John Wilson, the thirty-eight-year-old filmmaker, was drinking iced coffee on his home turf of Ridgewood, Queens, one recent morning. He was in Rudy’s Bakery and Cafe, a venerable neighborhood joint, feeling on edge. He and his friend Cosmo Bjorkenheim, a film critic, were about to head over to Low Cinema, a tiny storefront movie theatre (forty-plus seats) that they, with another friend, had quietly opened nearby in May. “We have one employee,” Wilson said. “And she’s never, like, fully opened the theatre before.”
Their début bill had been a double feature of the 2002 rom-com “Two Weeks Notice,” starring Hugh Grant and Sandra Bullock, and a short from 1903 called “Rube and Mandy at Coney Island.” Bjorkenheim, who has a wisp of a mustache, said, “Our first full run was a director’s cut of ‘Dirty Work’ ”—Bob Saget’s 1998 dark comedy. They’d followed up with Mike Nichols’s 1996 film, “The Birdcage.”
“We wanted to start out with some stuff that’s kind of hard to argue with,” Wilson said. Toni Binanti, the owner of Rudy’s, had a suggestion: they should show “Grumpier Old Men,” the “Grumpy Old Men” sequel, starring Walter Matthau and Sophia Loren. Wilson, who had on a striped button-down shirt and tan cut-offs, made a note in his iPhone. “All right, you’ve got the Midas touch,” he said.
As the partners walked to their theatre, a few heads turned knowingly in Wilson’s direction. He’s the creator and director of an HBO show, “How To with John Wilson,” which purported to be a series of lessons on such topics as small talk, remembering your dreams, and investing in real estate, but was really a collection of weird New York minutes. Low Cinema’s “inchoate programming sensibility,” as Bjorkenheim calls it, is intentional. Wilson said, “These were Hollywood movies from the nineties and two-thousands, but the framing is what we’re excited about. Making you pry open and rethink stuff that you may have glossed over.” Some have wondered if “Low Cinema” is a reference to the partners’ movie selections, but Bjorkenheim said, “We named it that because the ceilings were really low.”
Besides oldish and 16-mm. films (and a Sunday matinée programmed by a nine-year-old named Evelyn), the owners are trying to bring back the kind of second-run theatre that essentially vanished with the advent of home video and streaming. (“Eddington,” the new Ari Aster comedy, is on the schedule.) “It’s not really a viable business model,” Bjorkenheim said. “But we think there’s an audience.”
Wilson said, “Cosmo told me the last time a movie theatre opened in Ridgewood was in 1927.”
At one point, there were ten or so in the neighborhood, Bjorkenheim said. “A guy who works at a hardware store nearby said he used to go to R.K.O. Madison on Myrtle, which was, like, a twenty-seven-hundred-seat, single-screen movie palace,” he continued. “He told me his mother took him to see Judy Garland there.”
Even with no fanfare, the theatre has been attracting plenty of walk-ins and selling out shows. Wilson views it as a community space. He relishes the idea of people connecting “over something that’s a bit boring.”
Wilson had passed by the empty storefront “thousands of times.” When the theatre concept came up, he took a walk-through. “There were no windows onto the street, which would be really crummy for another kind of business, but was really good for a theatre. It’s just a rectangle, and that’s all we needed.” Previously, the space was a barbershop and a knife warehouse. In the thirties or forties, Bjorkenheim said, it was a Chinese laundry.
Sometimes patrons assume that the theatre is a stunt. “It’s absolutely not performance art,” Wilson said. “I didn’t open this space to show myself.”
Bjorkenheim jumped in. “The space isn’t Season 4 of ‘How To with John Wilson.’ ”
The business partners did a lot of the renovation themselves. “I think, after my show came out, I started to feel a bit more agoraphobic,” Wilson said. “And I tried to resist that by making a space that forced a certain amount of interaction. Just to get, like, what’s the word? A therapy connection going.” He said he’s picked up a similar feeling from the audience. “It’s like they are starved for a kind of communal experience of joy.”
At Rudy’s, Binanti urged them to try to join the Myrtle Avenue Business Improvement District, which, among other services, could help them remove any graffiti that turned up on their building. Wilson showed her a picture of their first tag, an illegible scrawl. Binanti peered intently. “It could be a gang,” she said. “Could be just a graffiti artist.”
Wilson added, hopefully, “Could be a movie fan.” ♦
