Cinema manager Peter Grendle
Growing up in Eugene, Oregon, Peter Grendle knew he was an odd, off beat teen, the type who needed a little extra something in order to make friends and attract girls. So he started making movies: short, cheap, shot-on-video works involving serial killers preying on high schoolers or jungle sirens who dismember men or private eyes spying on rich spouses who are having affairs. “I found I could get girls to talk to me by casting them in my movies,” Grendle said during an interview at the Violet Crown Cinema in Santa Fe. He became general manager of the theater in 2015 and practically lives there.
His biggest challenge back then wasn’t directing or coming up with plots, but rather, how to make fake blood for the gore sequences. “I put ketchup and salsa together once, but it didn’t work,” he said. He finally got it right after reading cult horror film actor Bruce Campbell’s autobiography, If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B Movie Actor, in which the Evil Dead star published the perfect recipe for cooking up cinematic blood. (Hint: It involves mixing Karo syrup, red food coloring, and nondairy creamer, among other ingredients.)
More important, Grendle earned extra high school credits making these low-budget opuses as after-school projects, and ended up graduating a year early. Did this ambitious Wes Craven-in-the-making immediately strike out for college? Nope. He spent one year sitting in his own darkened apartment watching movies on VHS, DVD, and television. “That’s when I discovered (French-Swiss filmmaker) Jean-Luc Godard. I watched every John Wayne movie I could find,” he said. This self-training exercise helped him develop a taste for filmmaking of all kinds. That experience — as well as his curating work under film arts professor Brent Kliewer at the College of Santa Fe’s art house cinema, The Screen — prepared the future filmmaker and historian for his job at Violet Crown. While the independently owned cinema offers up the expected roster of big-name film titles, under Grendle’s watch, it also screens current art house titles, classic film noir, and retro Clint Eastwood Westerns.
“Our mission statement here is to be the best movie theater that we can be, to be the best community sponsor we can be,” Grendle said. “Whether it’s a screening of Key Largo or an opera from Germany or a series of short films that run as a fundraiser for a local school, we’re always looking for a way to serve our community.”
Laura Sullivan, director of the School for Advanced Research and a regular Violet Crown patron, said the two words that best describe Grendle are “curiosity and commitment … Peter is a true community leader in the best sense of the word: He leads by example. He is always at the cinema, serving food, sweeping floors, collecting tickets, doing what it takes to keep the place running smoothly. He greets everyone with a broad and sincere smile, as he truly enjoys what he does.” That joy comes through as Grendle discusses possible community partnerships with local arts nonprofits, field trips to the Violet Crown for middle schoolers, or his early years in Santa Fe attending the now-defunct College of Santa Fe to study film. He moved here in 2004. “I decided I needed to get out of Eugene and not go to LA,” he said. He fostered ambitious plans for The Screen — such as a scheme to turn its parking lot into a drive-in cinema — but once the for-profit Santa Fe University of Art and Design took over the college, such dreams were put on hold. Instead, Grendle used his training to make a low-budget, lesbians-versus-zombies splatter film called Blood Soaked (2014) before landing his current job. (He plans on making another horror film soon.)
Violet Crown owner Bill Banowsky said Grendle’s knowledge of film and his commitment to making patrons happy made him the “perfect” candidate for the job. “Whatever we have created ‘good’ in Santa Fe is in large measure due to the leadership and work of Peter,” Banowsky said. “Right from the beginning, Peter connected in with the community and represented our vision — to be a community gathering space where everyone is welcome — better than anyone could have.”
Grendle, who just turned thirty-three, said despite the challenges in running the cinema — paying bills, fixing projectors, tending to leaky roofs — he loves his job. “Figuring out how to channel all this stress and funnel it into creating this beautiful thing is a lot of fun,” he said. “People tell us they feel something when they leave here, that we created an emotion that didn’t exist before they came in.”
— Robert Nott
“Whether it’s a screening of Key Largo or an opera from Germany or a series of short films, we’re always looking for a way to serve our community.”