Boxoffice - October 2018
The Official Magazine of the National Association of Theatre Owners
The Official Magazine of the National Association of Theatre Owners
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SHOWEAST <strong>2018</strong><br />
TIM LEAGUE<br />
FOUNDER & CEO<br />
ALAMO DRAFTHOUSE<br />
SPIRIT AWARD<br />
RAY BINGHAM<br />
Interview by Daniel Loria<br />
Among cinephiles, it’s common knowledge that a<br />
passion for the movies can have a big influence<br />
on major life decisions. In Tim League’s case, that<br />
passion drove him to take a big risk that would<br />
eventually change his life—and help popularize<br />
an alternative to moviegoing in the United States.<br />
In his mid-20s, only several years removed from<br />
degrees in engineering and art history at Rice University, League<br />
traded in a fledgling career at Shell Oil to lease a movie theater in<br />
Bakersfield, California. That risk didn’t pan out, but he didn’t let that<br />
keep him down. Together with his wife, Karrie, League regrouped<br />
and decided to try his hand at exhibition one more time—this<br />
time in Austin, Texas. That theater has grown to become a fixture<br />
in American moviegoing, and today the Alamo Drafthouse brand<br />
stretches from exhibition (named the 22nd largest circuit in the U.S.<br />
& Canada in our <strong>2018</strong> Giants of Exhibition ranking) to film festivals<br />
(Austin’s Fantasy Fest) to film journalism (Birth.Movies.Death) and<br />
theatrical distribution (Neon). <strong>Boxoffice</strong> caught up with League<br />
ahead of ShowEast, where he will be receiving this year’s Bingham<br />
Ray Spirit Award. He talked about his beginnings in the industry<br />
and how he helped establish Alamo Drafthouse as one of the most<br />
recognizable circuits in theatrical exhibition.<br />
Alamo wasn’t your first foray in exhibition;<br />
can you tell us about the first<br />
theater you opened in your career?<br />
That would be 1994. I was 24 years<br />
old and had previously been working<br />
for Shell Oil in Bakersfield, California.<br />
On my way to work was an abandoned<br />
movie theater that I passed by every day.<br />
One day, the marquee with red old-fashioned<br />
letters said “For Lease.” I had<br />
never thought of that as a career path. I<br />
wasn’t really happy with my first choice<br />
of careers, being an engineer, but I loved<br />
movies. So that weekend I had the idea<br />
of signing that lease. I spent most of that<br />
whole week putting a rough business<br />
plan together. Literally a week later, I<br />
signed the lease and entered exhibition,<br />
with no real right to do it. I just loved<br />
movies and wanted a change. I was close<br />
to L.A., so actually one of the first things<br />
I did was I went down to L.A., went to a<br />
good magazine shop, and bought a copy<br />
of <strong>Boxoffice</strong> magazine. They had all<br />
the distributor contact info in the back.<br />
That’s how I started to figure out how the<br />
whole system worked.<br />
One of the things I’m most excited<br />
about for this award is that it’s named<br />
after Bingham Ray. He was one of those<br />
figures, my first year in operations at<br />
Bakersfield, who really took me under his<br />
wing. He was so kind to me. I obviously<br />
didn’t know a damn thing about what<br />
I was doing. We were late on payments<br />
and we didn’t even know how anything<br />
worked. He took the time to walk me<br />
through the steps, gave me films that he<br />
didn’t have to, like Killing Zoe and The<br />
Last Seduction. He was one of those kind<br />
human beings that helped me understand<br />
the business that I had embarked upon.<br />
I met him for the very first time, face to<br />
face, at Art House Convergence—literally<br />
four days before he passed away. I was<br />
so excited to be able to say thank you<br />
personally. It was such a strange ball of<br />
emotions, because he was so important to<br />
me in those Bakersfield years.<br />
What were some of the lessons that you<br />
took from that first experience that are<br />
still with you today?<br />
I was really wide-eyed and optimistic.<br />
The theater failed. We ran it for almost<br />
two years, running it as an art house<br />
theater. It wasn’t in a great neighborhood;<br />
there was a lot of crime in the neighborhood.<br />
We just couldn’t get people to<br />
come. So that resonated, having a process<br />
for determining what is important about<br />
a location. I didn’t go to business school,<br />
but that’s what you hear: the “location,<br />
location, location” mantra was driven<br />
home to me by failure. So we take that<br />
very seriously now.<br />
On the more positive side, my only<br />
qualification for getting into the business<br />
was that my girlfriend at the time, Karrie,<br />
agreed to marry me in the middle of that<br />
two-year stretch in Bakersfield. She also<br />
quit her job and went into operations, and<br />
helped basically stabilize the theater that<br />
I had started. We both loved movies, and<br />
that’s the core of our company now: we<br />
go to great pains to make sure that we hire<br />
people that love what we’re doing, love<br />
our mission, love going to the cinema.<br />
You weren’t deterred after that first<br />
rough experience in the business. What<br />
62 BOXOFFICE ® OCTOBER <strong>2018</strong>