Looking Forward with Cinema Detroit
At the end of the 2018-19 Challenge Detroit Fellowship, each fellow was given the chance to work alongside a liaison at a Detroit-based nonprofit organization, like we had done all year. But this time, it was up to each of us to pick the nonprofit, develop the project and execute deliverables on our own.
I chose to work with Paula Guthat of Cinema Detroit, billed as Detroit's only truly independent film theater. Housed in a former furniture store, Cinema Detroit booked some of the city's largest film events, such as the Detroit Free Press film festival. They compete in a city–120 square miles of space housing over 650,000 people–without any major movie theaters? I could think of few organizations in the city that spoke to Detroit's DIY attitude more than the theater owned by Paula and her husband Tim.
I developed a set of recommendations and tangible, ready-to-use deliverable packages for Paula, suggestions that were guided by interviews with many of the theater's stakeholders – local journalists, community activists, and Detroit-based filmmakers. Below are the results of those interviews.
In response to some stakeholders expressing their feelings that the lobby lacked a sense of "place," I created a program called You Can't TAPE it with You.
The idea is to collect donated VHS tapes to display in the lobby. It could be a library, where a moviegoer who pays for a membership can rent VHS tapes. Or it could be a display, where audience members participate and share in a new collective film history.
Some stakeholders said they felt like the lobby could use an update.
Delivered to Cinema Detroit as a series of editable .ai files, I replaced signage around the lobby, updated the menu to create brand identity, and mocked-up banners to display on the inside of a prominent glass wardrobe.
Without enough revenue, or enough butts in seats, Cinema Detroit will have difficulty when courting distributors to bring their films to the theater. Are there other ways to bring in revenue, making sure the lights stay on even when audience numbers might dip?
Sponsorship.
On a print-ready .pdf file, ideally shopped around to various small businesses and other organizations in the city, I created a guide to working with Cinema Detroit, intended to open the door to a conversation about sponsorship.