AADL Talks To: Russ Collins, Executive Director/CEO Marquee Arts
When: September 16, 2024
Russ Collins grew up in Ann Arbor and received a Masters degree in Arts Administration from the University of Michigan just before becoming Manager of the Michigan Theater in November 1982. Russ walks us through the evolution of the Michigan Theater over its near-100-year history, from the vaudeville and silent film eras through the ups and downs of the celluloid and digital eras. He also takes us into the weeds of technical changes over the years; discusses historical preservation efforts in renovations to both the Michigan and the State theaters; and touches on programming and marketing challenges following the collapse of the newspaper industry. Russ will retire in December 2024.
Transcript
- [00:00:09] AMY CANTU: Hi. This is Amy.
- [00:00:10] ELIZABETH SMITH: And this is Elizabeth. In this episode, AADL talks to Russ Collins, retiring long-time Executive Director of the Michigan Theater Foundation, now Marquee Arts. Russ was raised in Ann Arbor and stepped in to lead the Michigan Theater shortly after graduating with a Master of Arts Administration from the University of Michigan. Russ talks with us about the evolution of both the Michigan and State Theaters, some of his many achievements at the helm, including the expansion of programming, technology changes, and renovations to both theaters. Thank you for joining us today, Russ. You were born and raised in Ann Arbor? Can you talk a little bit about what it was like to grow up here, where you went to school -- elementary middle high school -- and where did you like to hang out?
- [00:00:56] RUSS COLLINS: Well, I was actually born in Detroit but moved here when I was two and a half, so I don't remember living anywhere else. I feel like Ann Arbor really changed the trajectory of my life. Most of my relatives live in southwest Missouri. I have a lot of cousins down there and it's a much different environment than a college town in the Upper Midwest. It really suited me very well. I grew up in the Ann Arbor Woods area on the east side of town, southeast side of town and went to Pattengill grade school although Allen grade school was right down the street, but it opened a couple of years after I started kindergarten. And then I went to Tappan Junior High at the time -- now middle school -- and then Huron High School. I'm a proud River Rat, for sure. Got involved with the music program, which everybody did. They got an instrument in fifth grade. Before that, I was in the All City Choir as a first soprano, and, well it was pre-puberty so you would have a higher voice. The instrumental music program really changed my life. My parents didn't know much about music, so they didn't ever criticize anything I did with music. They were only encouraging, and they were very encouraging and I had a great middle school teacher by the name of Chuck Hills, who was a very good middle school conductor and music teacher. Then the real formative person in terms of life in the arts, particularly was Ed Downing, who was the first director of bands at Huron High School. He had very high expectations for us, and we pretty much achieved them, and that was quite an experience. The other thing that was really formative about the public schools for me was the humanities courses that Ann Arbor teaches at Pioneer and Huron, probably Skyline, too, at this point. But I'd taken math and science because that's what I thought smart people took. My parents didn't go to college. I was the first generation to go to college. I didn't have a lot of guidance in that way. But that humanities course let me know that there was a whole world out there of a very serious study in the humanities and arts. That was a very transformative experience. When I was in between my junior and senior year in high school, Ed Downing, this band director, was the director of the Youth For Understanding wind ensemble. Youth For Understanding was a student exchange program that was headquartered here in Ann Arbor at that time. I got to go to Germany and at the time Yugoslavia...the place that I was was Northern Macedonia, and then Greece. To have that experience followed by this humanities course, where I had actually seen the Acropolis, and then you learned about it. I have such great memories. I think Ann Arbor is a great place to grow up with the resources of the University of Michigan, but just the excellent education in the whole Washtenaw County area, for the most part. It really changed my life. It pointed me in the direction of the arts, although I went to college to be a dentist.
- [00:04:47] AMY CANTU: You did. [LAUGHTER]. I was going to say, maybe from what you had described with the band, I thought -- or the orchestra, or band -- you were in, yeah...
- [00:04:55] RUSS COLLINS: I was a saxophone player.
- [00:04:57] AMY CANTU: ...Okay, I was going to ask what instrument. So you didn't want to major in music?
- [00:05:03] RUSS COLLINS: No, I wasn't quite talented enough to do that. As a musician, I was trainable, but I didn't have that little extra bit where music just spoke to my soul, and fingers and ears, the way that really talented musicians do. I was very pleased to have the experiences that I had. I got to go to Interlochen for a couple of years, and that helps you understand where your musical talents and skills lie. But they were great experiences. I can't think of a better place in the world to grow up than Ann Arbor. My kids and grandkids are all in this area as well at this point.
- [00:05:47] AMY CANTU: That's great.
- [00:05:47] RUSS COLLINS: Yeah.
- [00:05:48] AMY CANTU: So where did you hang out as a kid? What were your favorite places?
- [00:05:51] RUSS COLLINS: Well, my dad, he was a dental lab technician, which is one of the reasons I was thinking seriously about going into dentistry. He had an office down on Washington Street right behind the Michigan Theater, the Ann Arbor Professional building. I got to come downtown quite a bit and hung out at the Art Fair when I was 12, 13, 14, 15 years old, really enjoyed walking around the Art Fair and experiencing that in the late '60s and early '70s. It was a very exciting and difficult time in a lot of ways. And school. You know, a lot of kids hung out at Frasier's and places like that. Although that was kind of in my neighborhood, I didn't hang out there too much. But again, I had a lot of really wonderful experiences in the music programs and that kind of thing, and then went to the University of Michigan.
