Frank Uhle Talks to Dallas Kenny about Campus Cinema and the Matrix Theatre

Fri, 10/10/2025 - 8:54am

When: November 21, 2024

Dallas Kenny currently runs a global education consulting business. But back in the 1970s, he was committed to Ann Arbor's cinema culture. Kenny helped found the non-profit New World Media Project, the umbrella organization for the New World Film Cooperative, which showed film on and around the University of Michigan campus. It oversaw Venus Productions, its printing and promotional arm, and the Matrix Theatre at 605 E. William Street, where New York Pizza Depot is located today. Frank Uhle, author of Cinema Ann Arbor: How Campus Rebels Forged a Singular Film Culture, talks with Kenny about his unique role in Ann Arbor's cinema culture, from his collaboration with other campus groups to promote community programming, to the rise and fall of the Matrix Theatre. 
 

Check out the Dallas Kenny Collection of historical film posters, schedules, and other documents. 

Read Frank's book here or check it out from our collection.

Transcript

• [00:00:00] FRANK UHLE: Welcome to Dallas Kenny and his daughter Maya, who are here from Japan. You normally live in Japan, but you're visiting for the holidays, which is nice. It was great to be able to catch you in person and meet you. You reached out to me, and I really appreciate that about your days in the campus film society scene and with the Matrix Theatre, which you founded and ran here. Again, my interest is, I wrote the book called Cinema Ann Arbor -- which Fifth Avenue Press did amazing work in laying out and supporting, and then the University of Michigan Press published -- about campus cinema, the film societies that existed on campus from the late 20s, early 30s, up until the late 90s when everything turned into home video and streaming and things where people didn't want to gather to see an old movie necessarily or not enough people would gather to see an old movie to pay the cost of renting it. But Dallas was here in town. He was running one of the most active film societies called the New World Film Cooperative. I guess I want to start with asking you a couple of questions because when we talked, you told me about when you grew up in Michigan. Tell me about your high school years and some of that stuff.
• [00:01:22] DALLAS KENNY: Sure. Well, I was born in 1951, which means I graduated from high school in 1969, which is the height of the Vietnam War, so a lot of activism was going on around. But I was in a small town called Pine Run, maybe about 200 people. It wasn't incorporated. There was no mayor or anything like that. There was just a bar, a church, and an automotive supply store that was on the Dixie Highway between Flint and Saginaw. But in Clio, which was about a mile and a half away, they had a small theater there and that was my first introduction to going out and seeing movies. But also because we are centrally located in the middle of the Tri-Cities in Michigan, the off-Broadway musical tent came there and set up off-Broadway productions out of New York and would give the locals free tickets to go see that. As a child, I was able to see Peter Pan and the King and I with the original cast, and so on. I think that wowed me and got my start to thinking about movies and so on.
• [00:02:31] FRANK UHLE: Then you came to U of M as an undergrad in 1969. Did you go to college right away or no?
• [00:02:38] DALLAS KENNY: Actually, no. I went to work at different things for about 10 years. Now, as a very late starting freshman, when I was like, 28 or so. I started as a freshman at Wayne State in Detroit. I eventually came back to Ann Arbor to do my PhD after I finished at Wayne State. After a couple years after graduating, I did come back to Ann Arbor because I knew about Ann Arbor, and I visited here. My older sister went here when I was a child, grade school, around that time. I always knew about the culture in that way over there in Ann Arbor. When I came, I was living in Northern California in San Francisco in that area and became more interested in film back then after high school. Then I came to Ann Arbor, and I was still maybe a late teenager, and I started the film society here when I came back here. At that time, I think it was 1971, we started in the People's Ballroom, and it burned down, I think, about a year later, and that's when we moved into the Modern Languages Building.
• [00:03:54] FRANK UHLE: What was that film society called, the first one?
• [00:03:56] DALLAS KENNY: It was called The Collective Eye Film Series.
• [00:03:59] FRANK UHLE: What kind of films were you showing?
• [00:04:02] DALLAS KENNY: It was still around the time of the Vietnam War, so we were showing some anti-war movies, but also some socially commentary type movies like of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck and things like that, and some alternative old classic movies that were cheap to rent out, and counter-culture type movies.
• [00:04:28] FRANK UHLE: I remember seeing an ad in the Daily for that series, and it was something like you were showing a Charlie Chaplin movie, but before it was this MC5 short John and Leni Sinclair made.
• [00:04:42] DALLAS KENNY: Eclectic mix. Probably reflected the confused state of my teenage mind at the time. Your excellent book that you put out really goes into the depth of these other film societies that have been here a long time, and people much older than me, and they had a broad breadth of experience in film and knew about film and history of film and filmmakers and so on. I was coming more from Vietnam anti-war movement and my interest in film was eclectic in that I had that early experience when I was living in Pine Run. But later, my sister moved to New York, and I went to visit her when I was still in high school, and her boyfriend was a film editor for Pumping Iron with Arnold Schwarzenegger and was doing some documentary on Simon and Garfunkel, and he had a projector room built into his apartment in New York City. I viewed some of that stuff, and he gave me his pass from MOMA, and I got to do this stuff as a kid out of the cornfields with short hair coming from Michigan. I got kind of wowed. I wanted to see more. When I was there, I saw a double feature of Animal Crackers with the Marx Brothers and Cartouche with Jean Paul Belmondo, a French film. It opened my mind to things I wanted to do. Then after high school, when I went to the Bay area, I saw some Kurosawa films and saw foreign films I'd never imagined existed before so I became more interested.
• [00:06:24] FRANK UHLE: By the time you got to Ann Arbor, what led you to start the film society? Were you involved with, like, I think the People's Ballroom, some of the John Sinclair people were involved with that.
