Tribeca Cinemas
54 Varick Street,
New York,
NY
10013
54 Varick Street,
New York,
NY
10013
3 people
favorited this theater
At one time the only operating theatre south of Canal Street, the Screening Room opened in the mid-1990’s, 1995 or so, and was situated on Varick Street and Laight Streets just south of Canal Street. It was unique in another respect in that it was attached to a restaurant and the the Screening Room/restaurant was marketed in tandem and you could get your meal tickets and a movie for a fixed price. Originally it opened as a single screen theatre and at some point a second screen in the complex was added. The cinemas, small, but cozy and somewhat faux funky, screened a mix of indie films, revivals, second run and was a venue for festivals. Like many businesses “downtown”, the SR was no doubt impacted by the 911 tragedy and quietly went dark sometime in late-2003 or early-2004.
Reportedly Robert DeNiro has bought/taken control of the facility, but it hasn’t as yet reopened as a full time public cinema.
However, in the 2005 program guide for the Tribeca Film Festival the site of the former Screening Room was used a venue and the new name is the Tribeca Film Center.
Contributed by
chris heaney
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Recent comments (view all 21 comments)
This is all well and nice but did this cinema ever open?
I had been here a couple of times in the late 1990s to see foreign or independent films. Nice cozy set up and good snack counter, along the lines of the Film Forum. Since I’m rarely down by Canal Street, not sure what it’s doing right now outside of the Tribeca Film festival.
To further confuse matters there was another theatre that was called “Tribeca Cinema” at 41 White Street. There was a discussion of this theatre somewhere here, but the White Street Tribeca Cinema had a brief life as a revival theatre in the late summer of ‘92 to the late fall of '92/early winter '93. It literally opened/closed within a span of months. I remember going there to see a number of screenings and it was a real bare bones operation. I never could remember the name of the cinema until I stumbled across it doing some research yesterday. I remember learning it closed when I went down there to catch Fellini’s “Roma” and the theatre was dark. I think I later went up to Columbus Circle to catch “A River Runs Through It” on its first run since I had time to kill.
Here is a recent photo.
Thanks LM, I now recognise this as THE SCREENING ROOM where I saw GOSFORD PARK. It had old beat-up uncomfortable seats with several missing and I felt like I was sitting in a 42nd Street dive. Although it was booked for specialised films the filthy concession stand sold pizza, of all things.
I never went back.
This is an 11/17/2003 article about the Oct. 30, 2003 closing of the Screening Room.
“Curtain comes down on the Screening Room.(Manhattan arthouse movie theater closes)
Source: Daily Variety
Author: Rooney, David
Marking another casualty in the Gotham specialty film community, Lower Manhattan venue the Screening Room has shuttered operations, following on the heels of distribution outfit Cowboy Pictures, which programmed the theater during one of its most successful periods.
Open since July 1996 and run by partners Henry Hershkowitz, Steve Kantor and Nancy Yaffa, the Screening Room closed its doors with no public warning Oct. 30 after operating at a loss for the past two years, posting a large notice that reads “All Farewells Should Be Sudden.”
“It’s tough lot us little guys,” Hershkowitz told Daily Variety. “We were never a huge money-maker, but we were paying the bills and had started paying back investors before 9/11. Basically, that was the final nail in our coffin.
“It’s become much harder to survive with all the competition downtown,” he added. “There are a number of new arthouse theaters like the Landmark and the United Artists at Union Square, plus multiplexes that have art screens, so everyone’s fighting over the same product. We lost out because we were a small company.”
In addition to its two theaters, the Screening Room contained a restaurant and bar that had frequently been used for industry events, such as the recent IFP Gotham Awards after-party and a launch for HBO docu-feature “Born Rich.”
“We still don’t know what’s going to happen with the place,” said Hershkowitz. “We have a long-term lease, and the business has been on the market, but while there are a number of interested panics, no deal has closed yet.”
The closing of the venue follows that of Cowboy, which shuttered Oct. 10 after a period of financial distress. During Cowboy’s tenure as programmer, the Screening Room was premiering films, but when the distrib expanded its operations and withdrew from the arrangement in 2001, the theater switched to move-over releases and was hard hit by the desertion of Lower Manhattan after the Sept. 11 attacks.
Further indication of the tough climate for New York film players can be seen in the recent closing of publicity house mPRm’s East Coast operations.
“I think it spells that the specialty community in New York has some specific challenges. Chief among them is being heard and seen, getting on people’s radar,” said IFP/New York exec director Michelle Byrd. “I look at Film Forum, which is a not-for-profit entity and I think a huge success in their ability to get the word out to people about challenging films, and I look at the Screening Room.
“I can’t speak about mPRm because publicity firms have their own unique challenges,” Byrd added. “But Cowboy and the Screening Room probably in a different time would have started as not-for-profit ventures. Maybe that’s the difference in approach. The ability to compete in a commercial marketplace sometimes requires not just great curatorial taste but a huge amount of marketing dollars”.
exterior shots taken nov 2007
http://www.flickr.com/photos/woody1969/2007632345/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/woody1969/2008455098/
This is a November 2008 photo.
This place is open and screening films weekly but apparently they are trying to keep it a secret, so don’t tell anyone.
http://www.tribecacinemas.com/TC_Home/
True: they do festivals, private screenings, benefits, and cultural screenings for the Tribeca Film Institute. While some of these are open to the public, not all are, and they aren’t running a commercial art house in the sense that the Angelika is. They also do screenings during the Tribeca Film Festival. I had a film show in the Big Apple Film Festival last November at the theater.