Seattle International Film Festival

And it was this spark.

It was so weird, right? So then we ended, I ended up being involved in helping them get a band, a live band in Seattle for the Seattle International Film Festival.

I kind of, last minute I reached out and got a whole band for them to perform.

Wow.

Anything else this weekend, or wanna shout out any events?

I'll be moderating a Q&A at SIFF on Friday for the Seattle premiere of the locally shot horror film The Cuckoo Clock, and I'll be excited for, for folks to come out to that.

That's Friday at the SIFF Film Center at 7:30 PM.

Has a lot of local film folks involved with that.

Obviously, for horror folks, you know what you're getting into, but I don't know.

... and is sort of famous for that reason.

So, uh, Videodrome, which is my favorite David Cronenberg movie, and I think pretty gross but pretty manageable, also showing at SIFF.

Um, the Beacon Theatre does a series called Five Minutes to Die, where they pick five movies and show the first five minutes, and everyone roots for what they wanna watch, and I think-

Oh, that's fun.

It's sort of like an anti-church screed.

And, uh, it finally got remastered and re-released this year and is, like, selling out across the country, and that's getting a run.

I believe at SIFF later this month.

I saw the preview for it at SIFF and was like, "Wow, this looks-

He is, uh, joining us from Fresno, so he is up early.

It's 6:30 AM on the West Coast, but we're also joined by Charlie Fox and the team at SIFF.

So Ethan, first of all, 6-

Hold on.

Yes, yes."

[laughs] Well, there's some great scene at the end of Gypsy, the movie Gypsy, and I was seeing it at the Seattle Film Festival one time.

And it's at the end where, uh, Gypsy Rose Lee is having this argument with her mother and saying how she overcame insurmountable odds to become-

Mm-hmm

Yeah.

I met him when I worked for the Seattle International Film Festival.

Awesome.

I hope he was lovely because I was like the nicest

All right.

So I think Meg Ryan was with Bill Pullman in sleepless in Seattle and she left him to go look into whether Tom Hanks was the right person for her.

So at the Seattle International Film Festival, he said, I was in a movie that had to do with Seattle and the whole place lost their minds.

And he was like, unfortunately, I don't think I filmed here because I was in like New York or Chicago or something in the movie.

This became the first true art house cinema in Seattle, the kind of place where Igmar Bergman films did real business.

And eventually, it became a flagship venue for the Seattle International Film Festival for something like 26 straight years.

A few years in, a company called Landmark Theaters took over the day-to-day operations and found a clever way to squeeze more out of the building.

That old ballroom upstairs, the one the club used to use for dances and dinners? Well, they converted it into a second, smaller screening room, up a steep flight of steps with no elevator, and called it the top of the exit.

I'm not going to do it for you.

Longtime staff and regulars showed up for a closing weekend that felt less like a business shutting down and more like a funeral, which for a lot of people who spent their evenings there for decades, basically was.

The Seattle International Film Festival brought it back for a last run a few months later, calling it a proper wake for the place.

24 days of programming, one final chance for the building to do the one thing that it had done better than almost anywhere else in the city.

Steven Cree was Young Macintosh, and Callum O'Neill was Wee Dingwall.

Uh, it released at the Seattle International Film Festival on June 10th, 2012, released worldwide, uh, or in US in June 22nd, 2012.

Uh, the runtime is 93 minutes on a budget of, uh, $185 million.

It got a global box office of $539 million.