Art house films ‘homeless’

Friday, Sept. 1, 2006 | 7:16 a.m.

If you're moving to Las Vegas, leave your beret behind, forget your odd-smelling skinny cigarettes and sell off your bookcase full of revisionist-Marxist auteur theory. There is no art house theater here.

Oh, sure, some small movies of rarefied airs do play here eventually. But they're squeezed into two multiplexes on the west side of town, and Woody Allen has to rub elbows with "You, Me and Dupree." And good luck to him making any money.

"Vegas is, despite its growth, a 'fair at best' art market," says Paul Serwitz, who buys films for Las Vegas' Village Square 18 and the Regal Cinemas in San Diego, Portland and Seattle. We are not like those places.

"Those markets are substantially larger, and there's a much stronger art audience in those cities," Serwitz says. "Part of it is having an urban center. Even though there's a downtown, there's no conventional center of the city in Las Vegas."

But it's not just the sprawl, it's also the lack of education. Art house theaters traditionally thrive near colleges and near an educated audience. In Seattle, which Serwitz says is a "legendary" market for art films, almost half of people 25 and over have at least a bachelor's degree.

Here, only 17 percent do.

In San Diego, which is almost twice our size and where 30 percent of people have made it through college, Serwitz estimates an art film can do four times as much business.

The art films that do trickle in here show in two multiplexes, the Village Square and the Century Suncoast. But only after they've been vetted in big-city markets such as New York and Los Angeles.

"They show some films, but they take a while to get here," complains Andrew Hamilton, a 39-year-old videographer and cinematographer. "And then usually it's very mainstream, something that's already been accepted by (dozens) of other theaters around the country.

"It limits the growth of the art culture in the whole city. If there were a theater, it would draw all kinds of people. It would draw people with their own movies. And the competition would make those films stronger."

The Village Square and the Suncoast have shown about two dozen art house films this summer. Some indie films make it to other theaters, such as the Brenden Theatres at the Palms and Regal Green Valley 10. And the occasional indie - like "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" or this summer's "Little Miss Sunshine" - breaks out to wide release.

Nationally, art house films (or independent or style or whatever you want to call them) are becoming increasingly successful and more popular, says Michael Taylor, chairman of the production division at USC's School of Cinema and Television. All of the major movie studios have started specialized divisions for art films.

"It's become an alternative to big Hollywood studio movies," Taylor says. "They're just such an obvious alternative to 'Batman' or 'Superman' and all of those other blockbusters."

At the same time, the growth of the DVD market has made studios more comfortable financing smaller films, says Jason Squire, another USC instructor and author of "The Movie Business Book." They may play to limited theater audiences, but they also might sell reasonably well on DVD, and the discs are more profitable for studios.

Large theater chains are also seeing art house films as a growing market, Squire says, and many are setting aside some multi- plex screens for them as the Regal and the Century do here. The AMC chain is setting aside 72 screens in 39 cities for art house films.

But the odds on Las Vegas getting a dedicated art house are low. Serwitz says he doesn't see Regal trying an art-only theater, and he wouldn't like anyone else's chances either.

"I'd wish 'em a lot of luck. It's a tough market," Serwitz says. "You can't make something be just by throwing resources at it."

A tough market for a tough business, says Trevor Groth, who is the director of programming for both the CineVegas and Sundance film festivals.

"Most art house theaters succeed just by staying open," Groth says. And new technology may make it tougher still. "I think that Netflix and video on demand could make things very hard for art houses. But for me and a fair number of people like me, there's nothing like seeing it the way it was meant to be seen."

But in Las Vegas, there just isn't any such scene.

"There's no art here," Hamilton says. "I just see the city languishing."