• [00:06:37] DALLAS KENNY: When I was in Northern, the North Bay Area in California, I crossed paths with the White Panther Party that was a chapter of this local the national organization, which is based here, and I actually became editor of their newspaper and learned how to lay out ads and do copy editing and stuff like that when I was still a late teenager after high school there. When I came here, I touched base with them, and Pun Plamondon was working for me for a while in the Matrix Theatre. But then they spun off and did something else, a Rainbow Peoples Party. I was no longer active with them but I knew some of the people, at least coincidentally, like John Sinclair, not as a friend, but I knew them in terms of contacting and talking to them and stuff and renting the People's Ballroom and they would in their Ann Arbor Sun newspaper, they'd run features about us, and our film co-op and so on.
• [00:07:42] FRANK UHLE: One of the great things I just want to mention: Amy, sitting next to me, has helped digitize the Ann Arbor Sun, and it's available online, so you can look up those articles and ads and everything. You can look at a PDF of it, and it's searchable, too. What wonderful service the library has provided of our cultural history.
• [00:08:03] DALLAS KENNY: They moved in actually to our building, the top floor, second floor of the Matrix. I was renting out office space to them. My office was right next to them. David Fenton and the other people, the Sun and their layout tables and stuff were all up there. I got to interact with them. Also, I could use their light tables and stuff to lay out some of our film schedules and stuff and some of their artists too, we'd pick up -- we didn't get, like, Gary Grimshaw or something like that -- but some of the other artists had working for him were able to do our film posters and whatnot from time to time. I was very lucky. They weren't so lucky maybe with me, but it was fun.
• [00:08:45] FRANK UHLE: It's interesting how things evolved. I mean, you started doing the film series, but you were not a student, and they were doing this, People's Ballroom stuff, and then Ann Arbor Sun, and then somehow you decided to open the Matrix Theatre. Well, what happened first? Did the Collective Eye series move to campus and then became New World?
• [00:09:12] DALLAS KENNY: Right, so we got some student members, and they became the official officials of the film group, and they had some roles in it, but they turned over a lot because they were students coming and going. Basically me and a couple of friends, we kept it going year after year and we went through a longer cycle. We were here '72 to '75,76, I believe, when the Matrix opened, it was only open about seven months, and that ended in the final bankruptcy of the whole thing because we ran out of cash. We no longer had access to big auditoriums on campus. The Matrix Theatre, I think it was only like 100 and some seats, so it's pretty small.
• [00:10:04] FRANK UHLE: The Collective Eye, I'm remembering the date, I think that was December of '72 when that fire happened in the People's Ballroom. I think it was December of '72 or maybe it was December '71. I think it was at the end of the year.
• [00:10:20] DALLAS KENNY: December '72, I wrote down a few notes.
• [00:10:22] FRANK UHLE: Good. That was the precipitating factor to really -- because I feel like you showed some movies at the People's Ballroom, but when you moved into campus, you really took off. You were showing way more films.
• [00:10:37] DALLAS KENNY: I think we were the first one to really get deep into the second run. The first runs went to theaters first, like The Godfather, whatever, but a few months later, it would be released in non-theatrical release, so we were, like, the first film group to bring in those big name films which had really large draws. Probably during that time, we were probably bringing in more people than all the other film groups put together and what they would do is they brought in we also brought in some interesting art films and historical films but it wouldn't be unusual for we'd have meetings with Cinema II, and Ann Arbor Film Co-op, and they'd negotiate who's going to do what titles and I'd be booking things like crazy from these film catalogs we got from New York, as they would be, too. But they had a history of doing these Lubitsch films or certain directors from the past. If I saw a really good -- I, for one, I'd say we'll show this one, and they said, We show that every year. It's part of our film thing. I just say, Okay, just go ahead and take it. I'd be giving films back to them, and they'd offer to trade stuff back to us, and so we worked out things that way.
• [00:11:55] FRANK UHLE: That was how when I was a member of Cinema II -- I started in 1979 for about 10 years -- so that was how we operated. We would vote for titles, pick them, and then the other groups might have had some of the same titles so we have this swap meeting where we would say, okay, you get this one, but I get this one thing.
• [00:12:14] DALLAS KENNY: This sounds like it continued.
• [00:12:17] FRANK UHLE: You started out. Again, this is a very much more politically active time on campus. You also started a free documentary film series, I believe.
• [00:12:30] DALLAS KENNY: That was where a lot of our money went, like, the extra money we were making went into International Film Festival because these were first-run international films from other countries, so they were kind of pricy, we were getting them through agencies in New York. They weren't just documentaries that had been around for 10 years that we were showing. We had first run films from Cuba that were not legally supposed to be shown in the US because the Treasury Department had sanctions against Cuba and in some other places they've been shown, they'd actually confiscated the films and stuff so we were in The Ugly multipurpose room, which was like an auditorium and so we had the doors barricaded during the joins in case federal agencies showed up to confiscate the films and stuff like that. They never did.
• [00:13:23] FRANK UHLE: Would those get good attendance?
