WASHINGTON — As Northwest D.C. loses one indie theater with the closing of West End Cinema in Foggy Bottom, another upstart is springing from the concrete in Mt. Pleasant.
Suns Cinema, which began with two roommates projecting DVDs at their apartment, has just crowdfunded its dream into a reality. The project has raised more than $14,600 on Kickstarter, surpassing the goal of $12,000 by April 9, and a lease is signed for a space to open this summer.
“The first location that we were looking at to create our theater was Suns Discount Building at Kilbourne and Mt. Pleasant Street,” co-founder David Cabrera says. “Through the arduous process of not getting that space, we decided that we wanted to keep the name Suns at our new location,” which is 3107 Mt. Pleasant St. NW, the site of a former cellphone shop called Xtreme Communication.
Co-founder Ryan Mitchell says the name is both practical and a Lynyrd Skynyrd-style jab (the Southern rock band named themselves after a gym teacher that said they’d never make it).
“We had already done the branding with that space in mind,” Mitchell says. “Our whole presentation, our whole analytics had been run on this space. … Why change it? We already had some good logos.”
The dream began in 2010 when the duo hosted private screenings at their Mt. Pleasant apartment.
Cabrera bought a digital projector off Craiglist. They asked friends to bring food and drinks. And they set up the Facebook group “Uncle David’s Movie Night at LaMonte Carlo Cinema,” named after a Zach Galifianakis stand-up routine and their apartment building on Lamont St.
A typical night would include about 30 people, watching an offbeat flick with a fitting food or drink pairing, such as Ingmar Bergman’s “Wild Strawberries” (1957) with strawberry margaritas.
“We got some people coming over who just wanted to have a fun Wednesday night, have some drinks, have some food,” says Mitchell. “So they might accidentally see something that David wanted to show that was pretty good.”
The apartment screenings ranged from Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho” (1960) to Alexandro Jodorowsky’s “Holy Mountain” (1973), from Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining” (1980) to Rene Laloux’s “Fantastic Planet” (1973).
“Just movies that I thought were weird that I wanted other people to see … and that most people hadn’t seen,” says Cabrera, who recently returned from film school at Brooklyn College, where he frequented the Spectacle movie house in Williamsburg.
Sometimes this approach would backfire, as audiences didn’t know what to make of Terry Gilliam’s dystopian satire “Brazil” (1985) or Jean-Luc Godard’s rule-breaking techniques in the French New Wave classic “Pierrot le Fou” (1965).
“A buddy of mine was there and literally — like, in the middle of the movie, was like, ‘This movie is weird, right?'” Cabrera recalls. “‘What are we watching?'”
Faring far better were Westerns such as Nicholas Ray’s “Johnny Guitar” (1954) and Jim Jarmusch’s “Dead Man” (1995), and horror flicks such as Japan’s “Onibaba” (1964) and Sweden’s “Let the Right One In” (2008), which screened outdoors as shadows of tree branches crept across the screen.
Cabrera and Mitchell will take these programming lessons with them in their professional venture.
“They might be able to see these pretentious movies we’ve been talking about,” Mitchell jokes. “But also what if you want to watch ‘Toxic Crusader’ and have pizza and a keg? You know, we want to do fun movies, too. If we could ever get ‘Con Air’ … There’s a lot of fun movies out there that I think people would really want to see.”
Their mock schedule includes a vintage “Monday Night Raw” on Monday night, “Little Shop of Horrors” and “Black Orpheus” during the week, a “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” pizza party on Friday night, followed by Saturday-morning cartoons and a “Muppets and Mimosas” Sunday brunch.
As for the look of the place, the theater design includes one movie screen, a few rows of seats and a bar at the back serving craft beers and cocktails.
“We want it to not feel like a house,” Mitchell says. “Now we’ve got a professional projector. We’ve stepped some things up. There’s no more sheets on the wall. … But (we want it to) have some of the good qualities of that. … It’ll feel more like a house than Regal.”
By their math, they need to sell eight or nine tickets per screening to keep the joint operating, a rate they’re confident they can fill using the Rolodex from their old apartment screenings.
They want to keep ticket prices around $5, knowing that people won’t pay $15 like at the multiplex.
“We imagine ticket sales aren’t gonna cover this,” Mitchell says.” “That never has been the purpose.”
Indeed, Suns Cinema is more a labor of love, relying on out-of-pocket expenses and money raised on the Kickstarter page, which features a video spoof of “Willy Wonka” and clever slogans for each donation threshold: “8 1/2,” “50 Shades of Green,” “101 Donations” and “For A Few Dollars More.”
“We’re gonna do this regardless if we get Kickstarted,” Mitchell told WTOP before reaching the goal. “It lets us gauge how invested people in the community want to be.”
Hear the full interview below:
