A lot of people don’t realize this but there are different prices for the sale or rental of movies depending on how many people are going to watch it. For example, if you own one of the country’s remaining video rental stores, you’re not supposed to just go to your local Walmart and buy a copy of a new release there to rent out in your store. The copies being sold in stores are supposed to only be for home viewing. If you’re renting the copy, you’re supposed to buy a more expensive rental copy of the movie.
And by a similar principle, if you rent a movie at a video store, you’re only supposed to be showing it in a household. If you’re renting it to show it to a larger group of people, you’re supposed to pay a higher institutional rental rate.
I encountered this back when I worked in prisons. We would rent videos and show them to hundreds of prisoners. So we had to have a special contract for our video rentals and paid a higher price than the regular rentals.
In the 80’s when I was in college they had 2 or 3 movies a night in the main 400 seat theater with up to 3 other theaters showing different films on weekends. They showed a mix of classic and current.
I just checked their web sit and it seems that they are down to a single theater but they still show multiple films a night. This week they’re showing “Porco Rosso,” “The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology,” “Blue Jasmine,” and “Captain Phillips.”
The college where I work has a weekly series of recent-but-not-out-on-DVD movies. Student clubs and academic departments also offer regular screenings of documentaries or foreign-language movies that are open to anyone, but these are usually held in classrooms.
This is untrue. Legally, the first sale doctrine enables all films on video and DVD to be rented out as “rental copies.” The same goes for public libraries. I purchase titles for my library’s movie collection from the same store you buy Uncle Joe’s Christmas DVD from. For the same price too.
What you’re thinking of is “public performance” discs, which do cost more and are typically only sold for educational materials. Public display of popular movies is handled through a film licensing company such as Swank Motion Pictures.
At Cal-Berkeley in the early 90’s, I was part of the film club that organized a weekly series of films at Wheeler Hall on Fridays. Some from earlier in the year, some classics, and other “screenings” for upcoming releases.
I just did a quick check online, all I found is something called GIANT.
They do, but there are fewer of them. I walk down the Infinite Corridor at MIT on an irregular basis, and I see that the Lecture Series Committee is still showing two flicks a week, generally really new ones. They used to show at least three, and continued through the summer.
Rochester Institute of Technology, when I was going to the U of R up the road, used to show a movie every night of the week! I don’t know how they’re faring these days, but I’ll bet they’re still showing a couple a week.
My alma mater showed movies on Friday and Saturday nights and apparently still does. I think the movies were shown in the window between the theatrical release and the home video release, around the time that the movies were available in the second-run theaters or on airplanes.
As it was a nerd school, so reactions included things like groans when Han Solo used parsec as a unit of time.
Glad to see some still do it. In my 1970s time at MSU, the residence hall movie nights were great. A classic movie, a Star Trek episode, a Leave it to Beaver episode. I think the latter was just so we could all yell “FUCK YOU WARD!” whenever Mr. Cleaver appeared. Plus you could count on someone doing some rather nasty shadow hand things to June when she appeared.
FWIW, every February, Washburn University in Topeka, Kansas has a 2 day free silent film festival. The ones I’ve been to had a very small number of students attend. Stupid young people
my favorite story is still the showing of Sam Peckinpaw’s Straw Dogs. Dustin Hoffman’s wife , angry at her theoretical astrophysicist husband, erases a " + " sign in the middle of a long equation on his blackboard and changes it to a " - ".
One guy in the audience sttiod up and yelled
“I’D KILL HER!”
the kicker is that, later in the film, he walks by the blackboard, sees the equation out of the corner of his eye, and nonchalantly changes the " - " back to a " + " with a single stroke of chalk.
University of Chicago’s Doc Films is the oldest film society in the country, and is still going strong, showing a different movie every night of the week during each term (I think they may have a more relaxed schedule the last week and exam week.)
