Cinema Lovers Flock to Alamo Drafthouse

Looking for arthouse movies? Look no further than Lubbock’s West Loop 289.

Alamo Drafthouse, which opened in April 2014, is hosting this weekend’s Flatland Film Festival along with the Louise Hopkins Underwood Center for the Arts. The festival is featuring features and shorts from local flimmakers.

Robert Peaslee, an associate professor and chair of the Department of Journalism and Electronic Media, is one of the organizers of the festival. He said he greatly values the dine-in movie theater, which has partnered with Tech professors on several film initiatives.

“With Alamo, we sort of extended our hand tentatively and they grabbed it and said, ‘Yes! Hello, how are you?’ and that’s just been great, it’s never stopped,” Peaslee said. “They are just great community partners.”

Photo by Weston Davis.

Weston Davis/ The Hub@TTU

Wyatt Phillips, Ph.D.

Wyatt Phillips in his office. Nicole Crites/ The Hub@TTU

“Where our goals overlapped significantly is that we both want to create and foster a space for a community of film lovers to emerge,” Phillips said. “A key part of that is exposure and education.”

Phillips said he worked at the original Alamo Drafthouse in Austin, Texas, years ago. When he moved to Lubbock and saw a new location opening up, he contacted Tim League, founder and CEO of Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, to introduce the idea of the new theatre coordinating a movie series with Tech.

“They were still trying to figure out how to engage Texas Tech and the students and how to create an environment of cinephilia to develop film lovers in Lubbock,” Phillips said. “Now you’ve got a huge student population; you have a relatively large city, but the film programming here over the years has not been one that caters necessarily to anything but the popcorn crowd.”

Films shown as part of this fall’s “Continuing Education” series included “Double Indemnity,” “Easy A,” “The Silence of the Lambs,” “The Social Network,” “Hero,” as well as several others, all chosen by Phillips and colleague Allison Whitney, an associate professor who studies film technology. The movies are shown for $3 each and include educational introductions from professors, something the International Film Series tries to incorporate also.

Photo by Weston Davis.

Weston Davis/ The Hub@TTU

“One thing that we try to do as often as possible is always try to make it more than just a film screening,” Peaslee said, “so we try to have either a faculty member or a speaker from outside the university or even a panel that sort of contextualizes the film for the audience.”

Phillips said he chooses movies he believes will be beneficial to students and educational in regard to different aesthetics and styles of film, and that introducing people to films they may have never heard about can build a new appreciation for cinema and its techniques. It is especially important for young people to open their minds up to new things, he added.

“This [18 to 30 years old] is the best time in your whole life to be exposed to new ideas, and films are absolutely a critical part of that,” Phillips said. “The ability to be exposed to other cultures, other ideas, all of these things, you can do it in a 2-hour block of time.”

Phillips and Peaslee said Alamo Drafthouse’s educational film series is vital to community building.

“You don’t develop a community by just showing things and having people come and meet each other,” Phillips said. “By having people from the community, interested parties, knowledgeable parties, do the introductions, the idea is that people see these as community events rather than just random screenings.”

 

 

About Nicole Crites

Entertainment Director - Senior journalism major from Fort Worth, TX