- [00:06:48] AMY CANTU: Yeah. Do you remember the first film that you saw at the Michigan Theater?
- [00:06:54] RUSS COLLINS: Well, it was probably -- I have a very distinct memory of It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, World. That was a mid-'60s comedy. Then we saw a few other films. My family were not big moviegoers, but another real formative experience was going to see The Sound of Music in downtown Detroit at a roadshow presentation, which was rather interesting. That was a 1950s '60s kind of exhibition technique where they played really big films in big cities, and then weeks and sometimes months, and sometimes years later, they played in the provinces like Ann Arbor. That was great. But another really important film that I saw at the Michigan Theater that upset my parents at the time, and this was when I was in college, was The Godfather, which was the Academy Award-winning film that particular year. But because there was violence and criminality and all kinds of things, my parents who were southern Baptist teetotalers, weren't particularly thrilled that I had seen that movie.
- [00:08:07] ELIZABETH SMITH: You said you didn't really go out to the movies as much with your family, but do you remember going to any other theaters around town?
- [00:08:14] RUSS COLLINS: Oh, yeah. The Briarwood Mall Theaters opened up and the Fox Village Theater. I had two really important experiences there. The Fox Village Theater is currently the plum market out there on Maple Road, near Dexter. I saw Grand Prix, which was a pretty big movie at the time. It's now pretty much forgotten. But it had a sound system where you could hear the cars go all the way around the theater. Again, it was just the sound system that they used, and the other one was 2001 A Space Odyssey. They had a very big screen there. It was built as a single-screen theater. Then Chinatown was another film that I saw there in 1974.
- [00:09:07] AMY CANTU: Was that what gave you your love of cinema? Those experiences, or was there somebody else in your life that you shared films with? What spurred your interest in film?
- [00:09:17] RUSS COLLINS: Well, my primary interest was in arts. When I came to the University of Michigan, I was in the marching band and I was in the campus band. I was also in the Men's Glee Club, and for a brief period of time, was in The Friars, which is an octet that does pop-swing choral works. That was really formative. Then I did some theatrical shows. In high school, we did The Music Man when I was a senior in high school. The choirs did that in Ann Arbor at that particular era and so I ended up doing a couple of musicals through the Musket program. Then I got into the theater program towards the end of my undergraduate degree and took acting and directing classes. But it was the arts management classes that the University offered through the theater department at that particular time that was really formative. I did well enough in those classes that I was offered a scholarship for a master's degree in Arts Administration. I was not a childhood movie maven. I had a college roommate who was a movie maven. It was more the performing arts, classical music, and theater. I got pretty deeply into theater in college. I was an actor with the Black Sheep Repertory Theater, which was the Purple Rose Theater of that particular era in the late 1970s and '80s. But I determined that my skill, much like music, was not in terms of performance. I was a pretty good stage director, but the Arts Administration is really where I headed with that master's degree. Then ended up a year after I finished that degree at the Michigan Theater. That was a fortuitous thing. I produced a couple of shows in the Michigan Theater before I started working there in November of 1981. I presented Hal Holbrook and Mark Twain Tonight. That was a big hit, fortunately. Then in February of 82, I did a local production of South Pacific, the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical which featured my then-wife, Julia Broxholm, as the female lead Nellie Forbush. Ralph Herbert, who was the director of opera at the University of Michigan -- I think he just recently retired back when we did this production in February of 1982 -- but he played Emile de Becque. He was a director and a performer at the Metropolitan Opera, and he was just a really great guy, and a lot of people know his son, Norm Herbert, who worked for the University for many years, and is very involved in many, many things, just community interest things, really wonderful family, the Herbert family.
- [00:12:26] AMY CANTU: Your involvement in those shows at the Michigan Theater, was this before the renovation -- before the "Save the Michigan Theater..." -- or was that right after?
- [00:12:39] RUSS COLLINS: The Michigan theaters were saved in 1979. In 1978, the lease was expiring for the Michigan theater that the Butterfield Theater Company had with it. They were the people who ran it for that 50 years between 1928-1978 and their lease was expiring. Jacobson's looked at it as a furnisher showroom, and there were several other things, but it was actually going to be turned into a food court. The paperwork was just about assigned to make that happen and folks that had volunteered to work with restoring the organ they were all volunteers, they had worked there for several years. They said, Hey, is this what we want? And one guy in particular, Henry Aldridge, who was a professor of film and media at Eastern Michigan University, was very effective at co-opting in community folks, getting the then Mayor Lou Belcher involved, and Lou Belcher ended up getting Margaret Towsley involved, a philanthropist in the community. There were lots of people involved with saving the Michigan Theater I was not one of them.
