Milwaukee Film to take over Oriental Theatre
Landmark venue to be revitalized
The Oriental Theatre, one of Milwaukee’s most venerable venues, will be operated by one of Milwaukee’s emerging cultural institutions as part of an ambitious $10 million plan to revitalize the 1927 movie palace — and nurture the city’s film culture.
Milwaukee Film, the parent organization of the Milwaukee Film Festival, has signed a long-term lease starting in July 2018 for the Oriental, 2230 N. Farwell Ave.
The three-screen theater, which later this month is marking its 90th birthday, has been run by Landmark Theatres since 1976.
The theater building has been owned by New Land Enterprises and related partnerships since 2002.
Making sure the film festival can remain sustainable was the No. 1 reason Milwaukee Film pursued the Oriental as a year-round home, said Jonathan Jackson, executive and artistic director of Milwaukee Film.
But he also called the Oriental “an important part of the cultural fabric” of Milwaukee.
“It’s really more than occupying the Oriental — it’s revitalizing the treasure and ensuring it’s here,” Jackson said.
Under Landmark, the Oriental for the past 20 years has shown mainly new independent and art-house movies, with some of the smarter Hollywood blockbusters thrown into the mix. Jackson said that under Milwaukee Film, the Oriental’s programming will tilt toward festival-friendly fare, such as documentaries and international movies, as well as the grown-up fare shown under Landmark.
“We would want to create a feeling that (moviegoers) are seeing something special,” he said. “We think there’s plenty of opportunities to see Hollywood blockbusters.”
“Something special,” Jackson added, would include “calendar programming,” such as smaller film festivals during the rest of the year.
That booking approach would be a throwback to the mix of classic movies and foreign films the Oriental had in the late 1970s and ‘80s, before the theater was subdivided into three screens. For years, the Oriental published colorful movie calendars, listing what was showing in the weeks ahead.
A year-round home, Jackson added, also will help the film festival build out the education enrichment programs it holds during the festival.
When Milwaukee Film moves into the theater next year, the organization plans a “major investment” in the sound and projection equipment at the Oriental, to turn it into a “state-of-the-art cinema palace,” Jackson said.
Milwaukee Film has been actively exploring having its own theater for five years. Having a year-round theater as a base of operations will bolster its bottom line and make it easier to plan the film festival and other programming, Jackson said.
Several of the country’s most successful regional film festivals, including the Seattle International Film Festival, have gotten a boost by securing their own ven“I’ve ues.
A nonprofit, Milwaukee Film operates on a $4 million annual budget. While it has a balanced budget, the film festival operation has long looked to strengthen its fiscal foundation.
“The film festival … has grown in such phenomenal ways, but it’s been built on toothpicks,” Jackson said.
Milwaukee Film is already about a third of the way toward its $10 million fundraising goal for the Oriental effort, thanks to big donations from two of the film festival’s co-founders: a $2 million personal contribution by County Executive Chris Abele and $1 million from the Herzfeld Foundation.
“This, I will say, is the biggest personal grant I’ve made in some time, but I couldn’t be prouder that I get to donate it to an organization that I’ve been with for every chapter of … what some day will make a fascinating documentary,” Abele said.
Abele, who is past president on the film festival’s board of directors, recalled being onstage during the first edition of the Milwaukee Film Festival, which launched during the 2008-’09 recession.
“The goal, I said, the first year … wasn’t just to have a film festival, the goal wasn’t just to have the best regional film festival. … The goal was to build the best film festival … on the planet,” Abele said.
Since then, the festival has grown into one of the 10 largest regional film festivals in the country.
never been more pumped about what’s next” for the festival, Abele said.
Operating a theater fulfills another part of Milwaukee Film’s mission, Jackson said: building up Milwaukee’s movie culture.
The organization has already laid some of the groundwork for that.
The 2016 Milwaukee Film Festival reported overall attendance of 76,899, a nearly 8.5% increase from the previous year.
The lively atmosphere at the Oriental and other venues during the festival underscores the potential.
The 2016 festival had 87 sold-out screenings, a number of them special events in the Oriental’s main, Buddhastatue-lined theater. Among them: the 1927 sci-fi classic “Metropolis,” with live music accompaniment by the Alloy Orchestra; and the Talking Heads concert movie “Stop Making Sense,” which turned the Oriental into a dance party.
Tapping the post-movie-going energy, the film festival also sponsors happy hour and after-party events at several bars and nightspots near the Oriental.
During the rest of the year, Milwaukee Film’s monthly member screenings at the Oriental are a reminder that the interest in cinema isn’t just a festival-season thing, Jackson said.
“Fifteen hundred people showing up in Milwaukee in January to see a documentary about a street revolution in Egypt tells us that the energy is there,” he said, referring to a screening of the Oscar-nominated documentary “The Square” at the Oriental in the winter of 2014.
Bringing more energy and vitality to the Oriental and Farwell Ave. was one of the reasons that the building’s owner made the deal with Milwaukee Film.
Tim Gokhman, director at New Land Enterprises, which manages the Oriental property, said the developer “certainly didn’t go out looking” for a new operator for the theater.
But the film festival’s plans fit in neatly with New Land’s aims for re-energizing the east side neighborhood.
“It’s the ability to use the base that the film festival enjoys (that makes this) a real opportunity,” Gokhman said. The Oriental “is a Milwaukee institution, and the goal is not only to develop this asset but to continue it being an integral part of Milwaukee.”
In expanding its physical footprint, Milwaukee Film expects to add 20 to 25 people, Jackson said. Retaining the Oriental’s current employees, he said, “is key.”
Although the festival will have a permanent home starting next year, the Oriental won’t be the only place it will show movies.
The 2017 Milwaukee Film Festival, which runs Sept. 28 through Oct. 12, will return to the same venues it played last year: Landmark’s Oriental and Downer theaters, as well as the Times and Avalon theaters and Fox-Bay Cinema Grill.
If anything, Jackson said, the festival hopes to expand to additional theaters in future years.
“Milwaukee already has the world’s largest music festival. We see no reason why we can’t have the largest film festival,” he said.