TIRED OF THE USUAL DRECK from Hollywood? Then do what many New York film lovers do: Head to the Film Forum, a small nonprofit theater on the border of SoHo and Greenwich Village.
Live too far away? Then you can catch up on the cinema of ideas through an e-mail newsletter and two new vehicles: DVDs and podcasts.
Film Forum was started in 1970 in a small loft on New York's Upper West Side with 50 folding chairs and a 16-millimeter projector. Today it occupies a three-screen facility on West Houston Street.
The independent theater premieres a new film every two weeks, everything from Jean-Luc Godard's “Notre Musique” to the documentary “State of Fear: The Truth About Terrorism,” and offers a full repertory schedule.
This mix pulls in 275,000 attendees a year, a “cross section of New York,” as programmer Mike Maggiore puts it. And ticket sales provide 59% of the $4 million operating budget. But there are many challenges, one being how to relay an ever-changing schedule while expanding Film Forum's national base.
For years, the theater relied mainly on print calendars to promote its schedule. But it started Internet ticketing in 2001, and this was a hit with filmgoers who'd seen the “sold out” sign at the box office once too often.
Soon 20% of all tickets were being sold online, along with a third of all membership purchases and renewals. In 2003, Film Forum decided to capitalize on this trend by starting the newsletter.
“It made sense to follow [our audience] along and give them more regular weekly updates,” says general manager Dominick Balletta.
And now? “We're using the newsletter as a lure to get people to visit us, to read about the films and also to create new revenue streams,” Balletta adds.
Every Wednesday the e-zine goes to an opt-in list of more than 26,000, 19,800 of whom live in the New York area, and is growing at a rate of about 300 per week, according to Maggiore. The issues are written and produced in house, and launched through Blackbaud, a service vendor serving nonprofits.
A typical issue includes blurbs and colorful mini-posters for current films (along with links to video clips for some), and features like the weekly Movie Challenge quiz.
The film write-ups are short and to the point. For example, the new German work, “Sophie Scholl: The Final Days,” is described as “a drama based on transcripts from the interrogation and trial of the woman who stood up to the Third Reich.”
Readers who are intrigued by these blurbs can link through to find more information on the theater's Web site (www.filmforum.org), which gets about 8,000 hits a day. They also can buy tickets, see video trailers for some films by linking to distributors' Web sites, and purchase related books.
In addition, the e-zine alerts cinephiles to opening-night appearances by figures like director Peter Bogdanovich and horror-film producer Robert Gordon. News of these Q&A sessions is often “late-breaking, so they don't make it into advertising or the print calendars,” says Maggiore.
Film Forum has been hosting the Q&As for many years, but “almost none of them have been recorded, which is a great loss,” he says.
But now they are being captured, and can be heard for free thanks to the newest innovation: podcasts. Listeners can subscribe through the Web site or through iTunes. “It's another way for you to think of us when you think of cinema even if you're not in the tri-state area,” Maggiore says.
Yes, and it also helps make the Web site “an encyclopedia of film history as we see it,” says Balletta.
The theater has found yet another way to serve its audience. It's offering DVDs of films that debuted there “in advance of the street date at a discount,” says Balletta. A recent newsletter offered a 25% discount on “The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till,” a documentary that went on general sale two days later.
The DVDs also are being promoted in special e-mail blasts to newsletter subscribers. Recipients are able to opt out of these mailings, but few do.
“People are receptive to it because they know we're not selling ‘Spider-Man 2’ on DVD,” Balletta laughs.
Does Film Forum send any other special e-mails? Occasionally. For example, one alerted readers that actor Donald Sutherland would be appearing at the opening of a documentary about Federico Fellini. The show sold out in less than a day.
Overall, though, “We've been very conscious of not flooding people with extraneous e-mails,” Balletta says. In line with that, the theater has avoided carpet-bombing donors. There is no separate newsletter for either contributors or members.
Meanwhile, the print calendars are still mailed several times a year to roughly the same number of people as the newsletter.
Have the newsletter metrics influenced programming?
Not a bit. “We program independently,” Maggiore answers. “We've tried to make the newsletter an essential part of how we promote the films rather than the other way around.”
But there are signs that it has helped attendance, which has been stable or even growing at a time when “every story you read coming out of Hollywood is that people are fleeing movie cinemas and multiplexes in droves,” Balletta says.
Further EZINE LISTS Reading:
- How to Build Your E-Zine List
- How to Write an E-zine Your Subscribers Will Love (or at Least Open and Read)
- How to Start and Run an E-Mail Newsletter