- [00:13:59] AMY CANTU: People think you were. [LAUGHTER]
- [00:14:01] RUSS COLLINS: I was a student at that point at the university but I had produced the shows, and people were aware of me and the work that I had done in terms of theatrical producing and directing. I went ahead and rented the theater and did those things but the theater was really saved by a group of volunteers and philanthropists that started before I did. They hired a manager. For the first year, 1979, 1980 it was volunteers that actually ran the Michigan Theater. Henry Aldridge being one of the key ones. And then another guy by the name of John Briggs, who was at that time the president of the Stage Hand union and he and Henry essentially were the de facto managers of the theater. They hired a manager by the name of Ray Messler, who was there for just a little while, didn't quite work out, and then he left in the summer of 1982. And then they went through a hiring process and I was hired in November of 1982. I was actively involved with the Michigan theater one year before I started there as executive director but was not involved at all in the initial saving of the theater. Really, it's probably a good thing because there were lots of people that were involved and Henry Aldridge, as just an interested community person, who jumped up and down and said, Hey, do we want to do this, community? He was clever enough to go speak in front of city council and Mayor Belcher really responded to this concept is a good idea and then it always requires money to get things going, and Margaret Towsley was very helpful in her very modest and anonymous way to get that going. But those elements are still germane now you need just passionate community people who want to do a good thing in the community. You need movers and shakers to bring things to the front and bring community attention to things and then you need generous philanthropists that are going to step up and provide the resources to actually make things happen.
- [00:16:35] AMY CANTU: Going back, you were pretty young when they hired you. What did you think? Did you walk in and immediately have plans and ideas? Or were you overwhelmed? Tell us what your experience was when you first got the job?
- [00:16:49] RUSS COLLINS: Sure. I had been producing theater and was interested in presenting theater. The master's degree I got was a work-study degree where you were actively promoting shows that the University of Michigan was bringing in. At that time, the Musical Society wasn't bringing in any theater they were just doing music and ethnic kind of events. The University theater department was actually bringing in touring theater shows and theater artists and things like that and so I worked in that form. My initial interest was in using the Michigan Theater to present live shows, so in 1982, when I started, there was a company that was renting the theater to show the movies, and it was an extension of the student film society. It was called the Classic Film Theater, CFT, and those were folks that had come to Ann Arbor, gone to the University of Michigan for the most part, and had been part of the student film societies -- Cinema Guild, and Ann Arbor Film...
- [00:18:01] AMY CANTU: Co-op.
- [00:18:02] RUSS COLLINS: Exactly and Mediatrics, and several other kinds of organizations like that. And so that was already going on before I started. And so the first things that I did was I brought in a couple of touring Broadway shows. Again, this was one of... The Michigan Theater had no money at all, the board said, Well you can do that if you want, but you can't use any Michigan theater money to do it. This John Briggs, who was the president of the Stage Hand union and acquaintance that I knew from college, a guy by the name of Greg Mazur, who's currently the tech director of the Michigan theater. He actually, most of his career he was on the road, around the country, around the world with the touring Broadway shows, but at this point, he wasn't doing that and he's come back to town and our longtime tech director Scott Clark left, and so we hired Greg. But they both provided the backing funding to do these shows and we wouldn't have been able to do this so we brought in Amadeus, which is the play about Mozart. These are touring Broadway shows and Evita, and they both did really well. And the initial idea was to actually reacquaint the community with the Michigan Theater because the Michigan Theater was a glorious movie palace back in 1928. It opened on January the 5th, 1928, but the movie industry had changed quite a bit. The Michigan Theater opened as a silent movie theater and only 18 months after it opened, it turned into -- so it did silent films in vaudeville, and then 18 months after it opened, the sound system was installed, so it became a primary place for talking pictures. They also did touring Broadway shows and ballets and things like that, in addition to the movies. Mostly, it was movies at that time. Then when television came in the 1950s, it really negatively affected... People talk about these days, like, Oh streaming, this or that is going to kill the movies. Well, the thing that really killed the movies was television, and between 1948, when movie attendance hit its peak, and 1964, movie attendance fell from just under five billion admissions a year in 1948 to under one billion admissions in 1964 and that wasn't the nadir in terms of movie attendance. That nadir came in 1970. But starting in 1964, the trend line for people going to movies at movie theaters started to go back up. It continued to climb up until the mid-2010s, and then it flattened out, and then it dipped down with COVID, of course, and still hasn't quite recovered. But that was the time period when people were like, Oh my goodness, and the Michigan Theater was significantly changed in 1956. They put a mid-century modern marquee on the front of the theater, the outer lobby had a mid-century modern look to it. They covered up all the 1920s plaster work, and gold leaf and all that stuff. Then in the grand foyer in the theater, they just over-painted it to dampen down the decorative qualities of the 1920s. Because if you think of a movie palace, which is rococo in the way that it presents itself, the mid-century modern is the opposite. It's sleek and glassy and marbley, and those things, and so the aesthetic of the theater was changed significantly. Then the Michigan Theater was built for chamber music. That's the thing that really surprises people because when the theater opened, there was an orchestra and the organ, and so it wasn't designed for sound motion pictures, and modern sound motion pictures require acoustically dead space to play in, but the Michigan Theater was an acoustically live space. It took a while for people to understand that a Broadway show in the Michigan theater works really well. In fact, you feel like you're on Broadway because a lot of those Broadway houses were built in the 20s and the size of the stage and the acoustical qualities of it really fit with the Broadway. Then ultimately, the Ann Arbor Symphony moved to the Michigan Theater as a primary concert hall because they finally understood the natural acoustics here are really remarkable. That's why I first focused on performing arts, bringing in performing arts and community organizations and things like that. Then in 1984, the company Classic Film Theater that had run the theater or run the movies couldn't quite pay their bills, and we had to kick them out, so that we literally took over their film program that they had already booked and then just continued it. It was in 1984, with no experience of booking films at all... I had taken a film class from Frank Beaver and who was at the time, a really well known film teacher at the University of Michigan. Then I took another American Studies film class. But again, my undergraduate degree was taking all wacky classes, including calculus and physics and everything else, as well as the art classes. Anyway, that's how I got into it. There was a lot of on-the-job learning in terms of booking films. But it suited me pretty well, all things considered. But it's not something that I aspired to do at the beginning. It really was the performing arts aspect to it. And I think that that's in a sense what I helped bring up was the fact that the community, the Civic Theater, and the Ann Arbor Symphony, the University Musical Society, the theater department and all the music school and all the other... We have a tremendous number of users that are part of the University, whether we're showing a film series for Japanese studies or Korean studies or the Weiser Center Eastern European film series, and all things like that that we do, and that's been exciting and educational for me.