• [00:13:26] DALLAS KENNY: It varied, but sometimes it was packed. It was standing room only, but we usually had a speaker. Sometimes it was a professor who specialized, like I think Michalowski was an anthropology professor and something to do with Latin America. When we had a film coming about the miners' struggle in Bolivia or something like that, I can't remember if that was the exact match for him, but he'd come and give a lecture about it. There'd usually be a presentation by someone, and there'd be a question and answer period afterwards. That was the pattern and we partnered with other organizations to the La Raza Legal Association, co sponsored some of the Latin American films we showed about Mexico. Actually, my roommate, as it turned out, I was living the life of a student, so in summer I'd sublet someplace, and one of my roommates happened to turn out to be the head of the La Raza student organization, Chicano from Texas. He says, Wow, I didn't know you're into this stuff, why don't we do some stuff together, so we just did it together and there was a group on Latin American issues too that I was active in at that time. I was continually active in these political things so while I was doing the movies, actually, about the time the Film Co-op was winding down and the Matrix was in its final throes. I became very active in the Ann Arbor Tenants Union, and there was a big strike in Ann Arbor at that time, and we got a big collective bargaining agreement with many of the largest landlords in Ann Arbor. I was on the organizing committee at that time, as well, so couldn't stay out of trouble. [LAUGHTER]
• [00:15:20] FRANK UHLE: Again, you were not a U of M student, and one of the things I wanted to ask you about a little bit later is relating to the university's attempt to crack down on the film societies. But this was kind of your job. You were just showing the movies and partly to pay your rent and things too.
• [00:15:40] DALLAS KENNY: Yeah, like I was staff, and we had at our peak, maybe about ten other staff because it became kind of a small conglomerate. We had a printing operation in the Student Union building that was Venus Press, and we were printing flyers sometimes for other activities and film groups around the campus. We had a multi-color mimeograph machine operation, and later, we created a nonprofit corporation, and Venus Press was part and the Matrix Theatre was like one wing of it, and New World Film Co-op. We had sometimes people just putting up flyers in every building, every small apartment from here to Ypsilanti. It was like a full-time job seven days a week because we were showing movies, basically seven days a week in the natural science building in the two MLB auditoriums plus The Ugly in the... It was like something much bigger than I was really qualified to do. It really required something that needs a business manager and an accountant and once we even had an IRS audit they sent an auditor we got a letter. You're going to be audited because you haven't filed taxes. I didn't know you had to file taxes. Everybody has to file them. We're going to come look at your books, and I said, Okay, come on such a date. We're upstairs in that Mark's coffee house above there with The Sun office next to us and stuff, and so funny. The guy came in, I said, It's good to see you, what do you want? I'll tell you anything you want to know. Anything I know. He said, Well, I want to see your books, I just brought this big cupboard box full of junk receipts and stuff we save half ass over the years and showed it to him. He says, Oh, my God. I've never seen anything like this. He said, Well, just give me a couple days so he couldn't really make head or tail of it. He just said, well, I'm going to just summarize what you have here on this form and say you owe us $500 or something like that, and he left, and that was the end. After that, I hired a student who was in the business school to be our account, and he actually had a ledger, and for the first time, we started to have books, but I admit I wasn't good at running a business that it grew into. It became too big for me.
• [00:18:02] FRANK UHLE: Again, those were momentous times. People were getting drafted and going off to fight in the war, and were you in parallel being drafted yourself if you're not a student?
• [00:18:16] DALLAS KENNY: Yeah. Because I hitchhiked to California immediately after graduating from Clio High School. I barely graduated because I helped shut down the high school a couple of times on student wide strikes there, and I moved to California, and my draft board ended up being Berkeley, which people are always invading and burning the files and stuff so my file kind of got lost, but I finally got a lottery number, in early 70s before I moved here, and the lottery number was high enough that I couldn't be drafted. Then shortly after Nixon finally ended the war.
• [00:18:54] FRANK UHLE: Think you were telling me, you got a letter, but then the timeline worked out in your favor.
• [00:19:06] DALLAS KENNY: Yeah, the lottery, I got a high number, so I wasn't... but I knew from my high school experience, we had people going all over the place from my high school because it wasn't really a college feeder school. It was a regional from rural Michigan, where you come from.
• [00:19:26] FRANK UHLE: Yeah, Coldwater.
• [00:19:27] DALLAS KENNY: Most of those people, they're bound for factories or most of them are not bound for U of M or higher life. A lot of those people never made it back, and so we were quite militant in terms of protesting at war, and we didn't think it was right, and we didn't think cause people our own age were graduating and they're being killed over there at a higher rate than they would be coming from upper middle class suburb or something, everybody has a student deferment type of thing.
• [00:20:01] FRANK UHLE: You luckily were, for your own sake, not going to be drafted, so you could run the film society, and that was going on, and at what point did you decide to try to open the Matrix Theatre?
• [00:20:13] DALLAS KENNY: Again, the dates were around 74, 75. The university decided to move to take over the film societies, all the finances, and so on, and we can get into maybe some of the possible reasons for that. But it looked like we were suddenly not going to get any more income. But our expenses, if we're going to continue to show a lot of films, would be about the same, so we rented the Mark's Coffeehouse.
• [00:20:47] FRANK UHLE: Which is over -- right in Ann Arbor now, is NYPD.
• [00:20:53] DALLAS KENNY: Yeah, too bad they moved the high ceiling and all that. I looked in there, and that's sad. We moved in there, and, again, there was going to be a construction project. It had to be renovated to be a theater. But, the construction company we hired -- which is an informal group of people, really, it wasn't like a big construction company -- were taking months and months to complete it, and in the meantime, we had to pay the high rent on that whole building to this campus management company, and the city would keep coming in and saying, Well, you need a fireproof ceiling because it's going to be public auditorium and like, three layers of drywall or something across, and oh, now you need a sprinkler system, too. We had to have, like, engineering makeup air, blueprints done for the whole ventilation system to be installed, and then there's all the plumbing that comes with um the basic plumbing plus the fire sprinkler system, and all had to be rewired, too, according to codes so it got into tens of thousands of dollars, which we no longer had, so it's a question I just roll it up and walk away at this point, or let's try to make a go of it. My bad judgement... I decide, Let's make a go of it, we've done it so far. We tried, but we couldn't keep up with those expenses, and finally... If it had opened like six months earlier, we might have been able to make it so we were borrowing money from a lot of generous people, and finally, we couldn't pay back loans that we had and stuff, and we filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, and that was the end of it.
