Silver Screens

There was a time when the Inwood, Angelika Film Center, and the Magnolia were your only choices if looking for a cinematic experience outside of the big Hollywood new releases. Of course, all those spots were in Dallas, but that was your lot if you wanted to explore arthouse. In Fort Worth, it was crickets.

Times change, and things change — very slowly. Alamo Drafthouse landed in the 817 (though without a central Fort Worth location), offering something a little different for us cinephiles. Still, there was no love for Fort Worth proper until the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth started its Magnolia at the Modern series in 2002.

That little love continued in 2019, when the wife-and-husband team of Brooke and Jimmy Sweeney opened the Grand Berry Theater near Linwood.

Finally, an independent arthouse theater in Fort Worth. Too bad the plague was fated to descend. In what seemed like a matter of days, everything began to deteriorate. The movie experience declined almost overnight, and people stopped going to theaters en masse. Like many other great businesses in town, whether it was the pandemic, the location, or the audience’s general apathy to getting out to the cinema, the Grand Berry eventually closed.

After the pandemic, theater wasn’t the only industry model to decline. Things look different everywhere now. In a lot of cases, nothing sprang up to take the places of the lost businesses, and the film industry has yet to reach pre-pandemic numbers. Box Office Mojo says that last year was still more than $1 billion short of 2019 numbers. The moviegoing experience seemed to be dying both domestically and here in Fort Worth with the closing of our lone arthouse theater.

Thankfully, the case of the Grand Berry proved to be different, and, as its message spread, a hit TV show has seemed to energize local cinephiles. Now that Yellowstone director Taylor Sheridan has been filming multiple TV series in and around town, Hollywood has been coming to yon Fort. Zoe Saldana dancing at the White Elephant, Ethan Hawke talking at the Modern, Billy Bob Thornton, well, doing stuff everywhere — there’s a buzz about town we’ve never seen before. Instead of a cautionary tale, the Grand Berry’s closure is a sort of bellwether. In the vacuum left behind, a new scene has bloomed, one powered by locals who want to continue building community and see cinematic art survive in our city.

*****

Though the Grand Berry Theater was in an arguably poor location for visibility, the space was quaint and inviting, if a bit minimalistic. The lobby was still big enough for a few people to sit around and talk, and this cultivated the community vibe beginning to take hold. One of the many great aspects of the Grand Berry, aside from its screenings, was its Film Club. For 50 bucks, you got two free tickets along with discounts, access to a members-only screening once a month, and a nifty little lapel pin. After each screening, Jimmy Sweeney moderated a discussion that was always lively and allowed for diverse interpretations of the films, and even though the Film Club crowd cycled, you could always count on seeing familiar faces. It was a true community film experience, and it was right here in Fort Worth.

It had a great run, but after an Oscars party on March 27, 2022, the Grand Berry Theater closed. It was at this time that two Film Club members, Craig Borders and Jason Wiseman, began talking about keeping the club alive in another form.

“It was sad to see the Grand Berry Theater close,” Borders said. “For the brief time it had, it was successfully fulfilling its goal in fostering a community through a shared love of cinema in Fort Worth. We didn’t want this to end.”

Meanwhile, across town on the North Side, the theater in the running for least creative name ever, Downtown Cowtown at the Isis, was beginning its own grassroots movement. The building, which reopened in 2021 after closing in 1988, boasted some serious Fort Worth roots dating back to 1914. Sans the parking conundrum, it was an amazing, possibly too-large-for-its-own-good space. Before closing last year, the Isis offered live music and theater in addition to film. The Lone Star Film Festival also utilized the space one year.

It was at the Isis that the Movie Mutant was born. The entity also known as human Greg TeGantvoort became Isis’ director of marketing in December 2021, and that’s when he hatched Weird Wednesday. If you haven’t been to one of these screenings on the first Wednesday of every month now at Southside Preservation Hall, you are absolutely missing out. TeGantvoort has a wide range of interests and projects. Housing all of them (Troma screenings and Time Warp in addition to Weird Wednesday) is the soon-to-be nonprofit Fort Worth Community Cinema, and TeGantvoort has a flair for the carnivalesque. Weird Wednesday is part trippy flea market and part B-movie cult classic screening. The event has quite the following. As part of the Night Market, more than 40 “local artists, collectors … and vendors that specialize in oddities, mysticism, cryptids, and horror” regularly fill the hall’s large front room. Recent filmic selections include Cannibal, the Musical; American Astronaut; Hard Ticket; and Hell Comes to Frogtown.

On top of curating his brand of B-movie cult favorites monthly, TeGantvoort developed a relationship with Troma. If you are among the uninitiated, think of production/distribution company Troma as Ground Zero for insane independent B-movies (The Toxic Avenger, Class of Nuke ’Em High, Surf Nazis Must Die). With nothing else like it in town, TeGantvoort’s Troma Tuesdays now also have a solid following.

For various reasons, Weird Wednesday didn’t last at its now-defunct original location, but the Isis is where Borders and Wiseman met TeGantvoort and arranged a space at the Isis for the Fort Worth Film Club to carry on after the closing of the Grand Berry.