- [00:24:59] ELIZABETH SMITH: You talked a little bit about the renovation history. What did it look like in 1982 after they had just done this big renovation in...79?
- [00:25:08] RUSS COLLINS: Well, they didn't do any renovation in 79. In 82, they passed a code improvement millage, which essentially replaced the boilers and did some other safety work. There wasn't any aesthetic change in the theater. The first community-based capital campaign happened in 1986 and 1987, and that's where the Grand foyer was restored and part of the auditorium, the main floor part. Then between 1998 and 2002, we did a second large capital campaign that finished doing the decorative part of the theater, the balcony space and other spaces. We added the screening room at that point. Well, we added the screening room in 1999, so that was part of that campaign, and so those were the two really transformative capital campaigns. We had another campaign in response to a Kresge Foundation grant of $1,000,000, which was an institutional capitalization fund that allowed us to do things like start the Cinetopia Film Festival and actually grow an organization that we started called the Art House Convergence, which was a professional society for independent community-based mission-driven cinemas in North America. That actually grew to be quite big, and we spun it off a couple of years ago. Those were the campaigns that we did, and then obviously we did a campaign around the state theater starting in 2014 and finishing in 2017. Those are the things that created the physical transformation of the Michigan theater and the state theater.
- [00:27:00] ELIZABETH SMITH: When you started, it was still that mid-century modern look?
- [00:27:03] RUSS COLLINS: Yeah, it had the mid-century modern look, the triangular marquee. That triangular marquee actually stayed on until 2001 and we restored the outer lobby, we moved the doors and put a box office in that wasn't in the original position, but it had an appearance, very similar to the 1920s. That mid-century modern part... One of the things that was the best advice we ever got from an architect is that when we were first looking at doing the work in 1986 and 1987, there was a lot of interest in the board of doing the facade. The people knew Well, there's a new organization in charge, and it's all going to be different, and a couple of years before that, the Goodyears building down on Main Street had been bought. It was no longer the department store. That's actually where I had my first job was at Goodyears when I was 16. But they had restored the facade, but they'd left the interior all torn up and ended up being a failure because although it looked good on the outside, it wasn't practically usable on the inside, and they said, Well, people see the outside, and it's nice if you make the change there, but they live and experience what it is you're doing on the inside. You really need to put your money in making the production where the audience sits and the comfort of the audience and the beauty of the interior space, your primary focus. And they were exactly right. We didn't do the facade. We didn't do the outer lobby. We did the grand foyer and the theater, which were connected. That was very, very good advice that we got from what became Quinn Evans Architects.
- [00:29:00] AMY CANTU: As long as we're talking about the interior, I don't want to forget about the Barton Organ. Can you talk a little bit about that and its history and involvement with the theater?
