Dear Third Auditorium, Please Keep Your Floor a Little Sticky

The ticket stub in my wallet has faded to a blank pink rectangle. It's been riding behind my driver's license since roughly the Clinton administration. I can't tell you the movie anymore. I can tell you it cost three dollars, because I remember being annoyed that it wasn't two-fifty.

Yesterday the Austin Film Society announced plans to expand its screening capacity with a third auditorium. That's the news, and it's good news, and I want that on the record before I start complaining about everything near it. A nonprofit that shows old, strange, foreign, and difficult movies wants more room to do it. In this town. In this decade. Nobody's putting a rooftop pickleball court on it. They want another dark room.

So I wrote the room a letter. It doesn't exist yet, which makes it the ideal correspondent. It can't have a valet stand or a brand partner.

The Letter

Dear Third Auditorium,

Congratulations on being announced. I've seen a lot of Austin buildings get announced, and the announcement usually turns out to be the best part. I'm rooting for you to be the exception.

Let me tell you where I learned to watch movies, so you'll know what you're being compared to.

There was a second-run house near campus that I'll call the Upstairs. It's a composite of three or four rooms I've half-merged in memory, so don't go looking for it. You climbed a staircase carpeted in a pattern designed to hide everything, including the staircase. At the top sat a man in a box who took your three dollars with the face of someone counting time served. The seats folded up hard enough to take a finger. The screen had a faint brown water stain in the upper left corner shaped like Oklahoma. Every movie had Oklahoma in it. Casablanca had Oklahoma in it.

It was perfect.

Three dollars bought you a double feature on weeknights. If you were broke, which was everyone, you smuggled in a sack of popcorn popped on a hot plate in an apartment off 26th. You could hear the trucks on Guadalupe during quiet scenes, so every art film had a soundtrack of air brakes. I saw something Swedish and devastating there with a couple of buddies and a guy who fell asleep, woke up during the credits, and said, loudly and sincerely, "Well, that happened."

He wasn't wrong. Three dollars was a fair price for finding out what happened.

What Finding Out Costs Now

Now, Third Auditorium, you need to know what's happened to the price of finding out what happened.

You haven't been built yet, so you've missed the era where going to the movies became a reservation. I'm not talking about your future colleagues in the AFS building. I mean the industry around them. At the big chains, the ticket is now a menu. There's a base price, then a fee for choosing your seat, then a fee for the convenience of paying the fee. There's a reclining chair with a motor in it. My entire first apartment did not contain a motor. I've watched a man spend a whole trailer reel finding the exact angle of repose, like a dentist's patient negotiating with fate.

Then there's dynamic pricing, where a Friday-night seat costs more because a computer noticed you wanted it. The Upstairs had dynamic pricing too. It went like this: if the man in the box liked you, he waved you in for the second feature free. That was the whole algorithm. It ran on mood and was never once wrong.

Also, in a separate tragedy, parking. The Upstairs had no parking. That sounds like a complaint, but it was a feature. You walked, you biked, you caught the shuttle, or you circled behind the co-ops for twenty minutes and arrived with three minutes to spare and real stakes. Today, at a lot of multiplexes, parking is a second ticket for your car to watch the building.

A Gentle Concern

Here's my one worry, Third Auditorium, and I'll say it gently, because you are a baby.

When a beloved Austin institution grows, the city around it starts getting ideas. I've watched it happen from Lamar to Cesar Chavez. A place gets popular for being unpretentious, and within three years the surrounding blocks have a "cinema-adjacent lifestyle district" with a tapas place called something like Reel. Somebody puts up a mixed-use building and names it The Auteur. One-bedrooms start at an amount of money I could have spent on ten thousand double features. The lobby has a framed poster of a movie nobody in the building has seen.

None of that is your fault. You're a room. But I'm asking you to be the kind of room that's bad for that kind of business. Show something four hours long and Hungarian on a Tuesday. Run a print with a scratch through the middle. Let the projector ping. Let somebody in the back laugh at the wrong moment and let everyone else forgive him. That's what keeps the leasing agents away. They can't monetize a room full of people concentrating.

Requests, in No Order

• Keep one cheap thing. I'm not asking for three-dollar tickets. I've seen the electric bill for this zip code, and I've seen August. Just keep one thing in the building that feels like it was priced by a person, like a matinee, a member night, or a bag of popcorn that doesn't come with a QR code.
• No seat motors. If I want to recline, I'll slump, the way our ancestors did.
• Let the trailers be weird. No fifteen-minute pre-show where a car drives through a rainforest to remind me I'll never afford it.
• Hire somebody who looks mildly put-upon to tear tickets. This is non-negotiable. It's heritage.

Closing Remarks

I'll close, Third Auditorium, by admitting the thing grouches don't like to admit. The people who run AFS have spent decades doing the unglamorous, money-losing work of keeping old movies in front of new people in this city. The organization was founded in 1985, back when Austin was mostly a place people left to go make movies somewhere else. Now it wants a third screen. That's not real-estate creep. That's the rare case of something good in this town getting bigger without getting worse, at least so far.

I'd like that "so far" to last.

So go ahead and get built. Get permitted, if the city can spare a reviewer. Then turn your lights down and show us something nobody asked for.

I'll be in the back with a sack of hot-plate popcorn I'll swear I bought in the lobby, and my faded pink stub still in my wallet. It's not a ticket anymore. It's a receipt for the idea that a movie could cost less than the drive to it.

Sincerely, A man who still flinches at folding seats

P.S. If you end up with a water stain on the screen, don't fix it. Let it be a state. Everybody needs a little Oklahoma.