About me: My husband and I texpatriated from Austin to Kingston in 2022. I’m from New York originally but relocated to Austin in 2015 for work, running the social media department for Robert Rodriguez’s short lived Genre/B-Movie cable channel, El Rey Network. It was a job I got in no small part due to my excellent taste in “bad movies” (read: great movies that normies can’t [or won’t] appreciate). Being a Genre fan in Austin I was also spoiled by the prevalence of Alamo Drafthouses, both for their exceptional programming, and rigidly enforced no talking/no texting rule.
About the theatre: The Rosendale Theatre has been in operation as a movie theater for 75 years, and has been run as 501c3 non-profit for the past 15 years. I started volunteering there at the beginning of the year, just working in the box office and concessions for screenings, and within a few months I was asked to join the Marketing and Programming committees, where, at 37, I am the youngest person involved at that level of the organization.
As such, one of my goals in joining the Programming Committee was to extend the theatre’s definition of “classic movie” into new genres, and beyond 1979 (I regret to inform you that 1994 was 30 years ago).
In the past few months I’ve produced a few one-off events, including a Mystery Science Theater 3000 style live-riff of JASON X for Friday the 13th. A few weeks ago I kicked off a new monthly series called WTF Wednesday, focused on celebrating “weird cinema.” We had 60 people come out for a screening David Lynch’s first film, ERASERHEAD. I’m aiming to launch a second monthly series in January focused on turn of the century “Millennial Classics.”
This month: I was given the honor of booking our Halloweek screenings, with the challenge of avoiding gory, R-rated horror. Here’s what we’ve got coming up:
THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW [R]
Friday 10/25 & Saturday 10/26 at 8pm
Saturday 10/26 at 4pm
LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS: THE DIRECTOR’S CUT [PG-13]
Wednesday 10/30 at 2pm & 7pm
Halloween Night at 9pm
I’m in the final stages of booking next month’s WTF Wednesday (who would’ve thought it might be hard to track down the US distribution rights to some of these movies), so I don’t have a title to announce, but the next screening will be Wednesday, November 6 at 7:30pm.