Tribeca Cinemas
54 Varick Street,
New York,
NY
10013
54 Varick Street,
New York,
NY
10013
3 people
favorited this theater
Showing all 21 comments
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.
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/
This is a November 2008 photo.
exterior shots taken nov 2007
http://www.flickr.com/photos/woody1969/2007632345/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/woody1969/2008455098/
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”.
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.
Here is a recent photo.
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.
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.
This is all well and nice but did this cinema ever open?
That makes sense, but you would think the Regal folks would welcome the Tribeca Film Festival with open arms becaue I can’t imagine that that ‘plex does much business. The only time I’ve ever been there is for the fest.
And one benefit for expanding the fest is that they seem to have added screenings for the films that are playing in the fest. Many of the screenings sell out. Since I’m not an insider, I don’t buy a festival pass, I don’t live “downtown” and I don’t have an American Express Card, I don’t get first dibs on tickets. All those groups get ducats first, then the tickets go on sale to the John Q. Public. I buy mine the day tickets go on sale and even then I’ve found myself shut out of screenings. Hopefully, the expansion of the fest will eliminate this.
Someone told me recently that they had a problem with the Regal Theatre complex down there. So that one of the reasons for the move.
I have been attending films since the beginning (all the way back to ‘02) and am a little baffled by this change as well. You won’t get the sense of a festival if the venues are that stretched out and it defeats the festival’s original intent to bring people downtown. The only time I go below Canal each year is for this fest. Maybe they didn’t want to rent the projection equipment they had to bring to Stuyvesant High School and I assume Pace University’s theatre. I don’t even know if those venues are being used this year.
It apears this theater will be the center of the Tribecca Film Festival which is oddly moving up town this year to play at locations as far North as Lincoln Square (which angers me to no end that movies in the festival will play so far from Tribecca since the original goal of the festival was to bring revenue in to lower Manhatten and areas directly impacted by 9/11). I guess all of Manhatten has, granted, but the new locations at AMC/Loews make it hard to catch multiple screenings, last year the furthest up they went was a screening or two at the Prada store in So Ho.
The Tribeca Cinemas will be hosting a Q&A meeting tonight (Feb. 27th, 7-8 p.m.) for those interested in volunteering at the 2006 Tribeca Film Festival.
Location: 54 Varick Street at Laight Street
Transit directions: Take the #1, #9, A, C or E subway trains to Canal Street.
Festival department heads as well as the Volunteer Manager will be on hand to give a preview of what it’s like to work at the Festival and to answer questions.
You can fill in an application on the spot for a place on the volunteer team.
The cinemas’ official website is: http://tribecacinemas.com
The festival’s official website is: http://www.tribecafilmfestival.org
Two other notes:
– John Vanco, hired several months ago as General Manager of the new IFC Center, booked the Screening Room for several years during the late 1990s and up until 2001 or thereabouts, programming during that time many productions of his now-defunct Cowboy Pictures.
The Screening Room opened sometime around ‘96 and closed in the fall of 2002, never fully recovering from the effects of 9/11. The impression I have is that the Tribeca Cinemas are operating as more of a private/special event venue and will not be booked and operated as a more traditional movie theatre would be; Robert DeNiro and Jane Rosenthal have been and/or are probably able to recoup their costs as is.
My, bad.
The Screening Room closed in 2003 or 2004. It wasn’t even open in ‘93 and '94.
While I am here and writing about downtown, isn’t there a cinema or at least a cinema building in the South Street Seaport. I don’t know what it is being used for, if anything. I think it may have been used as a revival house for about a minute in the 80s or 90s because I think I vaguely remember “Gone With the Wind” screening here (I didn’t go). I also could be hallucinating.
The Screening Room closed in the last 2 years or so. What he meant to say was that the Screening Room closed in 2003 or 2004, following 9/11…
I think he means that the Screening Room closed in 1993 and 9/11 impacted business on the Tribeca Cinemas since 2001. Its just worded wrong.
Something’s not right here — if it was impacted by 9/11 it would not have closed in 1993 or 1994.