For more than three decades, University of Arizona School of Theatre, Film & Television alum Mike Plante (’94) has been finding audiences for films that might otherwise slip through the cracks. Plante began his career as a projectionist at Tucson’s Loft Cinema and the Screening Room before spending 24 years as Senior Short Film programmer at the Sundance Film Festival, where he became an influential champion of independent cinema.
His new book, Sensation Cinema: The Audacious, Defiant History of Louis Sher and the Art Theatre Guild, shifts the lens to an earlier generation and the remarkable story of Louis Sher, the theater owner and distributor who built an arthouse empire by championing films that challenged convention – and censorship. Sher exhibited the work of filmmakers including Andy Warhol, Shirley Clarke, D.A. Pennebaker and John Waters, while his theaters became gathering places where audiences encountered films they might never have found elsewhere.
For Plante, the story has a personal resonance. Sher’s Art Theatre Guild founded the Loft Cinema in 1963, connecting a pioneering figure in American exhibition history to a place where Plante himself later learned the power of programming. In this conversation, Plante reflects on Sher’s legacy, the art of building an audience for unconventional films, and why the battles over artistic freedom that defined Sher’s career remain relevant today.
Sher seems like an unlikely cultural outlaw: a soft-spoken World War II veteran who built an arthouse empire while battling censors, distributing Andy Warhol’s films and giving early support to filmmakers like Shirley Clarke, D.A. Pennebaker and John Waters. What surprised you most about the man behind this chapter of American film history?
Everything about Louis was so strait-laced on the surface. Suit and tie at all times, clean-cut, older than the counterculture scene he defended. He never had long hair but did grow a moustache in the late 60s. He believed in the same sort of freedom that the younger generations did.
The most surprising thing might have been that Louis didn’t run a movie theater until he was 40 years old. When he defended Les Amants (The Lovers) through a years-long court battle, he was in his mid-40s. When his cinemas showed Andy Warhol’s Chelsea Girls across the country, a film that even today is an incredibly edgy, avant-garde experience, Louis was 53. He stood up for all filmmakers and against censorship as a point of honor, not because it was the hip thing to do in a youthful rebellion.
In the movie industry, another thing that set him apart was he paid all his debts. In the 1950s, when local officials said the French films his theaters showed were obscene, he said, “Not paying your bills is obscene.”
Sher’s theatres became something of an informal film school for audiences, filmmakers and critics, introducing people to films they might otherwise never have encountered. Having spent decades programming films yourself, including at Sundance and now at The Beverly Theatre – Las Vegas’s first and only purpose-built, independent art-house cinema – do you see a connection between Sher’s approach to exhibition and your own philosophy about what deserves to find an audience?
Definitely – I learned from older generations I worked with, and they came up in Louis’ era. There needs to be a balance – you make money from popular films and you carve a space for niche films that are important but bring a smaller audience. Both of those types of film could be high art or trashy entertainment. And both types could be a new film or something from 1976 or 1926. And you work within a group to do this. Louis seemed to be the driving force but he started the company with another like-minded theater owner and continued to hire people who believed in the power of film, from the head office down to the individual theater managers, who could give input about what their specific audience would respond to. Discussion is a big part of programming, not unlike the gathering in a theater lobby after a movie gets out.
While I’m obviously a massive movie fan that goes to the theater like anyone does, it is different when you are at work and it’s a job to show movies to people. I learned this at [Tucson’s] Casa Video in the 1990s – customers asked for help to find a movie to match the feeling they were looking to experience. Casa would get tons of copies of the newest Hollywood film, but we would also be sure to get the newest foreign-language films from around the world and support American independent films. And all of these would have an audience and make money.
Back then, [downtown Tucson’s] The Screening Room would show the original Frankenstein, Craig Baldwin’s epic Tribulation 99, a new political doc, new video art on queer and environment subjects, and a Werner Herzog retrospective. That could be an arthouse lineup today, just as it was when I started as a projectionist there in 1993. And if you live in Tucson, you know all the amazing programming The Loft does. Louis more or less aged out of exhibition in the late 1970s, but I think he was an inspiration for these models, and I’m doing my best to follow in all these footsteps.
There’s a Tucson connection in the story – Sher’s Art Theatre Guild founded and ran The Loft Cinema in its early years. What was it like discovering that a theatre that would later become such an important part of your own film life, and have such an impact on Tucson’s film culture, was once part of Sher’s empire?
Just from what he did nationally – reopening old movie theaters, showing indie films with no distribution, knocking down racist and sexist censorship laws – he helped create a foundation for art house cinemas from the 90s to today. It wasn’t mind-blowing to hear that a movie magnate did all these things, but it was to hear that this person started the place where I got to work and grow. It felt like watching a movie filmed in your hometown, that strange excitement of seeing your neighborhood on a big screen. And then I met Louis’ nephew Mike Getz, who started the nationwide midnight movie craze in the 1960s. Everything felt like family.
The book is filled with extraordinary characters, stories and visual material, and tracks some of the wildest corners of American independent cinema, from censorship battles and midnight movies to sexploitation, 3-D and the avant-garde. What do you hope readers come away with after spending time in Louis Sher’s world?
Inside the artform of film, fighting for the freedom of speech and the ability for everyone to be able to make art is important today and feels like an endless struggle. But it has been since movies started. We can find strength in what Louis did, and in all of the filmmakers from his orbit. We can also find a lot of humor and some of the most entertaining, meaningful and absurd movies, thanks to Louis.