyone, to this blighted corner.

So intrigued was he by the sudden spectacle that he called his wife on his cellular phone.

“Hey, baby, they got a party going on down here on the street. You got to come on down here,” he said with a chuckle as about 75 people whooped and cheered in the late-September night the way people rarely do anymore at the movies. “Down! Goes! Frazier!” barked the on-screen voice of Howard Cosell as 75 pairs of cold hands applauded. Next to a space heater, a grizzled man in a wool cap hollered, “Yessir! Good Lord!”

Welcome to the latest in urban renewal -- outdoor movies. Fueled by nostalgia, redevelopment grants and advances in technology, alfresco movie screenings have, in a scant couple of years, quietly become a summer -- and spring and autumn -- fad from Walla Walla, Wash., to Washington, D.C.

“They’re the contemporary iteration of the drive-in,” said Bob Deutsch, whose outdoor movie business has more than tripled in the three years since he launched it. Deutsch, based in suburban Washington, D.C., said he set up outdoor movie series in 14 communities in the mid- Atlantic region this summer. He recently launched a sideline selling screens for outdoor viewing.

“The growth rate,” he said, “has been phenomenal.”

In Burbank, for example, a shopping center’s need for midweek foot traffic burgeoned this year into a summer film series that drew 3,500 people a night to the side of an IKEA building -- and into the mall -- and prompted inquiries from communities as far away as Henderson, Nev., and as nearby as Irvine.

Two years ago in Baker City, Ore., a desire to bring locals back to a historic but neglected downtown resulted in a summer festival centered on a singalong screening, in the middle of Main Street, of “Paint Your Wagon,” which was filmed there. “Small-town historical events can have a hard time,” said Beverly Calder, a board member of the Historic Baker City Inc. economic improvement district. “But a bad musical with Clint Eastwood? That’s something different.”

L.A.’s Chinatown showed Jackie Chan movies outdoors this summer in an attempt to generate buzz. Universal CityWalk offered a free “Summer Drive-In Movie” series near the Hard Rock Cafe there. A James Bond film series screened in a commercial courtyard in Pasadena’s Old Town. In Colorado, so many cities have outdoor film series that one event producer, a former dot-commer, has launched the Outdoor Cinema Network, a Web site (www.outdoorcinema.com) to help them market themselves.

In San Jose, meanwhile, a bootleg outdoor movie night inaugurated by bored bar patrons in the late 1990s has blossomed into two outdoor cinema programs subsidized by downtown revitalization money. The programs have, in turn, inspired the developer of a new high- end commercial and residential project, Santana Row, to build outdoor movies into the infrastructure of the district’s shopping strip, a move that merchants say has bumped business up by 25% or more on film nights.

Now, with three venues where moviegoers can gather in lawn chairs and on blankets on warm nights, officials are considering a fourth modified cinema under the stars for San Jose’s new City Hall, which is scheduled for completion in 2005 and which will feature a large plaza and glass-domed rotunda.

Lynn Rogers, arts program officer for the San Jose Office of Cultural Affairs, says the aim is to give citizens a sense of ownership of their public spaces.

“It’s a great way,” she said, “for people in a community to commune.”

The rise in urban movies by moonlight came just as suburban drive-ins were being declared extinct. In 1958, more than 4,000 drive-ins dotted the United States, but the cable and video revolution had put all but a few hundred out of business by about 1985.

In the ‘90s, city planners and others became intrigued with the idea of open-air movies as a way to bring crowds back to neglected downtowns, but most had imagined such events to be too costly. The massive screens required thousands of dollars’ worth of rented scaffolding; the special projectors and speakers called for extra security and insurance; and some theater owners feared that the competition might cannibalize the box office at the local art house.

Innovation, however, was underway. In Silicon Valley, dot-commers were rigging up after-hours movies with DVDs, laptops and office PowerPoint projectors. Ad hoc “micro-cinemas” were appearing in bars, on college campuses and on rooftops in Los Angeles and New York. Meanwhile, equipment was becoming more powerful and cheaper, from the projectors to massive inflatable screens from Europe that could be blown up on site like bounce houses at children’s birthday parties.

Ideas spread on the Internet and via word of mouth.

The outdoor screenings did not, as it turned out, cut into audiences at local multiplexes and art houses, although discount theaters did appear to lose market share to outdoor cinema, Deutsch said.

There have been other snags, though. Even at lowered costs, promoters say, outdoor movies can run as much as $3,000 or more per film depending on the size of the venue, and not all films will bring out the crowds. (On the other hand, some films have taken on new life as outdoor cinema classics -- “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” has become a standard on the blanket-and-lawn-chair circuit.)

Some communities aren’t receptive: In Jacksonville, Fla., for example, a preservation group’s effort to revive a historic but long blighted neighborhood with an outdoor cinema fizzled in 2001 after a few movies. The preservationists blamed Sept. 11, saying no one felt like coming out after the terrorist attacks. But Tim Massett, the film buff who helped set up the program, offered a different view: “Only the residents would come out, and not even some of them because they didn’t want to be out on Main Street. It was fun while it lasted, but it was a very tainted neighborhood.”

