Frogby Sachs

Overcoming Lockdown with Film

The AFS Cinema reopens after a 16-month closure. Photo courtesy of Jana Birchum.

Written by Frogby Sachs

How did Local Film Establishments Solve the Pandemic?

Adusty lot, an empty shop, a boarded-up restaurant. We’ve all seen it. Especially over this past year and a half, it’s inevitable that some establishments just aren’t going to make it. Almost every business in Austin was closed for many months, if not a year or more before beginning to reopen. In just the spring of 2020, 1.4 million Texans lost their jobs, according to the Texas Tribune. Most businesses across Texas, the U.S. and the world have had a hard time keeping things running as usual, and film-related businesses have been hugely affected by the pandemic. Blue Starlite Mini Urban Drive In, a drive-in theater local to Austin, has been doing great, or as great as you can be in such an unpredictable and wild time. “My business is made for pandemics, we thrive in pandemics, so there really are no downsides to my business during a pandemic,” Josh Frank, CEO of Blue Starlite, said. Frank is a self-proclaimed artist who enjoys “creating and inventing and playing.” During the time of widespread shutdown in Austin, Frank did some of the best innovating he’d ever done. He put together three personal one-car-only screens for his drive-in, and the reception has been incredible. “Sunday night, Saturday night and Friday night, all three [personal screens] were rented out,” Frank said. Frank’s innovative and imaginative approach to his business as well as the luck he’s had in not having to adapt much to the pandemic has served him well. In spite of this, he’s experiencing some difficulty at the moment. “There’s no predicting this business,” Frank said. “Last night was a Sunday and we were super busy, and today’s a Monday and we got nothing. We got three tickets today. And next Monday, we might be super busy, and that’s what makes it really difficult.” Frank explained that it’s been this way for years and that it’s just like this for his business and others like his own. His one exception to this issue, however, is private rentals. “We have big companies that, over the last two years, normally would spend tens of thousands of dollars running out of some fancy hotel,” Frank said, “and they come to us because we’re the most interesting option that they have for bringing their events outdoors.” He added that before the pandemic, he got two or three of these jackpot rentals in a year, but that during the pandemic, that number was easily 20 or 30. However, not every business was so lucky in keeping business up and running as usual. The Austin Film Society Cinema, Austin’s only nonprofit art house theater, was closed for 16 months before finally reopening in July. To stay afloat, the AFS Cinema applied for the Shuttered Venue Operators Grant, or the SVOG. Aaron Malzahn, Business and Technical Manager at the AFS Cinema, explained that receiving this grant “helped us out tremendously, as well as the number of loans that they were able to give us.” Malzahn added that the organization had to make some difficult decisions during lockdown. “Unfortunately, at the cinema, we had to lay off all of our part time workers,” Malzahn said. “We also, organization-wide, 9 | Epilogue

had to lay off a third of our full time staff. Then we had to go through a lot of budgeting to see what our emergency plans were [and] how long we could keep this going, and we had to weigh that with the safety that we all felt in doing business that would not put anybody in danger.” Malzahn attributed this

extended closure to the organization’s high interest in keeping those who come into the cinema safe. Luckily for the AFS Cinema, once the organization finally reopened, immediate success was evident. “The response from our community was incredible,” Malzahn said. “We had some of the best weeks we had ever had. When we opened in July of this year, the first two weeks that we were open were some of the biggest in our record.” On top of the high attendance, the cinema received a big boost to kickstart its reopening. “Our members are very generous, and we got about $255,000 from many hundreds of people who donate,” Malzahn added. “It was very, very great to see that support from the community and know that people wanted us to still be here.” Austin Studios, a branch of the larger Austin Film Society that is dedicated to renting out space that local filmmakers can shoot in, hasn’t had all the same benefits and issues as its sibling organization Austin Film Society Cinema. “As a studio, it was competitively a very good time to be in the studio business because productions wanted to be shooting in studios and because moving people around was becoming very difficult,” Martin Jones, director of Austin Studios, said in

reference to the time of lockdown in mid-2020. Jones went on to explain that in the time when the studio didn’t have any shows shooting because of necessary safety protocols, the staff spent the year “updating our new strategic plan, our program plans and getting ready to launch new programs.” He also shared that he and his teams “did things that are a nuisance when people are filming, like digging up sewage lines, fixing parking lots and pavement, replacing air conditioning units and painting and stripping floors.” In normal times, Jones said, you have to work these maintenance tasks around filming at the convenience of the renter, but when no one is using your space, you can be far more productive in these chores. The Shuttered Venue Operators Grant, the same grant that helped keep AFS Cinema part of Austin culture, greatly benefited Austin Studios as well. Jones explained that this grant came to the Austin Film Society as a whole and thus assisted each sub-organization in its troubles, of which Austin Studios ran into its fair share during the pandemic.

“The response from our community was incredible. We had some of the best weeks we had ever had.”

The new Creative Media Center at Austin Studios. Photo courtesy of Suzanne Cordeiro.

Josh Frank shows a Blue Starlitebranded mask. Photo courtesy of Olivia Aldridge.

“We lost people,” Jones said in reference to the organization’s tough decision to lay off 45 employees in the Austin Studios division alone. “We had a great team of full time people, and losing some of the people that are on your boat, running those orders, [meant] you had less people power. That put a greater responsibility on the people who remained. There were times where it was quite intense or tedious to try to

keep an organization moving.” In explanation of the effects of the choice to let some employees go, Jones said that “making those very tough decisions, and making them very early on, helped to stabilize our organization.” He went on to say that even though Austin Studios is a nonprofit organization, their employees still have to make money. The organization managed to achieve this with the “incredible resilience of our industry, and the creativity that people have been putting forward with solid grounding and science and safety.” Each business struggles and succeeds in their own way, overcoming the hugest of obstacles or working around some unexpected challenge.

These three organizations have encountered their fair share of ups and downs, and now that we’re in recovery from a time of shut-down businesses and mass laying off of workers, we can only hope that things will just go up from here.

“There were times where it was quite intense or tedious to try to keep an organization moving.”