- [00:29:11] RUSS COLLINS: The Barton Organ was the catalyst to having the Michigan Theater saved. It was the hobby of several folks as we talked about earlier. But the theater organ was originally installed in 1928. It was essentially an early 20th-century synthesizer. They didn't have synthesizers at that point. But they did have organs that could imitate clarinets and flutes and trumpets and those things, as well as violins, and so there was originally a 12-piece orchestra plus the Organ. If you were in New York City, you would have a 100-piece orchestra. If you were in Detroit, you'd have a 60-piece orchestra. If you were in Ann Arbor, you had a 12-piece orchestra. [LAUGHTER] The organ was particularly important because it filled in instruments that were either missing in the 12-piece orchestra or it supplemented the violin sound so that you got the edge of an actual violin playing, but a lot of the background dynamic -- or the heft -- came from the organ sounds. The organ also had practical percussion, so it has a snare drum and a bass drum and cymbals, and all other things that are actually being hit, xylophones and chimes and bells and all other things that are done by the organ. That was standard equipment for a 1920s movie palace. Silent films are never silent. They just had music that was performed live. If it was in a very small theater like in Dexter, it would be a piano or some of the Nickelodeons that were in Ann Arbor back in the teens and early 20s, if it was a movie palace of some degree. And again, the Michigan Theater is a medium-sized movie palace, and it had a very nice organ by the Barton Oregon Company from Oshkosh Wisconsin. [LAUGHTER] But by the late 1960s and '70s, the theater fortunately had not removed the organ because most of those organs were removed in the 50s and 60s. They were complete maintenance headaches. As you were getting 60, 70-years-old, they just were worn out to a large degree. But the original manager of the Michigan Theater a guy by the name of Gerry Hoag, who started on January the 5th, 1928, and his last day, I think, was January 5th, 1974, which is the year I graduated from [LAUGHTER] high school. He was there for 46 years. He protected the organ. He also provided permission to those volunteers that wanted to save the Michigan Theater organ or restore the Michigan Theater organ. It was Henry Aldrich, who was attracted to that organ along with a lot of other folks, and all of those folks from the Motor City Theater Organ Society, the Ann Arbor chapter, were involved with saving the theater, not just Henry, but there were a dozen or so folks that were involved there. Those volunteers had restored the organ. They continued to restore the organ for many years after that. We ultimately got a professional organ restorer -- Renaissance Pipe Organ, which is an Ann Arbor Company --to completely rebuild the organ a few years ago. The organ plays probably better than it did when it was put in 1928, as a result of that excellent work by Renaissance Pipe Organ, David Hufford, in particular. The organ has been a really important part of what we do. We're one of the few places in the country that has the original organ in the original location. A lot of times theaters have removed the organ, and then if they're non-profit like the Michigan, they'll find another organ and put it in there, but it's not the original organ. But we have the original organ that was never removed and has been cared for for the almost 100 years that operated.
- [00:33:35] AMY CANTU: It's amazing.
- [00:33:35] RUSS COLLINS: It's a fascinating thing. It's played almost daily. We have a professional team of organ players headed by Andy Rogers, and Henry Aldrich is still playing the organ on occasion. It's a real gift.
- [00:33:52] ELIZABETH SMITH: Speaking about just technology changes in general, you still have the organ, which is great. That's a relic from the past, but you've also implemented a lot of changes. What has changed in the technology that you use day to day and how has that changed operations?
- [00:34:10] RUSS COLLINS: Well, that's really interesting. If you think about the first 50 years from 1928 - 1978, they went from a silent film situation to a talking picture situation to a situation where television was really undermining the audience. There was reaction to all of that along the way, the orchestra was fired in 1929. They kept the organist and the organ playing. The sound equipment was installed, and then there were several versions of sound equipment that were used. Originally, there was a record disc that provided the sound. That was replaced by the sound on film, which is the system that they still occasionally use today, but before the digital era for sure. Then we were an early non-profit adapter of digital cinema. We put in a digital cinema projector when up came out, the Pixar film Up. That seemed to be the future. At this point, almost everything that you see at the Michigan and State Theater are off of digital projectors. When I started in November of 1982, again, I had done things the previous November, but started working in 1982. There was a IBM selectric typewriter. That was the most advanced [LAUGHTER] technical thing that we had. There essentially were not...business was not commonly using personal computers. Apple, they existed at that time, but they weren't widely adopted by especially small businesses. I don't remember the year, but it was probably 5 - 7 years after I started, it would have been the late 80s, I asked the board for a computer, and they said, Ah, we just don't have the money. So I bought a PC Junior, which was an economy-priced computer. I started working on that, which I used more as a typewriter, and then we could use Lotus 1, 2, 3, which was the spreadsheets [LAUGHTER] at the time.
- [00:36:42] AMY CANTU: I remember that. [LAUGHTER]
- [00:36:42] RUSS COLLINS: Then a couple of years after that, the theater bought its first computer. It was basically a basic IBM personal computer. We had a laser printer and an extra storage device, and the whole thing cost over $10,000. It was not a super [LAUGHTER] sophisticated system, but to have a hard drive in a computer, which was outside of the computer, was a pretty big deal. The laser printer was actually probably a good idea because at that point in time they lasted quite a long time, and they were much better than a dot matrix printer, which was the other printer at the time. Anyway, that was the office technology. Now we're like any office everybody has a computer, and things are networked and all that stuff. But there was a big change in movie exhibition between a film strip projector, a celluloid projector, and the digital projectors. It just seemed to me that that's the way things were going to go. A lot of our peers were going No, no, no, they'll never...it's all film, film, film. And it was like, Well... Like every movie in the early 0's and into the teens, most movies, were shot on film, but they were edited digitally. They took the film image and they scanned it in and then edited it digitally and then reprinted it on film, because it was easier to edit in a digital format. It just seemed to me that cutting out the middle person or the middle technology of the film capture only made sense. Then if you're going to do that, you might as well just show it digitally, especially if all the files had already been changed into digital and then changed back to cellulite. We weren't the earliest adopter of digital, but we were an early adopter for an independent cinema.
- [00:39:04] RUSS COLLINS: Before that, we added a 70-millimeter projector with magnetic sound tracks and those are spectacular projectors. We're probably going to get another set of 70 millimeters. The 70-millimeter film projector that we had, we only had one of them and these days you need two of them because you're only playing archival prints, and so they don't want you to make them up in a gigantic platter. They want you to play them off the reels that they're shipped on. Anyway, this is a lot of boring detail, I think.
- [00:39:38] AMY CANTU: No.