Then there are the audiences, which sometimes need to be reminded to silence mobile phones, keep the view clear for the people down on the grass and leave pets at home if the animals are inclined to yelp should someone trip over them in the dark.

“At one of our events -- I think it was a showing of ‘Top Gun’ in Fairfax, Va. -- a man was smoking and a lady asked him to quit, and when he said no, she grabbed the cigarette out of his mouth and the dude turned around and slapped her,” Deutsch said. “We had to throw the both of them out.”

For all that, however, the form appears to be spreading, particularly in temperate venues where screenings can run well into the autumn months. There are outdoor cinemas on Main Streets and in warehouse districts, in Rust Belt cities and in Sun Belt suburbs. None charges more than a modest admission -- in fact, most are free, underwritten by public subsidies, sponsors or corporate marketing budgets. Some are seasonal, some are year-round.

Foreign Cinema restaurant in San Francisco became a dot-com-era magnet in the late ‘90s with outdoor classics screened during dinner. At the boutique hotel Habitat in Mexico City, guests at a night reception watched from the rooftop bar this summer as a Charlie Chaplin movie played on the wall of an adjacent mid-rise.

In Silicon Valley, Chris Esparza, who owned a jazz club in languishing downtown San Jose, became an outdoor cinema booster in 1998 after he and some regulars got into a conversation over the paucity of local urban night life. Someone asked: Why couldn’t San Jose be more like the town in “Cinema Paradiso,” the beloved Italian film in which everyone gathers to watch movies under the stars on hot nights? One thing led to another.

“We borrowed some equipment from a guy I knew who did videos for raves,” said Esparza, now 36 and the owner of an events planning business that specializes in nonprofit and civic projects. “We got some speakers on sticks, and someone we knew happened to have a 35-millimeter copy of ‘Blade Runner.’

“We showed it at dusk in the back of this parking lot that had walls on three sides. We didn’t have a permit, and we were probably in violation of that FBI warning you see when you play a rented movie. But the whole thing probably cost us a hundred bucks, and even without any advertising, about 75 people showed up.”

Today, Gypsy Cinema is an annual six-film summer event underwritten by about $12,000 in public funds from the city’s redevelopment and cultural affairs budgets. A second outdoor film series, featuring more mainstream titles, has been spun off and is being run by another events company.

Esparza’s firm, Giant Creative Services, meanwhile, has helped the developers of Santana Row launch their own outdoor summer film program, designed to make shoppers look at the freshly minted complex as a sort of neighborhood rather than a mundane mall. Old and new classics -- “Casablanca,” “Bridget Jones’s Diary,” “The Matrix” -- have been shown each Wednesday during the spring and summer for the last year on a massive screen in a grassy plaza surrounded by cafes and restaurants.

“The idea was mainly to say welcome -- not necessarily ‘Bring your wallet’ but ‘We’re here for you when you’re ready to shop,’ ” said Bill Billings, an area director for Maggiano’s Little Italy, a chain that operates a restaurant abutting the plaza. The eatery’s 17 cinema-view patio tables quickly became the hottest Wednesday night ticket in San Jose.

“It turned a Wednesday into a Saturday for us, which is a big deal in the restaurant business,” he said. “I’d say we had a 20% to 25% increase in business, easy. People were almost bribing the maitre d’, and local celebrities and politicians were coming to us, asking for [those tables] as favors. Folks were asking for packages of food to go so they could eat outside on the plaza. There was an early wave that would come and eat before the show started at sundown.”

Billings said the festive atmosphere spilled over to neighboring merchants, tripling sales at the nearby Starbucks and creating an opportunity for other food vendors who set up booths for popcorn and snacks. Audiences for the shows have ranged from 300 to 500 a night, he said. They come not just for the picture, he said, but to be together “under the stars in some of the best weather in the world with your neighbors, who, until now, you’ve never met.”

In San Francisco, redevelopment authorities hope that such a mood will help resuscitate the Lower Fillmore, the onetime jazz mecca where the Ali-Foreman film was screened in a vacant lot.

“It’s all about creating buzz,” said Don Capobres, senior project manager at the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency. “Outdoor cinemas create such a dramatic scene: The sun’s going down, this huge screen is going up -- even the weather plays into the drama here, because you have these flames from the space heaters. People go by in cars and buses, and it makes them want to stop and ask, ‘Why are all these people hanging out in the fog here? What’s going on?’ ”

It’s a long shot -- the district has been singing the blues for decades -- and yet it seems to be working. On the night of the boxing film, the biggest topic of conversation was what had become of, and what could be done about, the neighborhood. One man noted that this corner had housed a Black Panthers office in his boyhood; another noted the calming effect the blue light of the cinema seemed to have on the local street people.

“This is like something you’d see in, well, the movies,” said Rebecca Atwater, a 44-year-old firefighter, “where a bunch of strangers end up in some barren place and actually end up having a good time.”