YELLOW SPRINGS, Ohio — When the Little Arts Theatre decided to pursue a $100,000 grant to build a stylish new marquee in keeping with its hundred-year-old history, this cozy arthouse theater in Ohio got help from some talented people.
Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker Steve Bognar hails from Yellow Springs, the bohemian college town between Columbus and Cincinnati, where the theater is in the heart of downtown. In addition to being one of Little Art’s biggest fans, Bognar is a supporter of small independent theaters everywhere, as they struggle to survive in an industry now dominated by home streaming.
The eight-minute video, directed by Bognar and filmed for the theater’s grant application, was intended to reflect what its loss means to people, communities — even entire societies.
“This movie theater is right in the middle of town; it’s the heart of our little town,” he said in a recent interview.
Bognar, who won an Oscar in 2020 for the feature documentary “American Factory” with the late Julia Reichert, began the video with nearly 100 different classic film titles projected onto the Little Art Theatre’s existing marquee. He then conducted interviews with local residents who reminisced about their favorite films and movie-going experiences.
The documentarian doesn’t forget that such community experiences are becoming increasingly rare, as school populations are fragmented by rising home and charter school enrollment, in-person church attendance is declining and everything from shopping to dining to dating moves more and more online.
“If there was one overall theme that emerged or kind of a guiding idea that emerged, it was that a cinema, a small-town movie theater, is like a community center,” Bognar said. “It’s a place where we come together to have a collective experience, like a work of art or a community event or a local filmmaker showing their work.”
Other events Little Art has hosted in its 95-year history include the Dayton Jewish Film Festival, the 365 Project for Juneteenth and a Q&A with Hiroshima survivors.
Bognar’s video did the trick. Little Art won the first Theatre of Dreams award from streaming media company Plex. The company is using its grant program to celebrate other independent entertainment entities, as a survey conducted with OnePoll last summer found that two-thirds of respondents believed independent movie theaters closing would cause great harm to society.
“It’s a beautiful collective experience to sit in the dark and express some kind of emotion, to go through a story and feel it together,” Bognar said. “We don’t do that enough anymore. We’re often isolated nowadays. We look at our screens separately. We watch different movies. It’s sad.”
He believes that when people watch the same film together they share energy, adding a sensory dimension to the experience.
“We feel more comfortable because we are surrounded by people who are going through the same story,” he said. “And that’s what theater can do.”
The theater plans to use the grant to replace the Little Art’s boxy modern marquee, which previously hung over the ticket booth. The theater opened in 1929.
“We found an old photo of our marquee from the 1940s and early ’50s, and that’s when it all came together,” said Katherine Ekstrand, the theater’s director of development and community impact. “And we said, that’s it — this is the marquee. We want to go back to our past so we can get into our future. So that’s where it started.”
Bognar, 60, said the theatre was the place where he was inspired to become a filmmaker as a youngster.
“Some of my deepest, most loving storytelling experiences in my entire life have happened right here in this theater, where I’ve been overwhelmed by a great work of cinema,” he said. “And that’s what I want to create for the audience, you know. It’s incredibly hard to get to that level, but I love swimming toward that shore.”
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