- [00:39:40] RUSS COLLINS: But technology has been important, and the newspapers going away was another big technological change that I think everybody's still adapting to. Ann Arbor used to be a fun place to promote things because the local population didn't look at television. For Ann Arbor events, they looked in the newspaper. You had everybody's focus on the newspaper as the primary source of information. Of course, you mailed stuff and put in radio ads and those things. But it was fun that the Ann Arbor Observer and the Ann Arbor News were really where people got the schedule and decided what they were going to do in advance. With the Ann Arbor News -- still around, but in a much different configuration and readership dynamic than it was in the heyday -- it is much more complicated to get the word out to the Ann Arbor audience. Digital media is so voluminous in terms of how you receive it that sometimes it's hard to sift through and get the things that you're interested in. In bigger cities, now there's many places that people can look. How do you attract the best way to do it? In the mid-century era, television was the way that that came out, but not in Ann Arbor. It was still the newspaper. That was a weird and fortuitous benefit that has now gone away. I think everyone is struggling a little bit with that.
- [00:41:20] AMY CANTU: You talked a bit about the live shows that you brought, getting familiar with organizing film and presenting film. Can you talk a little bit about the relationship that the Michigan had with the Film Festival -- the Ann Arbor Film Festival -- and also later you introduced the Cinetopia, which you mentioned a few minutes ago. Can you talk a little bit about the film festival?
- [00:41:41] RUSS COLLINS: Sure. The Ann Arbor Film Festival is an experimental film festival. When you go to the Ann Arbor Film Festival, you don't typically see what people think of as narrative movies. It's a story that has a beginning middle and end. Now, they do some of that, but mostly they're dedicated to artists who are exploring the aesthetic boundaries of cinema, digital cinema, celluloid cinema, and all of those things. It was established in 1983 on the campus of the University of Michigan by Charles [George] Manupelli, and it was a very much a beat generation and subsequent hippie 60s dynamic to it. There was a lot of anti-establishment kind of karma. There was a lot of controversial material, both in terms of political documentaries and nudity and things like that that you didn't typically see in motion pictures in those early days of the Ann Arbor Film Festival. But it ran on the University of Michigan Film campus until 1979, so 1963 and then 1979. Then in 1980, again, before I started at the Michigan theater, it moved to the Michigan Theater. I think a lot of that had to do with the fact that the classic film theater was there and the Michigan Theater was looking desperately for people to use the theater and get some attention. Since 1980, the Michigan Theaters hosted the Ann Arbor Film Festival, and so we have a very long and deep relationship with them. They do all the curation. They're not a subset of the Michigan Theater. They're their own business, but it is a great honor and pleasure to have them. A lot of people don't understand what the Ann Arbor Film Festival is, and they hear "Ann Arbor Film Festival" and then they go expecting to see the things that you would see at the Toronto Film Festival or the Venice Film Festival. It is a genre festival for experimental films. We started Cinetopia to create the kind of festival that people are more familiar with, that is primarily focused on narrative, story films that have a beginning, middle, and end, and that allow us to show films that are good films that we see when I went to film festivals. You'd see a lot of films that never got released, and you'd go, why? It allows us to show some of those films. It also allows us to do previews of films that subsequently get released or actually help filmmakers get their film released by playing it in festivals and having a track record on that level. We saw that it was important for the community, for the industry, and for the aesthetic appreciation, which Ann Arbor is very good at supporting.
- [00:44:54] ELIZABETH SMITH: Speaking of aesthetic appreciation, the State Theater, when it was renovated, you -- well, not you, but the foundation or whatever -- everyone decided to decorate it as Art Deco, original carpet, sconces. It's a very specific design in there. How did you go about choosing that and how was it engineered?
- [00:45:17] RUSS COLLINS: Well, so the State Theatre was originally designed by C. Howard Crane, who was a very famous theater architect. He designed the Fox Theater in Detroit. He designed Orchestra Hall in Detroit. He designed what's now called the Michigan Opera Theater, which was originally the Capitol Theater. He designed hundreds and hundreds of theaters around the United States, including a couple of Broadway houses and a famous LA movie palace or a couple of famous LA movie palaces. Again, all over the country all over the world. We wanted to honor C. Howard Crane's original design, which was Art Deco. It was very much Art Deco. We put the original pattern carpeting back in, which was Art Deco on acid. It's a very unusual but very distinctive carpeting, and then we put back wall sconces that were replicas of the original wall sconces that were in the theaters. What was left of the State Theatre for us to restore was the exterior. We put the marquee back into function and replaced all the neon and really spiffed it up. That was done, again, by a local company, Chalou Signs, and Mr. Neon is Mark Chalou. We're very proud to have that. Then the interior, what was the main floor of the theater is currently a Target store. It had been turned into an Urban Outfitters store, the balcony was kept for cinema. But the balcony was really not a good place to watch a movie. You sat sideways to look at the movies. We wanted to make an excellent movie going experience. We recalibrated the two theaters that sit on the structure of the balcony, so they have very good view lines to the screen, and the image is really excellent. Then we added two screens that essentially were between where the front of the balcony was and where the proscenium arch of the theater so they float over what was the front part of the seats on the main floor of the auditorium. Again, there's no main floor there. There's the Target store underneath. It was a big challenge to come up with a way not to interrupt at that time the Urban Outfitter business, because they didn't want to close down for even an hour. There was a lot of overnight work that was done there. Then in each of the theaters, we wanted to capture elements of the original design, and so we had one of the theaters has an accordion interior, like the exterior brick of the theater. One of them has a decorative pattern and that's reminiscent of the marquee, the vertical marquee, the State Theatre marquee. We used color palettes that were used in the lobby space, and then the lobby space, we actually restored as best we could to its original design, because that lobby space, which was a mezzanine lobby at that time, was really very distinctive in set seats, bank curved seats. We took one of the bank curved seat sets and actually put a concession stand in where there originally were seats, but there was an opening there that made sense. One of the things that we had to lose, unfortunately, were the original restrooms. The women's restroom had Art Deco furniture in it and Art Deco makeup mirror, and it was pretty cool, but a lot of that stuff had been painted over, and you couldn't really benefit from that. But the men's room was almost like a steam room. It wasn't a steam room, but it was tiled on the inside, and it had benches in there. You almost expected the steam to come up and have guys sitting on the steam room. But it was a pretty cool design. But we needed that space for other things for the concession stand for one, and so we weren't able to preserve that, but we did preserve that mezzanine office space. Then we added an elevator. We added an escalator so that the space became accessible because up until that renovation that was finished in 2017, that space was not accessible at all. We're very proud of that.
