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Saving Our Cinema

Scottsbluff's Midwest Theater offers a glimpse of Nebraska film possibilities.

By David L. Bristow

Omaha native Alexander Payne has directed four critically-acclaimed feature films, most recently "Sideways." In July 2002, he happened upon the Midwest Theater in Scottsbluff. As it turned out, the discovery not only helped efforts to save the landmark theater, but revealed much about the state of moviemaking in Nebraska.

Annie Sundberg had a problem. Holding a walkie-talkie, she stood beside a makeshift airfield at a park near Omaha. She was trying to coordinate flights of remote-controlled model airplanes with the filming of a movie at a nearby pond. The movie's director didn't want the buzz of noisy little airplanes in the scene she was filming, but the hobbyists felt they had as much right to be there as anyone else. Sundberg, the movie's producer, played air traffic controller so that the hobbyists flew only between takes.

“They put up with it,” she said, “but they weren't very happy.”

Perhaps they mistook Sundberg for a wealthy Hollywood producer. They asked for a donation to their club, but Sundberg confessed she had no money to spare. “Tully,” the movie she was producing, was an independent film, not a big-budget production. Based on a short story by Nebraska author Tom McNeal, the movie was shot at several locations within a 20-mile radius of Omaha.

“So the club president asked, ‘Can my kid be in the movie?' ” Sundberg recalled.

It was a deal. In a scene filmed later at an area grocery store, two characters visit at the checkout counter. Unknown to them, a pre-teen boy applies deodorant in the bath products aisle, then caps the product and places it back on the shelf. Though the boy has no lines and appears in no other scene, he draws a good laugh from audiences. He even got his name in the credits: “Deodorant Boy — Justin Hyde.”

Bet Steven Spielberg never has to do this.

Last fall, Sundberg told her story to a full house at the Midwest Theater in Scottsbluff. She was a guest speaker at the first annual Midwest Film Festival, a fundraiser for the 1946 theater. The festival's theme was “Spotlight Nebraska,” highlighting films and filmmakers with Nebraska connections. Director Alexander Payne (“About Schmidt”) headlined the four-day event, which also included Academy Award-winning film editor Mike Hill, novelist and screenwriter Richard Dooling, screenwriter and longtime UCLA film school professor Lew Hunter. All have Nebraska roots. Hill and Dooling live in Omaha. Hunter lives in Superior, Neb., teaching screenwriting seminars there and elsewhere in the United States and Europe.

People enjoyed hobnobbing with Nebraskans who've “made it” in the film industry, but mostly the event was an opportunity to think about the movies being made in Nebraska, and about the theaters that show them.

Cinema came to Scottsbluff in 1910 when the local opera house began showing silent films. The area's first actual movie theater was built three years later. By 1927 — the year of “The Jazz Singer,” the first movie with sound — it was no longer enough to show movies in a plain auditorium. That year, at the other end of the state, Omaha's palatial Orpheum Theater opened. Though it looked like a European opera house, it drew crowds with movies and vaudeville. Another Omaha landmark, the Riviera, opened a year earlier. Combining Moorish and Italian Renaissance architecture, it featured a domed ceiling with electric stars and fleecy clouds.

In the same spirit, Scottsbluff called its new theater the Egyptian, reflecting the interest sparked by the recently discovered tomb of Tutankhamen. For years the theater was ushered by teenage girls in Egyptian harem costumes (see Ruth Thone's reminiscence below). But in March 1945, while German and Japanese cities burned in the final months of World War II, the Egyptian Theater was itself destroyed, accidentally, by fire. Plans were made to replace it with an even grander theater.

Seating 700 people, the Midwest Theater was built in the Arte Moderne style. Opened in 1946 on the site of the Egyptian, its design emphasized curves rather than straight lines, and used newfangled materials with modern names such as Herculite, Plexiglass, Flexwood, and Satin Aluminum.

The building has changed little since then. Inside the theater itself, three-dimensional plaster floral scrolls still rise 25 feet from the floor on either side of the screen. Hand-painted floral murals adorn walls and ceiling. Neon lighting is used both inside and out. Outside, above the marquee, a 60-foot stainless steel tower is backed with a field of aluminum stars and a pair of neon-lit wings. The whole thing is topped with a pair of starburst spheres that look like Sputniks, and which give the building's exterior a soaring, early space-age look — though it predates the famous Soviet satellite by more than a decade. The tower was designed to be visible at night from 20 miles.

The Midwest, in other words, dates from the era when a good movie house was expected to be gaudy and pretentious, when the building itself was meant to show just how far removed cinema was from the drabness of everyday life. Like others of its era, the Midwest thrived during the years of the stand-alone theater, then died in the era of the multiplex. It closed its doors on September 12, 1996, a day before a new six-plex opened at a local mall.