• [00:22:54] FRANK UHLE: But you were telling me some great stories. While it was in operation, you had, like, a movie theater in there, and my understanding was Peter Wild, who worked on the campus film scene as a projectionist helped you design the projection system.
• [00:23:12] DALLAS KENNY: I met with Peter a couple times, and he was a magician, as you pointed out, your book. He did everything from major rock concerts to amazing duplicating what would have been a Dolby surround system just to his own technical know-how. All the things with Angel Hall, especially he did is incredible. He did a great job documenting that stuff so he brought back a lot of memories. I think what we had just set up there was very simple for him, and it was just a matter of setting up a couple of projectors and tuning them up, and it was a very small auditorium.
• [00:23:51] FRANK UHLE: But you're telling me that the bathroom was right underneath the screen?
• [00:23:55] DALLAS KENNY: Yeah. We had a grand opening. We thought everything was ready to go, and we had film critics come in, going to write for the Ann Arbor News and the Michigan Daily, and all these small-time VIPs were coming in to see this thing, and the bathroom were supposed to be downstairs, but we couldn't do it for code reasons and stuff. So it had to be on the first floor, but the only place to do it was behind the screen, off to the side on the screen. So some guy went in there to use the toilet, and the door didn't shut that well. So when the film came out people started watching and suddenly the door just kind of came open. The guy was sitting there on the toilet in front of everybody. I brought these theater seats from the Clio Theater which had been closed down for years and its dusty old seats in Clio, and I was able to salvage them, but they all had to be retrofitted reupholstered and the springs that make them come up and stay up, you know?
• [00:24:57] FRANK UHLE: Sure.
• [00:24:57] DALLAS KENNY: Some of them, they flip back up. There's all kind of theater seats. Every 10 or 15 minutes, like clockwork during the movie, one of the seats would just *thunk* fall down and the person his head would go down and be sitting on the floor. So it was *thunk* and 15 minutes *thunk." I think, Oh, my God. This is a horrible grand opening, just let me fly away to some other planet and never come back. I can't show my face again. But of course, I guess it turned out to be a fun episode for most people. It probably contributed to the place being known otherwise. [LAUGHTER]
• [00:25:34] FRANK UHLE: That's true. You said you were only open for about seven months, but you were continuing to show movies on campus and at the Matrix, but the Matrix also had live performers, too, right?
• [00:25:47] DALLAS KENNY: Yeah, we had the Firesign Theater come in, and there were some local theater talent, too, trying to remember the name. Yeah, so there were, like, a magic show. There were some local magic celebrities that came in and we had children's programming in the afternoons matinees. One of the magic acts was a half rock band, half magic act, and they came in and they did one show, and I don't know why we just let them do whatever they wanted to, and sometimes, it involved people throwing vegetables from the audience in this live theater type or interactive human theater or something, and this one show they took Empress Franks, that was a well known brand of hot dogs, and they plagiarized the label and they the title for the whole show, they call it Empress Rats asses and other tales, and so in the middle of going up to that, that Empress conglomerate tried to sue us because we're misappropriating and profaning the name of their hot dogs or whatever I knew nothing about it. It's just another weird act happening, and then finally, I realized I couldn't get anything out of someone that had nothing, so I just went away on.
• [00:27:23] FRANK UHLE: Was that the Django and Friends Road Show or possibly?
• [00:27:26] DALLAS KENNY: It was something friends Show Roadshow.
• [00:27:28] FRANK UHLE: Yeah, they were around here, the Friends Roadshow.
• [00:27:30] DALLAS KENNY: The Friend Roadshow. That was it.
• [00:27:31] FRANK UHLE: Yeah, and Django Edwards, who passed away, I think a year or two ago, who was the leader of it is a notorious. I think he ended up in Europe as a beloved underground theater performer. But he grew up, I think, in Dexter, and he was around here in the mid '70s. But he seems like he would be the kind of person that would appear at the Matrix, and you found these beautiful photos, Amy, in the archives of this guy, Gene the clown standing on top of, like, a fire or a parking meter. That sounds like you had children's shows, too. I think cause Gene the Cloud was advertised as a children's show.
• [00:28:10] DALLAS KENNY: I found some of the posters I gave to you, I think, Children's matinees, and so on.
• [00:28:17] FRANK UHLE: I think sometimes you had, like, rock bands, too, because I know Roger Miller, who's later in Mission in Burma and the AA Orchestra, his band Red Ants, someone told me, Dan Gunning, who used to work at the Matrix told me.
• [00:28:33] DALLAS KENNY: I can't remember the names of some of those groups. But I know one time, there was a group that came in from New York, and they did a multimedia show, but they were like a quasi-known musical group in New York, and they were somehow affiliated with Andy Warhol's group, and they did a multimedia show of some kind. I think that's when we first started to go into the MLB, but I can't remember the details exactly, except that I just remember the New Yorkers came very arrogant and they were always saying disparaging things about local people and local crowds.
• [00:29:17] FRANK UHLE: One of the things I wanted to ask you also about going back to the New World film group was the infamous issue of showing pornography on campus and how the regents tried to shut down the film groups, which you alluded to earlier. In writing my book about the local film scene, the Cinema Guild group was showing things, or the Ann Arbor Film Festival, that had a little bit of nudity or a little offensive content, and some of it was actually illegal in the late '60s. Up until the end of the '60s, things like I Am Curious (Yellow) couldn't be shown. It was scheduled to show here in 1970 at the Fifth Forum and then the police threatened to confiscate the film, but then the New World Film Co-op brought that same film I Am Curious (Yellow) to campus.
• [00:30:09] DALLAS KENNY: Mendelssohn.