- [00:50:13] AMY CANTU: How did programming change once the state was brought on board in its new configuration? It must have changed quite a bit when you were handling both the Michigan and the State. Can you talk a little bit about that?
- [00:50:26] RUSS COLLINS: Well, we started running the State Theatre program in 1999. The State Theatre building is owned by a local set of owners. They're not -- it's not a major corporation, it's not out of town owners. They're local folks and thank goodness for that because they were wonderful to work with, they ARE wonderful to work with. They bought the building from Tom Borders, who originally bought it from the Butterfield company, or actually, it wasn't the Butter-- it was the company that bought the theater, Kerasotes is after Butterfield bought it. We'd run the theater since 1999, and so that was a two screen theater that we did programs in. We'd even worked cooperatively with a operator before that in terms of moving films over and things like that. There wasn't a real radical change. It's just the quality of the space is much better. Now, there's more screens which gives us a little bit more flexibility. But, we had the experience of just having the Michigan Theater adding the screening room, which allowed us a consistent cinema performance. Then in 1999, adding the State Theatre as a way to have continuous commercial and when you say commercial, people usually think of blockbusters, but the art house product is also a commercial product, but not nearly as popular. I think, since 2017, the big difference has been COVID. But before COVID, it allowed us to program to the neighborhood a little bit better so that we could have a few more commercial films that might be appealing to students. But our core purpose and mission is to expose the community to a wide variety of cinema, international cinema, documentary cinema, classic cinema, and all of that stuff. One of the things that I don't think the community appreciates is there is not a better combination of theaters in the country that can show silent films in an authentic, silent movie palace that has an excellent screening room like the screening room attached to the Michigan Theater. High quality theater that was designed to the optimal, acoustic and visual dynamics of the time that it was built and then a four screen repertory theater like the State Theatre. I'm not saying that New York doesn't have better film programming than Ann Arbor. New York definitely does, so does Paris and San Francisco and a lot of other places. But those are multiple presenters from the Museum of Modern Art to films at Lincoln Center to Film Forum in New York, all those different organizations. We try to, in one organization, put on a film program that is competitive with those big city programs. In terms of the quality of presentation, you're better at the Michigan and State Theatre than you are in almost any other theater in a big city. Because the real estate prices there are so high that a lot of times you're going to the most interesting films in a really small theater that is not optimal in terms of its performance characteristics.
- [00:54:13] AMY CANTU: Well plus you are doing all of this while the big theaters around town are closing. Some reopening, closing. Briarwood. Quality 16 is gone now.
- [00:54:24] RUSS COLLINS: Yeah.
- [00:54:24] AMY CANTU: It's been a challenge, I imagine.
- [00:54:26] RUSS COLLINS: Oh, absolutely. So when I started, there was the Ann Arbor Theater, which was originally the fifth forum. There was the State Theatre, there was the Campus Theater, and those were all downtown theaters in addition to the Michigan. Back in the early '60s, there were two theaters on Main Street as well, the Orpheum and the Wuerth and in the '50s, there was the Whitney Theater that was torn down. It was originally Ann Arbor's opera house that was built in 1871. The Fox Village has closed, the Wayside has closed over time, obviously those downtown theaters, except for the Michigan and State. Historic preservation is really the core of why the Michigan Theater Foundation was formed, and it was to save the theater. The State Theatre was an extension of that dynamic, that historic preservation dynamic. The program opportunity is outstanding, but I also think that there's a certain virtue in the preservation of monumental architectural spaces like the Michigan and State Theatre.
- [00:55:46] ELIZABETH SMITH: In addition to all this work you've done with the theater, you also did 30 years of cinema chat with David Fair at EMU?
- [00:55:53] RUSS COLLINS: Yes!
- [00:55:55] ELIZABETH SMITH: You taught film studies at EMU, could you talk a little bit about that?
