AFS Cinema, Austin’s two-screen arthouse theatre, is about to become Austin’s three-screen arthouse theatre. On Saturday, July 18, at a special screening of his Oscar-nominated film Boyhood, AFS founder and Artistic Director Richard Linklater publicly announced the launch of a $250,000 fundraising initiative to help cover costs. This will fund a new third screen that will open up possibilities for extra showings, especially new releases. As Linklater told the Chronicle, “Believe in the future.”
Starting later this year, audiences used to turning left to theatre one, or heading straight ahead into theatre two, will also be able to take a right into the brand-new theatre three. Unlike the other two, this 179-seat (give or take) screen is not dug down into the ground, but will instead have several rows of bleacher-style seating, with rows in front on the ground. Senior cinema manager Cody Franklin, who has been overseeing the renovation, explained that the decision not to dig down again came from the architects. “Building up was the biggest money saver,” he said.
However, no expense is being spared on the state-of-the-art digital projection. The bleacher plan freed up more funding to ensure that any films screened in theatre three will look and sound as good as possible, with the cinema’s first laser projector and 7.1 surround sound.
Adding the third theatre will allow the cinema to schedule more screenings, with expansion in two specific areas. First is new releases, which have been an issue for AFS with its limited screens. Holly Herrick, head of film and creative media at AFS, said that, with only two theatres, “we can’t guarantee screening time when we already have our repertory programming on one screen, and rentals on the other.”
“It’s always disappointing when a film leaves, gets displaced by another,” Linklater said. “Now films can stick around longer and we can show more things.”
Rentals are the second component to benefit, giving screen space to individual filmmakers and festival partners like Cine Las Americas and the Black Auteur Film Festival, allowing the space to serve as “a place where they can build their audience.”
Initially, the whole room was going to be rebuilt as the biggest capacity of all three screens, with nearly 300 seats. However, the plans were changed to use part of the space to give the venue the green room it has so desperately needed, rather than the current situation of stuffing visiting celebrities into a converted office. However, the plan is for the space to serve as more than just a hangout. “It has a lot of possibilities,” Linklater said. “I’m going to put a little film library for members, a green room, a little media room.”
What is now AFS Cinema actually first opened as a three-screen cinema in 1985 as the Lincoln 3, expanding after four years to become the Lincoln 6 before closing in 2001. It later reopened as the Marchesa Hall and Theatre, an event space with two halls and one theatre. In 2013, AFS started a residency called AFS at the Marchesa before taking over the lease in 2016 and reopening it in 2017 as AFS Cinema.
Explaining that takeover, Linklater said, “We kind of had to make a move. … In the early years, we could just split [the] box office, but everything had just got so expensive, so we just had to commandeer something.”
That prior history as the Lincoln 6 made life easier for AFS as much of what they needed for a working cinema, including a large lobby, projection booths, and one working auditorium, were still in place. In 2017, AFS turned one of the Marchesa’s two exhibition halls back into a theatre, giving them two screens and an event space. “We needed to get up and running, and also to think about how we were going to exist as a full-time arthouse,” Herrick explained, “so we bit off a smaller project for that first renovation.”
The decision to only have two screens was primarily financial: Adding a third screen in 2017 would have been prohibitively expensive, while the event space would provide an alternative funding stream. Yet it was also intended as a space for community building. “We’ve always thought that AFS as a gathering space was key to the mission,” Herrick said.
Indeed, it’s that loyal and growing community that convinced the AFS team that it was time for a third screen. “When we showed how quickly we recovered from the pandemic, how our audience came back so strong and continued to grow, that’s when I [knew], ‘Okay, we are a success,’” Linklater said. “And you can get confident enough to say, ‘Okay, we’re ready to expand.’”
Moreover, as Herrick noted, the lobby increasingly served as that essential communal space, and that third room just seemed to want to be a cinema once again. Indeed, anyone attending a party, corporate event, the Texas Film Awards, or even a wrestling show in the event space would have seen the distinctive projection ports were still in place (however, unlike theatres one and two, due to their configuration, theatre three will not be able to screen 35mm or 70mm prints).
Now, theatre three gets to fulfill its original purpose, at a point when independent cinemas are having an outsize impact, and growing future generations of movie lovers. “When I was going to arthouse theatres in New York, there would be a sprinkling of young people and a lot of gray hair,” Herrick said. “And now when you go to these repertory screenings, the crowd is so diverse, and you see the community responding to this opportunity to see art together.”