• [00:30:10] FRANK UHLE: Mendelssohn Theater in 1973. So you effectively were the first to bring XXX content onto campus.
• [00:30:20] DALLAS KENNY: We may have been. I know that...
• [00:30:24] FRANK UHLE: ...As far as I can determine anyway.
• [00:30:25] DALLAS KENNY: The film that the Regents really used is the pretense to move against the film group Swizz when that Perry Bullard action group showed Deep Throat on campus, and that was the first explicit XXX one. I Am curious (Yellow) was pretty tame, actually.
• [00:30:43] FRANK UHLE: No, comparatively...
• [00:30:43] DALLAS KENNY: Absurdity, and that's when they really made a big thing out of that. This is really out of control. This is an off-campus group that came in, and did this and of course, as you know from your book. Because these film groups have been around for so long, it was often these older members that were in their 30s, 40s, 50s that were really keeping it all alive and going along. But they use that, these outside people, they're not students. Like you said, I wasn't a student when I started it up, and I briefly became something of a student when we had the big meeting with the Regents about they were going to make their big decision about finally taking over the film groups. I was also active in organizing secretaries on campus for the UAW local 2001, and they were being recognized as representing all the secretaries on campus. I knew the secretaries that worked in the president's office. I was living in a house where one of them lived in. I said, ''What are they saying about me up there?'' She says, ''This is where they're going to get you, this Regents meeting. They're going to point out the fact that you're not a student when all the press is there and stuff like that''. I said, ''So can you do anything to help me?'' ''I know someone who works over at the place that does the registrations and stuff. We'll do a crook registration for you as a one-credit student for some economics class and give you a card''. When they came to that part in the Regents meeting they said, Is this drama? They had this moment of silence. President Fleming said, ''We happen to know that you're not even a student''.
• [00:32:26] FRANK UHLE: This is President Robin Fleming of the University?
• [00:32:28] DALLAS KENNY: It was all full of spectators, press, and everything, and all the regents were there. I just let it hang silent for a while for drama, they're really going to get me. I slowly pulled this yellow card on them. I said, ''So how do you explain this?'' They passed around and looked at the shot. They had to call out their whole plan for banning this film, you're taking over the film groups for another day. I stalled them for a few months there.
• [00:32:53] FRANK UHLE: But that was an amazing thing. Again, in my book I documented the broader story, but I didn't know that very pungent detail. Because the Ann Arbor News, I think, wrote a story that said, Dallas Kenny is a student by virtue of the fact that he takes one class in the spring term or something like that. But that was an amazing coup because you really single-handedly saved the film groups from what could have been a complete dumbing down. Because the fact that the regents were getting these letters from concerned alumni, they're showing pornography. I will say that the Perry Bullard thing, which was, I think, April of '7,4 and your incident with the regents was in June or July of '74. But in February of '74, there was a big story in the Daily saying that the New World Film group had shown beyond the Green Door in Nat Sci, and you had five shows of it and had sold 4,000 tickets or something like that. You were charging above the standard rate too. You were charging $5 apiece or something. You're making tens of thousands of dollars. The article actually said in the Daily that people drove from Pontiac and Flint down to see this shocking band, a movie which coincidentally was actually playing in Ypsilanti at the same time at the Art One theater. But somehow showing it on campus got all this media attention. Then again, the Perry Bullard people a couple of months later probably had seen what you did and thought, we could make a little money for Perry that worked.
• [00:34:28] DALLAS KENNY: I couldn't remember the sequence.
• [00:34:29] FRANK UHLE: I'm pretty sure that's how it works. They show Deep Throat in April. Then there was an article in the Free Press that said, students are showing pornography, and the regents started getting all these phone calls from people. Then they decided to clamp down, but it was touch and go. I think the fact that some of the professors had become reliant on the film societies for showing their classroom films. The Daily again reported that Marvin Felheim who was one of the founders of the film program had said, ''We can't let the film groups shut down because we rely on them to schedule some of the films that our classes require''. Again, you stood up and you were there. That sounds so dramatic pulling up that yellow card. I wish there was movie footage of that.
• [00:35:22] DALLAS KENNY: That's interesting. But the thing that we were pushing really at the regents meeting, we had a handout. We did research and found out all the actual stocks and the ownership interest that some regents had in the Butterfield Theater chain. We were actually by that time, especially our group, because we are bringing in such large numbers of people on second-run major films, we're starting to put them out of business, basically. I think whether or not that was really their motivation or not, who knows. But we did point that out that there was a conflict of interest. The University's Regents were in financial competition actually with the student film groups. Why are they moving against the film groups instead of the one, the theaters that they own if they really want the students to benefit? We pointed out and pushed that line a lot, and I think that also helped forestall because it painted them in the shady light. The ones being in the shady light, not us.
• [00:36:29] FRANK UHLE: No, I believe your research found that the university owned a third of the stock in Butterfield, and a third of the Butterfield board members were U of M Regents. It was a very tidy little operation they had there. Again, those were interesting times, as I say. Tell me more about some of the more popular films in those days. Other than the recent second-run titles, what titles were particularly popular on campus for students to go see?
