John Wilson, who’s at the center of this project, doesn’t want to be. He worked on it with friends and thinks of himself as another audience member. “I’m excited to have a space like this in New York that I can go to, when theaters seem to be disappearing.”
Photo: Michael Buckner/Variety/Getty Images
In 2018, what was once the oldest movie theater in Ridgewood turned into a Blink Fitness. During the gutting of the 100-year-old theater, the filmmaker John Wilson stopped by to scour for ephemera — posters, chairs, anything. He failed but got luckier on other salvage trips, picking up signs from an old drive-in and framed headshots from a Hollywood-themed restaurant. As Wilson’s apartment filled with “all this crud,” as he described it, “I wanted to just put it into another space.” A movie theater made sense. “A lot of it is movie-related,” he said. But it also made no sense. The country lost 2,000 screens during the pandemic, and in New York, the survivors have been struggling to make rent. (The Upper West Side just got a $15-million estimate for the work to fix up the Art Deco Metro Theater, and that was before tariffs.) Wilson, who teamed up with two friends for the endeavor, wasn’t unaware of this. But he was still shocked when combing the internet, looking for seats to buy secondhand. “We were like ‘Wow there are so many available!’ he said. “Which was ominous.”
The primary listing photo, which appears to be a dated Google Street View snap from 2022, shows the flat façade of a former warehouse — not exactly the first building someone might think of installing a movie theater in.
Photo: Evergreen Realty & Investments
The theater that Wilson and his partners have built from the remains of other dead theaters will be called Low Cinema and will open in a few weeks (“hopefully”) to show 16-mm. and digital prints to audiences of around 40 or 50, who are invited to mill about the lobby before the show and browse a collection of old tapes and oddities. Classic movie-theater carpeting (tiny popcorn boxes) leads up to a curvy concession stand lined with a campy print of fake brick and lit with a vintage promotional Diet Rite Cola light that Wilson sourced on Facebook. “I just wanted everything to be kind of maximalist across the board,” Wilson explained. “The design of everything is pretty loud because where else can you use a lot of this material?”
The name, Low Cinema, is an-in joke for cinema-history junkies, who might know that Loews Cinema was founded by a Lower East Side kid who got into the penny-arcade business and built some of the country’s first movie theaters. But it’s also completely literal, Wilson said: “It’s a very low building, so it is a low cinema.” Wilson rented the former warehouse at 70-11 60th Street last year after walking past the vacancy sign several times; the rent seemed reasonable. It was advertised at $2,500 a month — one-bedroom rates in Ridgewood, at this point. His friends Davis Fowlkes and Cosmo Bjorkenheim have had success helping out at another micro-cinema, Williamsburg’s Spectacle, which like Greenpoint’s Light Industry goes back to the Jonas Mekas model by showing New Yorkers films that are impossible to find anywhere else, guaranteeing small crowds that come to watch what they may never see again. Because Low can’t screen 35-mm. film — a print format that can’t be squeezed into such a small space — Wilson plans to specialize in the more intimate 16-mm., and he ended up finding a wormhole of odd prints made for military bases and prisons, which he started buying up online. (Recent mail orders have included the 1996 Denzel Washington film Courage Under Fire.) “I’m really excited to show more punished formats here,” he said.
But Low is not just for the cinephiles who came out for Wilson’s series at Anthology Film Archives, which included cult documentaries, amateur video, and cheeky shorts. Low Cinema is, of course, also a reference to Wilson’s taste for what the culture deems lowbrow. “I think we want to start with rom-coms, honestly.”
A listing photo from last year shows the former warehouse, briefly rented by a barber, that Wilson and his crew have been turning into a micro-cinema.
Photo: Evergreen Realty & Investments
The space in progress. Wilson enjoyed learning arcane bits of city code, like how exterior doors that swing outward must be recessed. “I didn’t realize that was illegal, and now I look at the city and see it everywhere,” he said. “You learn fun little things like that.”
Photo: John Wilson
Friends and neighbors have been helping build the space since last year. A curvy concession stand was built by a neighbor who runs Elenel Custom.
Photo: John Wilson
Wilson, who sent in this photo of the theater toilet, is not exactly doing publicity around the theater’s opening. People who chatted with him about the construction posted on a neighborhood Reddit, where internet sleuths tracked down a liquor license for an LLC that is filed under his name, and Wilson confirmed the project to Curbed.
Photo: John Wilson