Empty old theaters rarely avoid the wrecking ball for long, but it does happen. In Omaha, when the Orpheum screened its last film in 1971, the building was in such bad shape that plastic sheets hung from the ceiling to protect patrons from falling plaster. After an extensive restoration, it reopened for stage productions in 1975. The Riviera — better known to most Omahans as the Astro — was restored in the 1990s with a donation from Nebraska Furniture Mart founder Rose Blumkin. It is now home to children's theater as the Rose Blumkin Performing Arts Center, or “The Rose.”

A group called Friends of the Midwest Theater had something similar in mind. They wanted the Midwest to be reopened for stage performances, speakers, community events — and movies, of course. The theater was in better shape than the Orpheum had been and had been altered very little since it was built. The building had been donated to a local foundation, and FMT planned to reopen it both for movies and for live stage performances. They bought an adjacent building to provide dressing rooms, additional lobby space and side wings for movements on and off stage. The theater reopened in 1998; FMT is still raising funds to complete the restoration and improvements.

By now the story of Alexander Payne's first visit to the Midwest Theater has become a local legend. In July 2002, Payne was driving through Scottsbluff on his way to Los Angeles. He noticed the theater and stopped in. At last fall's film festival, the printed program included a “script” of the resulting conversation. In the scene, volunteer Willa Kosman gives Payne the tour:

WILLA: We are trying to renovate the Midwest… we've been fundraising in a variety of ways — we're even hosting a film festival.

ALEXANDER: Well, I'm a director.

WILLA: Isn't that nice?

ALEXANDER: I just finished shooting a movie in Omaha with Jack Nicholson and Kathy Bates.

WILLA (perking up): Oh! Would you be willing to help us with our festival?

In a way, the scene really does sound like something from the movies — famous director just happens to stop by — but it happened pretty much that way.

Payne, 43, was born in Omaha, the grandson of Greek immigrants. His father owned a downtown restaurant and once received an eight-millimeter movie camera as a bonus from Kraft Foods. Payne started making films before he was 10 years old. As a student at Stanford University, however, he studied history and Spanish literature, and almost enrolled in journalism school after graduation. He chose UCLA film school instead. “I don't know if I have talent,” he remembers telling himself, “but I've got to try it. I can't not try it.”

He had talent. His 1989 thesis film led to an offer from Universal Studios. “Basically it was, ‘Here's some money, write whatever you want to write, if we want to make it, you'll direct it,'” Payne said. “I had this idea about a guy in Omaha who retires and feels utter alienation and emptiness at the moment of retirement — also, I was going to make a comedy about it. I finished the script for Universal, and they were utterly uninterested.”

Payne joked that he decided to try something more commercial — a comedy about the abortion controversy. Released in 1996, “Citizen Ruth” skewers both sides of the abortion debate. Filmed in Omaha, the movie was the story of Ruth Stoops, a homeless drug addict. The story's pro-life activists are church-going hypocrites; the pro-choicers are lesbians who pray to the moon goddess. Both sides try to use Ruth — pregnant with her fifth child and seeking an abortion to avoid child endangerment charges — as a pawn to further their respective social agendas.

In many ways, “Citizen Ruth” set a pattern for Payne's next two films, “Election” (1999) and “About Schmidt” (2002). All three feature flawed, unheroic protagonists. All three use comedy and satire to explore dark themes of human nature. And all three were filmed in Omaha.

“So much of what's wrong with our world is about people who are making other people miserable because of their own personal misery,” Payne said. That may not sound like a theme of a popular movie, but Payne's movies are popular precisely because audiences can identify with — and therefore laugh at — the characters and situations.

Visually, the most striking thing about Payne's films is the way his locations don't look like movie sets and his people don't look like actors — and in many cases are not. The Dairy Queen scene in “About Schmidt,” for instance, features Jack Nicholson and an actual employee from the store where the scene was filmed.

“I like the kind of raw reality that a non-actor can bring,” Payne said. “Actors often only look like actors. They only have those faces — but there are five billion different faces in the world.”

A major role in “Election” was cast locally. Chris Klein was a student at Millard West High School when Payne was scouting locations for the film. (It was eventually shot at Papillion-La Vista High School.) Seeking an actor to play Paul, the affable jock who reluctantly opposes Reese Witherspoon in a student election, Payne was dissatisfied with the professional actors he auditioned in California. Klein, whose biggest previous role was in a school play, got the part. He has since appeared in other movies.

Payne's next film, “Sideways,” to be released later this year, is his first to be filmed outside Nebraska. However, he was already scouting locations for “Nebraska,” a road trip comedy that will be filmed in black and white. He is also one of the executive producers for “The Assassination of Richard Nixon,” starring Sean Penn, which was filmed partly in Omaha and scheduled for release this year.

