DENNIS NYBACK, the rare film archivist and public face of the Clinton
Street Theater since last September, has suffered his share of detractors.
There was the New York man who demanded his money back from Nyback’s
traveling “Politically Incorrect Humor on Film” program because it wasn’t politically
incorrect enough. (Nyback’s reply: “I showed you movies with animals getting
abused and that made fun of blind people and fat people-What more do you want?”)
There was the person in Seattle who called in a bomb threat to his now-defunct
Pike Street Cinema, because Nyback was showing films about child molesters.
There was Ted Turner, who sent lawyers after Nyback when he promised to show
“Fuck Mickey Mouse,” a collection of “submerged” racist and sexist 1930s Warner
Brothers cartoons, at another New York theater.
And finally, there are the impatient viewers in audiences around the world
who yell, “Why don’t you shut up and start the movie?” after Nyback launches
into one of his rambling introductory monologues. To them, Nyback shrugs his
shoulders.
“I like to explain to people why I’m showing what I’m showing,” Nyback says.
“A lot of these films, if they’re just thrown out there, people won’t really
get the point of why they’re being thrown out there.”
Since the Carter administration, Nyback has made a living of sorts by amassing
unusual films and showing them to audiences. Over the past three decades, the
46-year-old Clark County native has run revival theaters in Seattle and New
York and shuttled his programs to theaters and festivals all over this country
and Europe, with occasional stops in Portland. But in the past 10 months, local
movie-goers have had regular access to his unique, 2500-strong and growing film
archive. Last September, he and partner Elizabeth Rozier took over the struggling,
single-screen Clinton Street Theater on the corner of SE 26th Avenue and Clinton.
Since then, they’ve transformed the formerly proud, but raggedy purveyor of
cult and classic films–best known for an indefatigable run of The Rocky
Horror Picture Show at midnight every Saturday–into a venue for high-quality,
new, independent features. Between bookings of national releases, the partners
liberally sprinkle programs from Nyback’s collection.
His archive is devoted to titles so marginal they’ve fallen off everyone else’s
page, a mixture of spectacular forgotten art forms, wallops of kitsch weirdness,
and raw snapshots of racist, sexist, homophobic, and xenophobic blemishes on
American pop culture through the decades. A glimpse at one of his cramped storage
rooms (not much more than a hallway that doubles as his office) reveals government
and industry propaganda films (“What You Should Know About Biological Warfare,”
“PGE Farmers”), newsreels (“Women Get the Vote”), rare cartoons from their protean
era (“Molly Moo Cow”), educational films (“Junior Prom,” “The Story of Menstruation”),
’70s TV episodes (Wonder Woman and Starsky and Hutch) classic
footage of Jazz Age music, dance, and comedy acts (like the Nicholas Brothers
and Cab Calloway), scopitones (film reels that used to light up jukebox-style
contraptions with footage of ’60s pop music acts), lots of B-grade monster and
sex movies, and some hard-to-pin-down genres (“Chest Surgery in the United Kingdom,”
for example, which one Seattle film writer has attested is the best movie he’s
ever seen). And that’s just the fingernail on the end of the arm of the archive’s
body.
“I can actually come up with a film program on almost any subject a person
can name,” Nyback states coolly. His European booking agent estimates he’s curated
over 300 distinct programs already, from “I Know Why You’re Afraid” (featuring
unnerving health education movies for pre-teens) to “The Dark Side of Dr. Seuss,”
which shows racist World War II propaganda films made by Theodore Geisel, aka
Dr. Seuss. Last month alone, he estimates adding 100 movies to his archive.
Not that he keeps a written catalogue (making it more of a “collection” than
an archive, but who cares?).
Ticket buyers often get more than movies. They’ve also had open access to
Nyback himself–a man who takes the business of film exhibition and turns it
into a performance art.
