The
Summer Festival of Rare Film
Clinton
Street Theater 2522 SE Clinton St., 238-8899
8 pm, Aug. 13-29
$5
See highlights
from the festival
The first time he calls, he leaves a message: "Why hello.
This is Dennis Nyback," he says slowly, drawing out his surname
in a remotely sinister, breathy sigh. "I understand you're
interested in talking to me about my films I'm going to show
at the Clinton Street Theater. I'm really busy, busy, busy
in New York City right now, getting ready to rent a truck
and load everything I own into it, including my entire film
archive, so I might just be a little hard to catch."
In 25 seconds, Nyback has effectively distilled himself
on the machine. A peripatetic archivist and collector of
thousands of classic, obscure and rare films--current favorites
of his include a "Mormon melodrama" called How Do I Love
Thee? and the revealingly named Four Men Sit Around
a Table and Talk About the Shape of a Beer Bottle for Fifteen
Minutes--Nyback has certainly packed up his life before.
Later this month, he takes over as a new co-owner of the
Clinton Street Theater in Southeast Portland; it will be
the fifth independent cinema he's run. Since opening the
Rose Bud Movie Palace in Seattle's Pioneer Square in 1979,
Nyback has operated the Jewel Box Theater and Pike Street
Cinema, also in Seattle, and, most recently, the 65-seat
Lighthouse Cinema in New York City. Nyback and co-founder
Johannes Schönherr converted the Lighthouse from a
Manhattan storefront once occupied by a children's clothing
store.
Two days later, when he calls again, this time from a New
York pay phone, I answer. "It's going to keep asking for
quarters, so if I get cut off that just means I've run out,"
he explains. Then, undaunted by fiber-optic arrhythmia and
the periodic, recorded demand that he feed the phone, Nyback
began to explain himself.
Of the theaters he's run, he says, "They generally go broke
because I have a philosophy: No Hollywood crap."
This dictum will guide the Clinton's new programming under
Nyback and his longtime business partner, Elizabeth Rozier.
The cinema's schedule will include a variety of films from
Nyback's stash, including film appearances by Billie Holiday,
naughty cartoons starring Betty Boop, and caustic versions
of Bugs Bunny, along with first-run independent movies that
won't play at Cinema 21, like Bingo: the Documentary
and The Ogre.
Nyback articulated his perception of Hollywood's artistic
meltdown in an unpublished essay titled "Hollywood Garbage
and How to Smell It." The paper begins with these lines:
"The continuing waste of Newspaper space in the Arts and
Entertainment pages on Hollywood movies mystifies and appalls
me. Please be advised that I use the term Hollywood very
loosely and intend it to cover 90% [of] current films. For
roughly twenty years the films being churned out have had
nothing to do with art and everything to do with money.
If these films should be reported on at all it should be
in the financial section."
The essay later offers "ten suggestions" for helping "people
just say no to Hollywood Garbage." Here, Nyback advises
against going to movies that "feature product tie-ins with
any multinational Burger chain," have "an advertisement
with guns pointing at you, or that has a number after its
title," or are "associated with Quentin Tarantino or Oliver
Stone or anyone else you care to add to this list."
Nyback's commitment to filmic alternatives to Hollywood
and his apparent unconcern with material comfort have been
well documented in piles of press clips from Europe and
shorter notices from many regional news outlets in the States.
"I'm much more well-known in Europe than in the U.S.,"
he says. "A lot of people still watch films over there--there's
not as much access to video and generally more money available
for the arts."
The 46-year-old has been flown to Europe four times by
different film organizations and has shown his films in
20 to 25 cities there. During one trip to Paris he wandered
through a shop and discovered a box full of old films, which
he bought for 600 francs, or about $100. The loot included
home movies of Nazi airplane inspections and a mysterious
Andy Gump short, the third in a series Nyback said was previously
believed to consist of only two installments. The box also
contained an extremely unusual 91Ž2mm film.
When I asked how he could ever view it, Nyback said he knew
of a 91Ž2mm projector in Bordeaux, France,
that he would have to retrieve some day.
For all his Euro-hopping, the collector's stateside lifestyle
has been, at times, far from glamourous. When Nyback arrived
in New York in 1995, he slept in the Lighthouse's office.
"I'd be dozing off and I'd hear kuh-whack!" he says,
recalling the traps he used to clear out unwanted rat roomies.
"Then, half a second later it'd go thud! The trap
was so big, the torque it generated caused the trap to fly
into the air."
Nyback's digs improved considerably when he moved in with
a psychic playwright who wanted to cast Dennis in his play.
The playwright performed psychic evaluations for a very
affluent woman who owned a cat. The woman's husband, however,
didn't want the cat in the couple's apartment, so the woman
paid for a separate apartment where the playwright lived
with the cat. For several months Nyback occupied part of
the psychic's midtown apartment, paying no rent.
If strange fates have blessed the archivist over the years,
perhaps it is because of the purity of his professional
intentions and the integrity of his desires. Having rejected
television in the 1960s, Nyback instead reads rabidly: Joseph
Conrad, Henry James and George Eliot are among his favorite
writers. He is also an enthusiastic jazz singer and dancer
(he is especially adept at the jitterbug). Passionate about
baseball, particularly the Mariners and Yankees, he played
outfield in a men's hardball league while living in Seattle.
But more than anything else, Nyback wants to show films
to people who might not otherwise get to see them.
It is for this last reason that he calls back again from
a different New York pay phone; this one takes nickels.
Wasting no time I ask him the question he says he gets
more than any other: Dennis, where do you get your movies?
"I look, look, look, look. Sometimes I get them from the
Big Reel, a publication for film collectors. Sometimes
from people I've bought them from before. I've bought lots
and lots of films here at a flea market at 6th Avenue and
26th Street. And the garbage cans outside of places that
do [film-to-] video transfer used to be great spots, but
a lot of those places started putting padlocks on their
dumpsters. But I travel a lot; I walk around and go into
any shop that looks interesting and ask, 'Do you have any
movies?'"
As he was speaking, Nyback occasionally interrupted himself
to count down his remaining coins: "Three more...two nickels
left...last one."
I panic, wondering if I've gotten enough information from
him for the story. If not, will I ever hear from him again?
Then I realize: How much is enough, anyway?
"I'm out of nickels. I'm going to get terminated any minute,
I can tell," Nyback says.
Suddenly I'm holding a lifeless receiver. "Dennis? Dennis?"
I call through a dead line.
Highlights
from the Summer Festival of Rare Film
FRIDAY, AUG. 13
FRIDAY THE 13TH SPECIAL: Short films about bad luck,
black cats, witches and more.
MONDAY, AUG. 16
MUSICAL ATROCITIES AND ECCENTRICS: Featuring Liberace,
Lawrence Welk and others.
FRIDAY, AUG. 20
HARLEM IN THE '30s: Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway and
many more entertainers from Harlem's golden age.
SUNDAY, AUG. 22
TOUGH BABES OF THE SILENT SCREEN:
Featuring Louise Fazenda, Polly Moran, Fay Tincher and others.
MONDAY, AUG. 23
ELECTRIC BOOGIE: A documentary
about breakdancers in New York City in 1978.
FRIDAY, AUG. 27
BILLIE HOLIDAY: From First to Last: All of Holiday's
commercial film appearances from 1934 to 1957.
SATURDAY, AUG. 28
THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL: Considered by many to
be Luis Bunuel's greatest work and purportedly Nyback's
favorite film of all time.
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Willamette Week | originally
published August 11,
1999
|
