• Both Linklater and Northwest Chicago Film Society have revived Warren Beatty’s Reds in the past two years.

Richard Linklater is not only one of this country’s most versatile working film directors, he’s also an accomplished film exhibitor. Linklater started the Austin Film Society in 1985 to bring hard-to-see movies to his hometown and to stoke his own nascent cinephilia. What began as a ragtag (and often one-man) outfit has grown to a million-dollar organization that awards grants to new filmmakers, offers youth education programs, and operates a 100,000 square foot production facility. Last week I spoke with Linklater about his life in programming when he came to town to promote his new movie Boyhood. To help me conduct the interview, I recruited Julian Antos, Rebecca Hall, and Kyle Westphal, the brains behind local programming organization the Northwest Chicago Film Society. (J.R. Jones recently profiled the group’s 35-millimeter restoration of the rare industrial film Corn’s-a-Poppin’.) Our half-hour conversation centered on how repertory film programming has evolved over the last 30 years, though as in his latest film, Linklater was quick to note that some things—like the joy of rediscovering neglected areas of film history—remain consistent over time. The first part of our conversation follows the jump; check back tomorrow for the conclusion.

That’s more of a struggle, to get prints. I think it’s dangerous that some studios and some rights holders are now saying, “Show Blu-ray. Show the DCP.” They’re not valuing prints, so everyone else needs to demand them. They can’t go away.

Linklater: Yeah, there is a beautiful print of that. But even some of the classics I showed, like Fanny and Alexander, they’d seen them, but they hadn’t seen them in a theater on a 35 print. Then there were titles that I thought were big films at the time [they came out], but that many people didn’t know. A lot of people hadn’t seen Atlantic City, Cutter’s Way, Star 80, or Samuel Fuller’s White Dog. It was fun to go through all these again.

  • White Dog

Hall: We make a point of showing everything on film, even though not everyone who comes to our shows really cares about that distinction.

  • Linklater (left) in Slacker

Westphal: Digital technology makes things more democratic on the filmmaking side, but not on the exhibition side. The distributors don’t have to make all these prints, but all the theaters have to buy new projection systems.

Hall: No, we just charge admission. We’ve had to move from theater to theater in the past year. [Two venues where they’d shown movies, the Portage and the Patio, have shut down in that time.] It’s hard to ask people to become members if they don’t know where the next showing is going to be.