Every night, and often twice a night, Nyback greets the audiences at the Clinton
Street Theater. Bounding onstage, the smallish, graceful impresario launches
into a five-minute salutatory shtick that will leave some people enthralled,
others deeply annoyed. Partly, they react to the breach of convention that places
a real, three-dimensional body in front of the curtains. But more importantly,
they notice that Nyback is obviously a freak. Not a scary or mean freak, but
the kind of freak who maybe wore a fedora and suspenders in high school, spoke
with an affected cool, and presided over the Thespian Society. The kind of freak
who still, after all these years, after growing up and getting married and taking
up smoking and getting divorced, is noticeably different from everyone else.
Onstage, Nyback emits the nervous energy and anachronistic social impulses of
a night club MC from the swing era. Off-stage, he’s remarkably similar. He wins
jitterbug competitions; last Valentine’s Day he won a Swatch watch covered in
hearts at a competition in New York. In his opinion, he wins because “the kids
out there now, they’re not getting into the joy of dancing. I can just improvise
and let myself go.”
HOW IT ALL BEGAN
In addition to a couple of entertaining stories and anecdotes, Nyback’s nightly
intros give the evening some historical context. The Clinton Street Theater,
he explains with a storyteller’s practiced cadence, has been in continuous use
as a movie house since it was built in 1913. That was the tail end of the Nickelodeon
era, just before film promoters started building grand movie palaces with triple
the seating capacity. As far as he knows, it’s now the oldest operating theater
in the country. When the business landed on the selling block last summer, Nyback,
then living in New York, called his old business partner, Elizabeth Rozier,
then living in Seattle. She said she’d move to Portland and buy the theater,
if Nyback would help her run it, and he acceded. Now, thanks to their intervention,
the toilets at Clinton Street no longer telegraph an unpleasant stench into
the main hall, the curtain opens and shuts breezily, and the building is saved
from a probable fate as a music venue or brew-pub. After a note about his archive,
a quick intro to the evening’s program, and a plug for a coming attraction,
it’s “Well folks, enjoy the show!”
He leaves out a couple of points, like the fact that he and Rozier were once
married. Neither of them like to talk about this, least of all Rozier, who guards
her privacy like a reclusive screen actress, hardly making eye contact when
she hands Hot Tamales across the counter (she even looks a little like Jean
Seberg). What’s more, Rozier owns the theater and has final say over all business
decisions. Nyback, without whom the theater wouldn’t be what it is, has no more
legal control than the average ticket-taker. But, he claims not to mind. With
only one boss, the partners don’t get mired down in conflicts–kind of like
a traditional marriage, but with the gender roles reversed.
The rest of the story goes like this. Nyback started collecting movies in
1979, after graduating from college and buying the Rosebud Movie Palace in Seattle.
“It was the thing to do in the ’70s,” he says. “Have a little art theater where
you can show good movies, revivals.” Like his peers, he showed classic films,
but he decided to show them in their original context–a whole package deal
with news reels, cartoons, short subjects, and even travelogues that preceded
the feature presentation. For awhile, he rented these short reels, until he
discovered that it was cheaper to buy them. So he began regularly perusing junk
stores and Big Reel magazine; a monthly where people advertised films
for sale in pre-ebay days. Soon, he built a solid collection. And then he made
another discovery. If he strung the short films together, he could make feature-length
programs that people would pay to watch. When there were scheduling crannies
to fill between the features that he booked, he could put on a program of shorts.
There were no rental fees at all, and the strange, remote subject matter appealed
to his bohemian customers.
The Rosebud went under after three years–a casualty of home video–and Nyback
left the theater business temporarily to pursue other interests. But by the
late ’80s, he was working as a projectionist at Seattle’s Jewel Box, a 1930s
screening room-turned-performance space that “poured the stiffest drinks in
town.” They let Nyback show movies on Tuesdays and Thursdays. One day, a man
named Jack Stevenson from Boston called him. “I’ve been driving around the country
with a car full of films,” Stevenson said. “Will you let me hold a screening
at the Jewel Box?” The idea of a mobile film show pleased Nyback so much that
he agreed to Stevenson’s request without even asking for the titles.