• [00:37:02] DALLAS KENNY: Well, Reggae was coming into its own at that time. We showed the harder they come with Jimmy Cliff, and that was a huge sell-out hit. The movie, the actual music was great. The quality of the film per se, was probably not that great. That was pretty big and some films that had rock concerts, like Altamont. There was one Sympathy for the Devil was one of the experimental films that had the Rolling Stones in it. Some of those had pretty good audiences. Also marijuana and so on was becoming more of a thing than actual politics were. Politics after '71, '72, student interest in was falling off greatly because there was no more draft and they were no longer on the line, so they cared less and less about social issues and stuff like that. But when we'd show something like Alice in Wonderland and we'd feature the hookah-smoking caterpillar on the poster, it tended to draw, and the theater would be full of smoke. We'd do it with a double feature with something totally unrelated like My Little Chickadee with WC Fields, which had all weird things in it. That was something. But some of what we did was we dug up things like with Marlon Brando and Gillo Pontecorvo had an Academy Award Level type winning for the Battle of Algiers film that he did. He did a second film called Queimada that United Artists reissued as calling it Burn, but it starred Marlon Brando. He actually did a pretty good performance. The musical score was really good as well by a famous, was it Theodorakis or one of the famous Greek did a good musical score, and the cinematography was amazing. We showed that on campus, and that would be something that typically other film groups that weren't really... And it was a parable for Vietnam. It took place... Portugal was occupying, a sugar republic, something like Cuba or Haiti, or something back in the old colonial days. But originally Spain was the occupier, but United Artists changed it to Portugal, because they didn't want to jeopardize the film market in Spain. Anyway, we brought that, so that pulled in a lot of people from the Star Power.
• [00:39:56] FRANK UHLE: I think you also got some audiences with John Waters Films?
• [00:40:02] DALLAS KENNY: Pink Flamingos, Multiple Maniacs, and some of his stuff. I thought that was pretty pretty neat. The gay community really flooded in for those films.
• [00:40:16] FRANK UHLE: Is that so?
• [00:40:17] DALLAS KENNY: I'm not sure that much explicitly gay stuff had been shown in films before, though some subject matter and a lot of the players were in the other film groups were active in the gay community. But Pink Flamingos, it was way over the top. It was really totally in your face transvestitism and stuff. You're smiling. Maybe you've seen it.
• [00:40:46] FRANK UHLE: Were the folks in the Gay Liberation Front around then? I know in the early 70s there were active protests again, which I wrote about in the book that were against the more stereotyping films, like the Boys in the Band and a couple of other films like that which had the self-loathing homosexual male characters, and they were the Gay Liberation Front. Excuse me, folks would come out and get up. At one point, they got up on the stage in 1973 in auditorium A, and were stomping and shouting, Don't watch this movie and stuff. But you were not showing those -- probably -- movies. You're showing the more...
• [00:41:28] DALLAS KENNY: Probably more from luck than anything else. We didn't happen to book those films.
• [00:41:32] FRANK UHLE: I see.
• [00:41:33] DALLAS KENNY: They got the heat for that. I didn't have any run-ins with them. We had cordial relations with the gay community, because they liked that stuff we were showing, and I knew some of them went to hung in some of the same circles as some of the activists in the gay community. We never felt that heat from them, though I was never involved in their political movement. I knew more about that when I lived in Berkeley and San Francisco on the West Coast. It was much more flamboyant, public demonstrations, and stuff, and they had their gay newspapers and stuff. The Berkeley Bar, but also I think what was called the gay newspapers. But here I don't think it was at that level, really. I didn't know too much about them here.
• [00:42:26] FRANK UHLE: Thanks. You were around the same time as your group was this group that was for a while around the corner on Maynard Street that they went under different names. The New Morning people or they call themselves?
• [00:42:45] DALLAS KENNY: Friends of News reel.
• [00:42:47] FRANK UHLE: Friends of Newsreel. George Depue, was the main guy, but it was a political collective that also showed movies. Did you have any interactions with them? Because they seemed to be combative you showed. There was another film group that was called the Orson Welles Film Co-op. There was a guy who apparently had gone to Cornell and shown movies there, and got in all sorts of trouble there, and somehow transferred to U of M because he wasn't paying the bills. He came to U of M, and he started a film society. They started showing movies. The New Morning people or Friends of Newsreel were showing. There were times when they showed they booked the same title, and then someone would show up and chain the doors before the audience could come, do things, vandalize, steal equipment, but you didn't interact with that.
• [00:43:41] DALLAS KENNY: That might have been a little bit before I came. It seemed like just as I came in, New Morning was already set up with their bookstore and stuff. They were already starting to get into trouble by not reporting their receipts to the film companies or something. But they were very combative. From what I remember anyway, they never cooperated with the other film groups. If they were showing something, you're just going to show it, and if you didn't like it, that's too bad for you. I think we did some outreach to try to do some cooperative programming with them at some point, but they always just were against that. They were also in a big fight with the Rainbow People's group and John Sinclair. You mentioned to me somehow those two leaders were somehow went to school together or something.
• [00:44:33] FRANK UHLE: They had both come from Detroit to Ann Arbor. Around like '69, '70, '68, '69. They'd already been button heads in the Motor City and the Cast Corridor art scene, and then they came here, and so they were once again, too small of a pond, and they were up against each other. But one of the things that you were telling me, and I think this was because of the New World or New Morning, not New World. New Morning, it's hard to get remember it straight sometimes. Friends of Newsreel was because they weren't paying the film distributors who were largely based in New York, some in Chicago, the film distributors, what they would do is they would say, you're going to rent this film for $250 versus a share of the gross. If the gross was huge, you would have to pay them an overage. You wouldn't necessarily pay in advance for the film. You'd get the film, and then you'd say, Well, we sold this many tickets, we owe them this many dollars. But the New Morning people, Newsreel people, weren't doing that. They were not paying I don't think they were paying anything as much as they could. You were saying they actually sent -- the film distributors sent agents out to spy.
• [00:45:53] DALLAS KENNY: Especially like a group like ours because we had really big budget films that were bringing in a lot of money. We would have the, you'd buy from a certain supplier ticket rolls of theater tickets that are rolled, and they're serial number. We'd keep it right on the desk, and we just keep peeling them off, write down the first number. Then the last number we'd write down. The agent that was sent by Films Incorporated or whatever, would buy one of the last tickets and just do the math by the first and last and they could easily tell how many you sold. Well, the morning, they just tear all the tickets off and put them in a bowl or something, so there's no way they could find out how many tickets were there. I think that was the difference.
