How the Alamo Drafthouse Turned Trash Cinema into a Cultural Institution
A new book tells the sweeping tale of the Alamo’s Weird Wednesday series, the American Genre Film Archive, and Austin’s custodians of cult
https://www.texasmonthly.com/arts-en...l-institution/
When Lars Nilsen was growing up in North Carolina in the seventies, his local multiplex used to program kids’ movies on summer afternoons. Stuff like Swiss Family Robinson or (far more meaningful to Nilsen) Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster that you could watch for a dollar while your parents worked. Nilsen went almost every single day. After one matinee, Nilsen recalls, he found himself outside the theater, impulsively pawing through its trash bins. There he came across a small piece of film history, lying discarded among the soda cups and stale popcorn: a couple yards of celluloid that had been lopped off of the 1956 kaiju classic Rodan. Nilsen was thrilled. Taking it home was a pivotal moment for him, Nilsen says—that feeling like he actually owned Rodan.
Nilsen moved to Austin in 1994. He worked a late shift at Kinko’s; he spent some time driving a cab. But mostly, just like those summers when he was a kid, he watched a lot of movies. In 1997, Nilsen met another film fanatic, Tim League, who, along with his wife, Karrie, had just opened the first Alamo Drafthouse Cinema inside a former parking garage in downtown. Nilsen soon became the Alamo’s first real regular, often hanging out with the Leagues and like-minded obsessives after the show. He started suggesting films that the Leagues should screen, drawing from his deep knowledge of cult curios like ’Gator Bait and Female Prisoner Scorpion: Jailhouse 41. Eventually, League asked Nilsen to do some of the preshow introductions for these. Nilsen proved to be a charismatic emcee: knowledgeable, funny, almost effortlessly entertaining—and what’s more, he could sell the hell out of anything. It wasn’t long before League officially gave Nilsen a job, putting him in charge of programming and hosting the Alamo’s fledgling midnight-movie series, Weird Wednesday.
Like everything about the Alamo Drafthouse, Weird Wednesday has its own, nigh-mythical lore. The story always starts in 1999, when League got a tip about a former movie-house depot out in East Prairie, Missouri, where thousands of 35mm prints had just been abandoned and left to rot. League flew up and bought the whole lot of them. He rented a truck that could safely carry 11,500 pounds, and he loaded it with 20,000 pounds of film, driving his rusty, moldy bounty back to Austin on an overheated engine and straining axles. On his slow ride home, League hashed out a way to justify his impulse purchase. The Alamo would start a free late-night series for adventurous moviegoers, he decided, where he would pluck something from his haul, neither he nor the audience knowing exactly what surprises lay in store. Sexploitation flicks, Italian giallo, lesbian vampires, hillbilly cannibals, psychedelic freak-outs—they would discover these forsaken films together.
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