- [00:55:58] RUSS COLLINS: Oh, I taught film studies. I taught film appreciation for 10 years at Eastern, and I really, really enjoyed that. They say the best way to learn things is to teach it and so I had taken the film appreciation course, a very similar one, at the University of Michigan. Again, Henry Aldrich helped me provide that opportunity, and boy, you learn a lot. You also are kept on your toes by the students. When I had to give that up I really missed it then, and to a certain degree, I still miss that opportunity to work with young minds, young people, different expectations and to try to bring them up in terms of the understanding of cinema and what goes into it. People -- they don't have a three-dimensional view of what cinema is really about. Cinema, like music, is something that you don't have to study to really enjoy and even be passionate about. But most people understand that there's a language that goes on between music. It's a written language, and if you can't read it, it doesn't matter, you can still like music. The same thing is true with movies: There's a language of cinema. But people, because we all have movie cameras in our pockets these days, they just see movies as something that you point and shoot. And it's not, it's very regimented and the elements of film are very important to understand, or it's very easy to get manipulated by the media arts. And so that was a challenge and a rewarding one to be able to teach that.
- [00:57:45] AMY CANTU: You mentioned Art House Convergence. Can you just tell us a little bit more about what that was and your involvement and where it spun off?
- [00:57:52] RUSS COLLINS: Sure. Well, the Michigan Theater back in 2006 was invited by the Sundance Film Festival as one of a dozen art houses around the country that they wanted to honor and bring us all together and so we went out there. Boy, it was a terrific experience, and I worked with Sundance to try to get them to invite us back in 2007, which they did. Again, it was a really fabulous experience and Sundance wasn't going to do this -- they had lots of other things that were doing -- and so we took that energy that we got from those experiences and started the Art House Convergence in 2008, which was this gathering of independent community-based mission-driven independent theaters from around the country, starting with those 12 theaters that Sundance pulled together. It grew and grew and grew until 2020 was the last conference that we did, the Michigan Theater did. There were over 750 people that came to that so it turned into a major gathering of community-based mission-driven cinema and distributors and filmmakers and all kinds of things. Then with COVID coming on and with the growth of that and with other changes that were going on, we thought that spinning it off would be a good idea. The members, or the constituents of the Art House Convergence, wanted it spun off as well. It's an independent organization that's based in Chicago at this point. They did their first post-COVID conference this particular summer in 2024 and so that continues. They had about 700 at their first conference after COVID so I thought that was very, very good as well.
- [00:59:47] AMY CANTU: It's going. Great!
- [00:59:48] RUSS COLLINS: Yeah.
- [00:59:49] ELIZABETH SMITH: What are you most proud of?
- [00:59:53] RUSS COLLINS: Well, my grandchildren. [LAUGHTER]. I got eight of them right now. But in terms of the Michigan Theater, walking in every day to go to work is like most workplaces: You open the door, you go in. As library people, you probably have this similar kind of experience. Four days a week, you walk in, and this is where you work. But one day a week or maybe two days a week, you go, magic happens here. People's lives are changed. And there's a beauty in a public space like a library, and there's a beauty in... You know, the Michigan Theater is designed to be that kind of really spectacular space. So you walk in every day and you go to your office, you do your work. But just knowing that the theater had kind of lost its place before the theater was saved, and to know that it's now considered an iconic part of Ann Arbor, both in terms of the streets-cape and in terms of the programs that are there, and to know that lives are changed by walking into the Michigan and State Theatre and experiencing the concerts and shows and theatricals, and movies that are there. I didn't make those happen. Those happened as a result of the work of artists and community folks that provided the money and the inspiration to make those things happen. But to have had a hand in it and to have helped guide it, is humbling and magnificent. And I'm tearing up right now.
- [01:01:48] AMY CANTU: Well, thank you so much Russ, and congratulations on your upcoming retirement.
- [01:01:53] RUSS COLLINS: Well, thank you.
- [01:01:54] AMY CANTU: And for all the work you've done in this community for the past several decades.
- [01:01:57] RUSS COLLINS: I appreciate that, and it's been a great pleasure and honor.
- [01:02:07] AMY CANTU: AADL Talks To is a production of the Ann Arbor District Library.
Media
September 16, 2024
Length: 01:02:17
Copyright: Creative Commons (Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share-alike)
Rights Held by: Ann Arbor District Library
Downloads
Subjects
Interview
Ann Arbor Film Festival
Ann Arbor Public Schools
Art House Convergence
Barton Organ
Butterfield Theaters Inc
Cinetopia
Classic Film Theater (Film Group)
Film Festivals
Cinema
Goodyear Building
Huron High School - Students
Historic Preservation
Marquee Arts
Michigan Theater
Michigan Theater Foundation
Michigan Theater Building
MUSKET
Quinn Evans Architects
Renaissance Pipe Organ
Remodeling & Renovation
State Theatre
Friars (Musical Group)
Vaudeville
Youth for Understanding (YFU)
AADL Talks To
Russ Collins
Andrew Rogers
C. Howard Crane
Charles Hill
David Fair
Edward Downing
Frank Beaver
Gerald Hoag
Greg Mazur
Henry Aldridge
Julia Broxholm
Lou Belcher
Margaret Towsley
Mark Chalou
Ray Messler
Scott Clark
Ann Arbor 200