Some have criticized Payne for making Omaha and its people look plain and ugly. In fact, what he is going for is realism, and the unconventional location of his films seems to suit the unconventional way he makes them. Hollywood filmmaking, Payne said, has become a “cesspool of formula,” with cinema controlled by corporate interests that care only for profit, not quality. “I have to fight with studio people all the time to get these movies made,” he said.

Watching Payne's films, along with “Tully” and two classic Great Plains films, “Badlands” and “Paper Moon” (both released in 1973), one gets a sense of the possibilities of Nebraska and Great Plains filmmaking. Without glamour, big cities, oceans or “scenery” (read, mountains), the region is geographically and culturally far removed from the media centers of New York City and southern California. That seems to make it fertile ground for offbeat, original films that break Hollywood conventions — films such as “Tully,” which was the big surprise of the festival, having played fewer than 60 cities after its 2002 release. The story of a farmer and his two sons, “Tully” lacked big-name actors and special effects, had no cops, drug dealers, spies, car chases or buxom karate-kicking women. It was simply a well-told, well-acted, deeply human story that was better than 95 percent of the movies that got all the publicity that year.

Among the sponsors of the Midwest Film Festival was an anonymous donor who contributed “in memory of the Indian Hills Theater, Omaha, Neb. — one we didn't save.” From 450 miles across the state, the shadow of the Indian Hills hung over the Midwest. Everyone seemed to know the story — and anyone who didn't could watch a documentary, “Saving the Indian Hills” on a TV in the lobby. Moral of the story: don't let it happen here.

Built in 1962, the Indian Hills Theater was designed for a new technology called Cinerama, a super-widescreen format that used three synchronized projectors on a curved screen. The drum-shaped theater boasted a screen 105 feet wide—the nation's largest at the time. For a generation, the Indian Hills was the best place around to see big-screen action movies. When “Star Wars” was re-released in 1997, crowds began camping outside the theater days in advance. It wasn't right to watch a movie like that anywhere else.

By 2001, the theater was owned by Carmike Cinemas, a national chain that had filed for bankruptcy. Though the Indian Hills had been doing well, it was among the smaller theaters (meaning fewer screens) that Carmike was forced to sell as part of its financial restructuring. The theater was purchased by nearby Methodist Health System. The hospital soon made it clear that it planned to tear down the theater for a parking lot.

Protesters circulated petitions and picketed the theater. Actors such as Charlton Heston, Janet Leigh and Kirk Douglas wrote letters to the Omaha World-Herald . Film critic Leonard Maltin taped a public service announcement to be shown on local TV. Their argument was simple: the Indian Hills was the last theater of its kind in the world and ought not be torn down in haste.

On August 8, the Omaha Landmarks Preservation Commission voted unanimously to recommend that the theater receive landmark status. The issue was to go before the next city council meeting. In the meantime, contractors prepared the building for demolition. Smaller theaters surrounding the main theater were torn down first. Protestors watched helplessly as walls were ripped away to reveal projection equipment still in place. They watched as the main theater's new seats were thrown into dumpsters. Soon, only the shell of the main theater remained. On August 20, that too was demolished. Methodist Health System had paid $3.8 million for 96 parking spaces.

At a reception at the Scottsbluff Country Club, Payne spoke of long-gone Omaha movie theaters such as the Cooper, State and Omaha. Condemning the “boring, homogenous architecture” of many current buildings, he said the idea behind saving old theaters is to “treat cinema as an art form.” We need impressive reminders that culture is important, he believes, and architecture can serve this purpose.

Whatever Alexander Payne might say about the art of cinema, movies have always had a reputation for being frivolous and vulgar. Until 1929, Hastings, Neb., prohibited the showing of movies on Sunday. When it appeared voters might overturn the ban, local clergy staged an anti-movie rally. A preacher warned that if movies were shown on the Lord's Day, within 10 years the city would have a vice district and Hastings College would be driven out of town. Fifty-three percent of voters decided to take their chances. The ban was lifted.

These days, Payne, a director of “R” rated movies, often sounds like a preacher himself, using interviews and public forums to denounce corporate interests that have made quality films increasingly rare. In Scottsbluff, Payne spoke passionately about “the fight to take our cinema back and have a more human and humane cinema.” A certain percentage of bad films is inevitable, he believes — what matters is that filmmakers have at least the opportunity to make movies that ignore Hollywood formulas and tell stories in new ways. What matters is that audiences have the opportunity to watch good movies in theaters where film and audience are treated as something more than just product and consumers.

“The reason I'm here is very personal,” Payne said, explaining how as a boy in Omaha he used to go to the demolition sites of old theaters, picking up pieces of the facades, taking them home as mementoes. He brought such a fragment with him that night, ivory in color and having the shape of carved stone, as if it had been pulled from the ruins of some ancient Greek temple. He held it up for the audience to see.

“That's why I'm here,” he said. “I don't want to see any more theaters destroyed.”