On April 27, 2022, the Fort Worth Film Club began in earnest. With its new location at the Isis, and from the remnants of the Grand Berry Film Club, Borders and Wiseman started to build momentum. Before their first screening, which was Juzo Itami’s Tampopo, there was a group dinner at Hanabi Ramen in West 7th. Since this first meeting, these themed pre-show dinners have become a staple of the Film Club’s signature screenings. If you haven’t seen Tampopo, you need to fix this immediately. It’s often referred to as a Ramen Western, but that isn’t doing Japanese cinema any justice. It’s common knowledge that many Spaghetti Westerns were influenced by the likes of Kurosawa. This hilarious and absurd comedy is pure Japanese. However, as the Fort Worth Film Club and Weird Wednesday were garnering fame in our community and beginning to build their respective crowds and followings, another roadblock arose: Both the Fort Worth Film Club and Weird Wednesday left their current theaters in search of a new home.

There has been enough said about the demise of Downtown Cowtown at the Isis, and, no, I don’t think that name had anything to do with it, but you never know. Either way, at around the same time, both Weird Wednesday and Film Club decided to leave the Isis.

*****

The Film Club is now part of a nonprofit. In 2015, Wiseman created The Reel House Foundation to help fund worthy causes. It started with mystery movies at Texas Theater. Proceeds from the first three years went to Child’s Play, a nonprofit to place video games in children’s hospitals. In 2018, Executive Director Wiseman said, Reel House looked locally “with the aim of fostering a love of cinema in local at-risk and underserved youth.” The annual Reel House Mini-Movie-Thon fundraiser is now hosted at Stage West, the Near Southside theater that’s now also home to the Fort Worth Film Club.

Stage West, Wiseman said, has the “perfect setup with a bar in front and lobby, which is conducive to conversation and chatting, and the theater space has a feel of being in a unique space.”

Wiseman added that finding Stage West was when the Film Club really began to take off. Though Stage West was an ideal move, for the first time in the Film Club’s history, the use of the space was not free. Subscriptions have helped. Since the club needed to generate funds for screenings, the Film Club’s Patreon page solved this problem by offering various monthly membership tiers ranging from $5 to $25.

One popular feature is the membership’s very lively Discord server, where members plan meetups, debate films, share happenings around Fort Worth, and support one another’s projects. With the new location, the club increased its social media presence, and, full disclosure, I created a Substack for reviews and edited them for a time on a volunteer basis.

“It’s always about the conversation afterwards,” Wiseman said about the formula or thinking regarding monthly selections. “Whether it’s the filmmakers, group representation, or the genre, there is always a conversation to be had. What is going to elicit an emotional response or open your eyes to something you have never seen before? The films need to be accessible to a certain extent but also drive a conversation allowing the audience to think critically about elements of the film.”

To ensure a respectful atmosphere and to stimulate discussion, the post-screening talks are moderated by club members and hosts of the podcast Why Does the Wilhelm Scream? An “unofficial extension of the Film Club,” the podcast cohosted by Wiseman and Brock Kingsley talks about and brings attention to filmmakers they feel “do not get the attention they deserve.”

The Fort Worth Film Club also reserves certain months for collaboration with local nonprofits to program the monthly signature screening.

“The more that we can partner with other local organizations,” said club board member Amber Yourman, “the more we can amplify our impact to create shared community experiences.”

Wiseman said each collaborative selection is intended to challenge the audience and spark meaningful conversation. In the past, Anime Frontier screened Cowboy Bebop and Perfect Blue, the She Dares Collective did 9 to 5 and Bottoms, MPact DFW and the Asian Film Festival of Dallas offered Funeral Parade of Roses, TCU professors Frederick “Dr. G” W. Gooding Jr. and Marcellis Perkins served up Watermelon Man, and Spacey Microcinema presented News from Home, to name a few. After every screening, group members took part in the conversations afterward with filmgoers.

Along with pairing with other nonprofits and organizations, the Fort Worth Film Club showcases local and regional short films. Filmmakers from Fort Worth, Dallas, Denton, and Austin have screened their work for the Fort Worth Film Club.

“We want to provide emerging and established artists a platform, a place they can show and talk about their work,” Kingsley said. “Hopefully, we can create a symbiotic relationship between cinema lover and filmmaker.”

With a strong following and over a year of successful monthly screenings, the Fort Worth Film Club plans to partner with Spacy Microcinema in October to show a Toshio Matsumoto series, and an Elaine May series might happen later in the year. The club will also show its first first-run feature in August. Wiseman said The People’s Joker is “this amazing story of one person’s trans journey told utilizing the Batman universe.”

Though there is no arthouse theater to take the place of the Grand Berry, there are options all around us for cinematic experiences outside of the multiplexes. There are groups in this town right now doing their best to build a community that wants to see cinema thrive, and regardless of how the box office is doing, there is an experience for those who want to seek it out. Whether you want a B-movie cult classic or an arthouse film, there is no longer a void for you in Fort Worth.

For more, visit Patreon.com/fortworthfilmclub.