After making good on the deal, he followed Stevenson’s lead, and began booking
screenings of his own rare films in other cities. Of course, if his films were
to be seen elsewhere, Nyback had little choice but to carry them there himself,
because no other distribution system existed for movies that not only were far
out in content and of dubious copyright status, but sometimes also needed special
projection equipment. But Nyback liked schlepping his films around. It gave
him a chance to travel, give talks, and personally share his archive with people
all over the world. Moreover, audiences responded.
Meanwhile, despite their negligible financial return, Nyback continued to
run movie theaters. In 1992, this time in partnership with Rozier, he opened
the Pike Street Cinema in Seattle. They put 70 seats into an old storefront
situated next to an infamous tavern, which averaged one murder and many drug
sales to Kurt Cobain every year. Under Nyback’s and Rozier’s ownership, Pike
Street Cinema quickly became an alternative cultural institution, the kind of
landmark that people referenced in personals ads. But in just a few years, sick
of Seattle and pining for a woman in New York, Nyback quit Pike Street, put
all his films in the back of a truck, and drove across the country. In New York,
he opened the Lighthouse Theater, again in an old storefront, which lasted only
one year before going out of business. He didn’t care. Closing shop just meant
another chance to go on tour with his films. “For a few years, I lived out my
dream. I spent the spring in Europe, the summer on the West coast, the fall
in New York, and the winter wherever I could.”
THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE HOME
Then, in the summer of 1999, he was in Portland showing films at the Clinton
Street Theater, when he heard it was for sale. “I loved the Clinton Street Theater,”
Nyback remembers. “I’d done a lot of shows there over the years.” He also had
deep ties to the area; growing up in nearby Vancouver, as well as frequently
visiting his family’s farm in St. Helens and his grandmother’s house in Southeast
Portland. Deeper still, back in the 1840s, his Portland, Maine-born great-great-great-uncle,
Francis Pettygrove, founded this fair city, winning the legendary coin toss
against Asa Lovejoy that would have made us all Bostonians. And his great-great-great-grandfather,
Phillip Foster, built the toll road across the Cascades that let wagon trains
cross the final hurdle to the Oregon Country.
As for the theater, it was gasping its last breaths. It had already passed
through the hands of three owners in the past decade. In 1996, a long-resident
film collective had sold it to Adam Moore, who mixed live performances by his
experimental theater group, Dreadnought, with screenings of classic and cult
films. In 1998, Moore moved to Chicago and passed the business on to his partner,
Anne-Marie DeStefano. She’d struggled for a year before putting the building
on the market in 1999. Other than Rozier and Nyback, only two buyers showed
any interest: a live music promoter and an experimental live theater group.
“I was happy to find someone who wanted to keep it running as a movie theater,”
says DeStefano. “The sale to Elizabeth and Dennis was a really positive thing.”
Nyback and Rozier did more than clean, paint, and give the theater a face
lift. They gave it a new identity. Though The Rocky Horror Picture Show still has a home there on Saturday nights, the overworked cult classics and
unprofitable live shows are mostly gone. Unless there’s a special reason, movies
that are available on home video are nixed. Instead, the partners show new,
independent features as much as possible, with Nyback’s rare films thrown in
the empty slots. Thrown in, but not indiscriminately. Nyback tries to use his
collection to respond to audience interests and the day’s news. When he got
first dibs on the local release of Jim Jarmusch’s latest film, the Kurasawa-inspired
Ghost Dog, he partnered it with Kurosawa’s classic Shogun, at
the urging of an audience member. When he read in the newspaper about the death
of Tex Beneke, Glenn Miller’s saxophone player and singer on 1941’s million-selling
“Chatanooga Choo-choo,” Nyback pulled out his Tex Beneke reels. When Hollywood
came out with film reprise of Rocky and Bullwinkle this summer, he countered
with a night of original 1960s The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle TV episodes, along with commercials. Sure, most Clinton Street regulars couldn’t
care less about Tex Beneke. But, like the chef at your favorite lunch spot who
cares enough to vary the soup of the day, Nyback’s efforts are appreciated.