• [00:46:36] FRANK UHLE: Interesting.
• [00:46:38] DALLAS KENNY: We didn't care if they came cause we were doing the accurate reporting. There's no we didn't want to get in trouble for anything.
• [00:46:47] FRANK UHLE: No, I'm sure it was pretty common. I will admit in Cinema II, we agreed all together to slightly shave off some of the numbers. We'd say, Well, we'll pay them. Most of what we owe them, but if we sell out three shows, we'll pay them as if we sold out two shows. A little shady, but the goal of it in our minds, because we were a nonprofit, was to simply show more cool interesting films. We were diverting the big bucks from the hit movie of the day Harold and Maude or 2001, weren't going to get as much money, but then we would end up showing two other interesting art films or something.
• [00:47:29] DALLAS KENNY: Didn't you buy some films, too?
• [00:47:32] FRANK UHLE: That's true. Well, we owned a couple. We only owned a couple of really poorly chosen films. We own, a Harold Lloyd's last film, which was called the Sin of Harold Diddlebock AKA Big Wednesday or Mad Wednesday. We might have shown it once and made a profit, but every time we scheduled it after that 20 people would show up. But Amy's husband, John, was a member of Cinema Guild.
• [00:47:56] DALLAS KENNY: What was his name?
• [00:47:58] AMY CANTU: It was later. He was in there later. John Cantu.
• [00:48:03] DALLAS KENNY: He was there starting in the early to mid-80s. But, Cinema Guild owned all these prints, and they were able to show. Sometimes we actually borrow, but they had Breathless by Goddard, and they had a whole bunch of Chaplin films, and they had some European art films. They were supposedly out of copyright, but they weren't, and they were showing Charlie Chaplin movies that himself still owned the copyright to, some of his later films. But you guys didn't ever buy any prints too.
• [00:48:34] DALLAS KENNY: But we did keep a lot of trailers. We had a huge trailer collection because I think they didn't actively try to reclaim the trailers, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. You'd see all this wild four-minute collage, and it's pretty with music, and actors are all there. They had the same thing for Chaplin's Limelight and The Great Dictator and these really well-done trailers are cool. We just assembled a big reel. When I left town, I just finally moved out of Ann Arbor. I took it over to the Ann Arbor Film Co-op house where I thought they were living, and the only guy I knew I said, Why don't you take this 'cause someone, you can maybe put it to good use. I know I'll never use it again. But those were one night, I think we did a showing only of trailers. We did an hour and a half of trailers. [LAUGHTER] That would be combined with some dope film. [LAUGHTER].
• [00:49:30] FRANK UHLE: Reefer Madness.
• [00:49:31] DALLAS KENNY: Reefer Madness.
• [00:49:32] FRANK UHLE: Cool, I actually collect trailers. I have 35 millimeter ones that I got right from the theater distributors, and they especially for 50s and 60s, like sci-fi movies and juvenile delinquent movies.
• [00:49:46] DALLAS KENNY: Cool.
• [00:49:46] FRANK UHLE: They're fun to watch.
• [00:49:49] DALLAS KENNY: There's Bogart movies like Knock on Any Door and so on. They have some neat little trailers. If you could track down the one that end up going to Ann Arbor Film Co-op, you'd have quite a treasure trove there, probably somebody's basement someplace.
• [00:50:06] FRANK UHLE: I actually have some of them. Because, well, when the film societies collapsed in the late 90s, a fair amount of that stuff got stuck in the Michigan Theater attic. Cause the Michigan Theater would occasionally get rented by the Film Societies. Back up in that attic, I grabbed a bunch of stuff that was basically going to be discarded and there were a few reels of trailers. They might have dated to your purchasing them, but the Film Co-op had ones for Yellow Submarine and What's up Tiger Lily movies that they showed often. Because they own a print of that movie. Magical Mystery Tour they own a print of. But yeah, the Film Co-op was another, they were playing it fast and loose a little bit. But again, it's part of the rich cinema culture of Ann Arbor, and this is so awesome to be talking to you because you contributed a lot and that time period isn't as well documented. I knew people from multiple different organizations that I was able to interview for the book, but I wasn't able to track you down. I talked to Dan Gunning and Vicki Honeyman who had worked at the Matrix toward the end of what you were doing in town, but I didn't know the full story, especially I found some ads and things about the Collective Eye and the New World, but it's really been wonderful to hear more of the nitty gritty.
• [00:51:30] DALLAS KENNY: Sure, if I can contribute later to any detail, so I can't remember now, let me know, and I'm happy too.
• [00:51:40] FRANK UHLE: Well, one of the great things is that you have this great collection of fliers that you saved. A lot of the film societies just went poof and nobody kept any of them, maybe there's someone out there with a basement stash, but gosh, a couple of the film societies, I had nothing. None of the members I spoke to had kept anything.
• [00:52:00] DALLAS KENNY: Really, too bad. I thought it would end up in the library or something, some of that stuff.
• [00:52:05] FRANK UHLE: I mean, it's weird. Cinema Guild's stuff did get saved, and I have it in my attic now because someone who saved it gave it to someone else who went to high school with, who gave it to me.
• [00:52:14] DALLAS KENNY: Good for you.
• [00:52:15] FRANK UHLE: When I was doing my book. But that contained a pile, this high of all the calendars, going back to the 60s, and there were a couple from New World in there, which got me thinking about what you guys were doing. But some of the other mysterious groups were also documented in there, so that was helpful. Since you provided me, and I will... And Amy also has this collection of your documentation. That's just great because we can combine this interview and transcript with those images to tell the story, much better than we could have before then I was able to in my book.
