I'm trying to convince a theatre owner who is currently showing first-run art-house/crossover product to start running shorts. We're running a Droopy Dog short (nice IB Tech print!) this weekend and so far haven't seen much reaction from the customers, which is unfortunate since this is sort of a trial to see if the idea "works" in this market.

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We also hosted the Student Academy Awards and the ones I thought would be good for our audience, I would make note of the filmmaker and contact them later to book their short. About 2/3rds were 16mm releases and the rest 35mm. Today there probably will be a lot of video-only entries....patooie.

Used to be that if some good 16mm titles were available, you could avoid all the leg and paper work of approaching individual filmmakers and simply book the yearly compilation of the winners that the Academy made available. Unfortunately, and much to my dismay, the Academy no longer makes this compilation available in 16mm, but only on video. Kodak is a cosponsor and I say a curse on both their houses for abandoning film as the medium of choice to make these films available.

Yes, release the video if you must, so that these films can be seen by more people (evidently more have video projectors now than motion picture projectors), but at least strike a few 16mm prints for theatres that still run film. Lots of art houses have 16mm capabilities and now we cannot show these cream-of-the-crop student offerings.

Eastman Kodak should be ashamed of pulling out of 16mm for this prestigious aspect of the Academy's mission. How expensive could a few 16mm prints cost that Kodak as a sponsor couldn't cover that expense? In fact, I always wondered why EK didn't make a few 35mm prints of the winning films that could be circulated around the art house circuit, perhaps even getting a few chains on board to include them in their programming. Same with the yearly grown-up Academy Award short subjects. You would think an organization like AMPAS could cover the cost of making the nominated shorts available to art theatres at a reasonable cost so that the public would actually get a chance to see these supposedly high quality award-winning films.

Depending on how ambitious you want to be with this, you could try to attend film festivals wherever they are close enough to you and evaluate the short subject entries. When you see any that you think will work for your audiences, get the filmmaker's information. Usually they are flattered, happy and thus eager to let theatres run their work.

Here at MIT, we basically show 2 films/weekend, and we assign a given short to two movies over the course of a term, and run them that way. So if you come to both movies in one weekend, you don't get stuck seeing the same short.

Our audience opinion is extremely variable. Some really like shorts, others dislike them, and others get annoyed when they're more than 5 minutes. There are a lot of different opinions. Of course, part of it is cultural (as is a lot of stuff around here), and we'd gotten out of the habit of doing shorts for quite a while until we resumed last Spring.

As for advertising, well, again, we're a special case, but we advertise the shorts on our web page and our weekly email, but they're not well-publicized on our term calendar or weekly posters. I think this is perhaps less a conscious decision and some lameness at work.

Crowd dynamics are weird. For instance, when we showed The Accountant (long) last term, it was pretty much uniformly disliked by females and liked by males.

Anyhow, you should feel free to come by and check out our shorts some time, Scott.

We never advertised the shorts individually, except with "What's Opera Doc" which we tipped via fax with awards info, etc. to the local classical radio station & they talked it up for a week at a level like they have for a week when an opera is opening.

I think you should put up the name of the short in any print advertising where there's room, but understand that the name draw may be insignificant as opposed to the effect of instilling the perception that the particular show & house are something more than usual; one line is enough - 'Also, MGM cartoon "Dawgs Experimenting Dangerously With Gravity" !' I think an audience enjoys having the 'extra', & even if they didn't particularly care for this one, it doesn't poison their minds against shorts. They take each one on a "Well I liked that one" or "I didn't particularly care for that one" basis.

The Droopy Dog cartoons, like Road Runner cartoons, were of extremely good quality early on, just brilliant (they were MGM cartoons directed by Tex Avery). Some of the later ones are lame, formulaic tired & unispired; plus, women (a large part of rep audiences) are the least fond of physical humor without strong character personality, etc. I'd just plug the studio & title, much like the original exploitation materials often did (except for Bugs Bunny & other big 'stars').

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