And there’s another thing, too. Nestled amongst the retro chic of Dot’s Café,
the gringo-Mexican cuisine of La Cruda, and the gaggle of vintage clothing and
furniture shops that make SE 26th and Clinton a formidable hipster node, it’s
nice that Nyback offers his brand of cultural appropriation with more than just
a wink and a nod.
To Nyback, his archive isn’t kitsch memorabilia; it’s history written on celluloid.
If he mongers his shows with a Howard Stern-like embrace of scandal, controversy,
and self-promotion, underneath is a Howard Zinn-like commitment to revealing
forgotten pieces of American history. “Because of film,” Nyback says reverently,
“we can document the 20th century in ways we can’t for earlier centuries.” To
be fair, one should add that film, TV, and radio technologies created 20th
century culture as much as they documented it–one can’t point to directly equivalent
cultural forms in prior centuries. But even so, Nyback is right: his films give
a unique kind of access to the past. Unlike most history books, they seem to
thrust us right into the arms of our distant relations. There, just like at
real family reunions, heroes, and celebrities make rare appearances while weirdos,
bigots, and unrecognized visionaries abound. In this company, Nyback doesn’t
seem far out of place.
It could be that the Clinton Street’s new masters have found the right silk
hat for their Frosty the Snowman, because the theater is looking relatively
pink-cheeked, at least for now. It’s not just that Nyback’s unique film collection
and unusual personality attract customers. It’s also that, with an in-house
supply of films, Nyback and Rozier have a measure of self-sufficiency in a competitive
market, where a small theater’s survival can depend on a getting a few good
bookings a year (remember how The Secret of Roan Inish saved CineMagic
a couple of years back?). The Clinton Street Theater is at the bottom of the
pecking order for booking new releases in Portland, admits Nyback, with distributors
tilting preference toward larger, more established art houses like Cinema 21
and KOIN. And the pecking order is about to get much longer, with the imminent
arrival of the new, seven-screen Sundance Cinemas at Pioneer Place. In the intensely
competitive environment that’s about to come, Nyback’s private movie stash and
unique niche will become all the more important. Plus, he’s starting to create
“found footage features” which he hopes to distribute nationally. As contrasted
with the reels of spliced-together shorts he occasionally sends to theaters
by special request, these are essentially documentaries, complete with explanatory
captions. In addition to “The Dark Side of Doctor Seuss,” he’s made “Defining
the 1970s through Classic Commercials,” a collection of 130 commercials grouped
in categories such as “Damn the Ozone–Hair is Important,” and “Get ‘Em While
They’re Young: The Fine Art of Exploiting Children.”
It’s hard to say how much time is left on the clock for a relic like the Clinton
Street. But no matter what, Nyback will surely find a way to keep showing his
films. Consider his story about how, while getting a haircut in Seattle several
years back, his barber confessed a love for blues music. Snipping away, the
barber asked, “Do you have any movies about the blues?” Nyback replied, “Sure,
I could do 90 minutes on the blues.” “How about barber shops?” the barber asked.
“Yeah,” said Nyback. “I could probably do 90 minutes of barber shop movies.
In fact, come to think of it, I’ve got a film called “Barber Shop Blues.”
He worked out a deal with the barber and screened The Barber Shop Blues and
Comedy Festival there in the shop. So stop rolling your eyes and give Dennis
Nyback a handshake the next time you stop by the Clinton Street Theater. Tell
him about your secret love for movies about orthopedic surgery. You never know
what he might have in store.
Beginning September 8, Dennis will show Fuck the Republican Party:
Secrets From Their Own Propaganda Films, 1940-1980.