Boxoffice - October 2018

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