The last time Phoenix had an independent film house, Steven Spielberg owned the box office with his first Indiana Jones movie, “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” Sam Raimi’s “The Evil Dead” shocked audiences with unprecedented gore, and it was still OK for Mel Gibson to lose his shit, as he did in “Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior.” The year was 1981.
The Palms Theater was the last such venue. It opened its doors in 1945 off of Central Avenue and Thomas Road, but has since been torn down, leaving Phoenix with a gaping void. The landscape was a little different then. Ronald Reagan had just become President, and MTV and Microsoft’s MS-DOS software were introduced to the public for the first time. Phoenix was already a major metropolis then, but had not yet cracked the top-five cities in the country in terms of population.
As the city’s community has grown, so has the demand for a thriving downtown culture. Dive bars, restaurants, coffee shops and local-run boutiques are regular sites in downtown but something has been missing. Until now.
With FilmBar’s opening in February, the sprawling city now has a spot where folks can unwind with a bottle of beer or glass of wine while checking out foreign films and cult classics. Enter Programming Director Steve Weiss.
Over the last 20 years he has worked in the movie industry, serving as a location scout and manager for commercials and films. Although he displays a passion for the art, FilmBar’s cinematic champion is not the movie aficionado some might expect him to be.
“The weird thing about my background is, I did study some film and certainly worked in film off and on, but I never was the true film buff that knew or saw every film,” Weiss says. “I think that actually has been an asset to programming.”
Where some enthusiasts make a living out of breaking down and comparing most every movie that has ever been made, Weiss explains that he hasn’t been jaded by the process because of his non-traditional path to programming.
“Originally I just really loved short films,” he says. “I started looking at other films and then features came along that I could program and I’ve just been really excited about championing great stuff ever since.”
Weiss, an ASU 1978 alumni, first gained notoriety with the local film community in 2002 as the executive director of No Festival Required, an outlet for independent and foreign filmmakers. Initially hosted at Modified Arts, the event showcased a series of short films across the Valley before settling in to the Phoenix Art Museum. “The idea of showing shorts was really because I felt that that was the one thing missing in downtown Phoenix,” he says. “All of the other arts were coming together except that one.”
No Festival Required went on to run 50 screenings that included more than 600 shorts over a five-year period.
During that time he relied heavily on his occupation as a location scout to pay the bills, but eventually found that he was more excited about film programming as time went on. “In the back of my mind I always thought it would be really cool to open a theater,” he says.
He got close to opening his own theater, but the dream never came to fruition. Two weeks after a potential deal fell through, he met Kelly Aubey, owner of FilmBar. Initially, Aubey planned to do the programming on his own, but that changed once Weiss approached him.
“I crafted probably one of the more eloquent emails I’ve ever written because I really, really wanted that job,” he says. “We met and our first conversation was nothing to do with business, we just got to know each other. Our last meeting ended with a contract and a toast out of Dixie cups in the middle of the empty space that became the theater.”
Now Weiss knows exactly what he wants for the screenings at FilmBar.
“There is a definable level of quality,” he says. “It doesn’t necessarily mean slick, or narrative or non-narrative. I like lots of different types of films.”
“I’ve seen films that were extremely slick and highly polished and professional in their look, but completely disinterest me and give me no emotional satisfaction after I watch it,” he says.
He leans towards short subject work and documentaries, stressing that the story takes precedence in deciding what he likes. And so goes the movie selection by the man who admittedly rarely watches movies.
“My friends make a lot of fun of me because I don’t go to movies, I very rarely rent movies and I watch crappy television all the time,” he says. “I look for movies that I can show to an audience, and that will enable money to flow to the filmmaker and myself.”
Reach the reporter at jose.sandoval@asu.edu