• [00:52:54] DALLAS KENNY: Well, your book is really a masterpiece of rounding it all up and going back to the beginning of people started the film showings in Mendelssohn Theater, and that woman who eventually went back to New York and did live theater and came back again. Stuff I never knew about. That's why I was asking you if you have time today, could you show me the Mendelssohn projection room and Hill Auditorium, cause the history of that in your book, it just got my imagination working or reliving those days, way before my time. But you did a real amazing service by creating that book, and...
• [00:53:28] FRANK UHLE: Thank you.
• [00:53:29] DALLAS KENNY: I'm just maybe a major footnote in the whole thing. I don't pretend to be more than that. But when I found your book, I was just so amazed, so appreciative that someone pulled together all that history because it really enriched my understanding to my own place there. Because I hadn't known 90% of what came before that, a lot of that went on after that, as well. You did a real professional job assembling it. With your team, the publications that UVM and Ann Arbor Public Library and that just congrats to all of you.
• [00:54:05] FRANK UHLE: Thank you. I just appreciate people like yourself that took an interest in the history. That's what led me. I was curious about what had happened before I was on campus, and lots of wild stuff. It was cool to get it all together. It's an ongoing project to continue documenting the little ins and outs, not just footnotes, but major parts of the story.
• [00:54:31] DALLAS KENNY: Well, it really was a great launching pad for me too, because I didn't start out as a student, and I may have never been a student if I hadn't been, to coming here and getting inspired by so many things. The experience of fundraising and that, even though it eventually didn't right the ship. But that really, experience, helped me get other jobs later. I ended up at Wayne State, I ended up raising millions of dollars to create a global education center at Wayne State, and became Associate Provost for the Global Education at Wayne State for several years and went on to do similar jobs after that. It really started here with the experience things I learned really in Ann Arbor working here and picking up skills, also getting a good understanding of the things I didn't know how to do like, running businesses accounts and stuff like that. It humbled me in constructive ways.
• [00:55:32] FRANK UHLE: No, I mean, you went on to get a master's degree in Library Science from U of M, which is just a couple of years before I got mine.
• [00:55:39] DALLAS KENNY: And you too?
• [00:55:40] AMY CANTU: Yep
• [00:55:40] FRANK UHLE: What year did you graduate?
• [00:55:43] AMY CANTU: My gosh, '98?
• [00:55:45] DALLAS KENNY: I graduated in '92. You graduated in '90?
• [00:55:48] DALLAS KENNY: I think I have it. So many dates here.
• [00:55:52] FRANK UHLE: We probably had some of the same professors. Did you have Thomas Slavins?
• [00:55:55] AMY CANTU: I sure did.
• [00:55:55] FRANK UHLE: He did, too.
• [00:55:57] DALLAS KENNY: I was writing his blurbs for him. He invited me to his house for dinner as a thank you with him and his family, and he said, You're the best one that ever wrote these blurbs of my books. I was writing him like a mile a minute, these summaries for his bibliography books and stuff. I don't know how good it really was, but he gave me a free dinner out of it anyway.
• [00:56:17] AMY CANTU: He was fun. In a slide tray, if he just decided, "Well, I don't like that slide, " he'd just pull it out and throw it across the room. That was always fun.
• [00:56:25] DALLAS KENNY: He gave me some rusty career advice too. Like, I asked him and I said, Tom, if I really go into this library stuff, I have to make decisions whether into technical services or reference or this, what would you do? He said, Well, in my experience, I found out that going to what you like, and when they ask you to do something you don't like, always screw it up, so they give it to someone else. See you can push along the track and directly to where you want to go. Tom, that's good advice in it.
• [00:56:57] FRANK UHLE: Wow.
• [00:56:57] DALLAS KENNY: I managed to avoid cataloging to some extent.
• [00:57:01] FRANK UHLE: Wow, I wish he'd told me that. But you also got a PhD in -- you were telling me -- related to library or information. I forgot.
• [00:57:15] DALLAS KENNY: Actually, when I went to Wayne State, my major and my BA was in Arabic Linguistics. U of M was the flagship Arabic college in the United States. I think second was Penn, and there was a couple others. The ones who wrote the textbooks on teaching Arabic and that were here at U of M. I got a scholarship to do my PhD at U of M in Arabic Linguistics, and it went on for about three years. I got a couple Fulbrights to study in Egypt for about a year and a half to do dissertation research, and I got a Rackham grant. That was all in Arabic linguistics. Then my first job was actually library job was in UAE at the University of UAE near Dubai. It all kind of came back to Ann Arbor somehow. But I'm coming back here as a PhD student, where before I was just a loudmouth rebel or something with the high school education, it was a weird trip.
• [00:58:23] FRANK UHLE: I love that. I think it's just fascinating.
• [00:58:25] DALLAS KENNY: My daughter just graduated last week from U of M.
• [00:58:30] FRANK UHLE: Congratulations.
• [00:58:31] MAYA KENNY: Thank you.
• [00:58:33] FRANK UHLE: You met your wife here.
• [00:58:34] DALLAS KENNY: Because she was also Arabic major from Japan. But we both got a scholarship to study in Egypt the year before we met, so we could both... Her English wasn't very good, and I couldn't speak Japanese, but we could both speak Egyptian Arabic. We'd meet at the Del Rio after classes, and people were drinking beer, and we're speaking to each other in Egyptian Arabic. But she's the only truly bilingual one in our family. She's really excellent native level at Japanese and English, so.
• [00:59:07] FRANK UHLE: Excellent.
• [00:59:07] DALLAS KENNY: Didn't want to repeat my situation of being good in other languages, but not native speaker.
• [00:59:17] FRANK UHLE: Wow.
• [00:59:18] DALLAS KENNY: Thank you.