After 25 years, Fremont Outdoor Cinema is losing its home
Apr 28, 2016, 9:07 PM | Updated: Oct 11, 2024, 10:01 am
After 25 years, Fremont Outdoor Cinema is losing its home. (Courtesy of Ryan Reiter)
(Courtesy of Ryan Reiter)
Fremont Outdoor Cinema was Seattle’s first outside movie venue and only the second of its kind in the country. Now it’s losing its home.
Its founder is hoping the community will rally to find a solution.
There was only one other outdoor cinema in the nation, in New York, back in 1992, when founder Jon Hegeman opened Seattle’s first outdoor cinema, the Fremont Almost-Free Outdoor Cinema. Hegeman also established the Fremont Sunday Market and the Ballard, Madrona and Wallingford farmers markets with his wife, Candace, back in the 90’s.
“We had spent 10 years living in Europe and so we fell in love with European-style markets,” Hegeman said. “When I came back, I was dismayed to find that we only had Pike Place Market as a true old style market. So when I got tired of my advertising career, I decided to move into community activism. For a hobby on the weekends, I decided to put together a street market in Fremont.”
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He noticed a large, blank wall on the side of a nearby building, and the Fremont Outdoor Cinema was born.
But, sadly, it’s about to lose its location.
“There are structural difficulties with the wall,” Hegeman said. “We’re just the casualties of that.”
Hegeman is optimistic that they’ll find a new location in the future, but for now:
“We’ve got one last show, that’s going to be July 16. I’m not sure what the film will be, but it’s going to be the last hurrah for the time being,” he said.
Let’s go back 25 years and look at the history of the Fremont Outdoor Cinema.
“Our first movies were ‘Motorcycle Gang’ and ‘Sorority Girl’ and these were 50’s movies, these were bad B movies. We actually got the idea from Quentin Tarantino because in his movie ‘Pulp Fiction’ — these were the two posters on the wall in the joint that you went into to see all of these celebrity waiters and so forth,” Hegeman said.
“So from there we began to mine some of the bad B movies, cult movies that you would never ever see anywhere,” he said. “At that point in time, there was a 16-millimeter distributor in California who had a mountain of these things. We were doing classics like Dr. Strangelove and all of the Kubrick movies, ‘Buckaroo Banzai,’ just off-the-wall films.”
Since the films were on 16 millimeters, there was always a 10-minute intermission to change the reel.
“That was the time that we allocated for contests. You know, for “Young Frankenstein” we had a contest called ‘Show us your scar!’ That just blew the doors off everything, people started sort of stripping! At the very end of it some gal pulled up her T-shirt and said, ‘Boob job!’ and, of course, the Applause-O-Meter went off the scale,” Hegeman recalls. “That was the all-time grand champion.”
The cinema site is just a parking lot, so people have to bring their own seating.
“People were encouraged to dress up in costume, bring imaginative seating. People brought sofas, dinette sets, rubber boats,” Hegeman said. “I remember one time when I was cleaning up after a show, and there was a four-poster bed with four people in it, in the middle of the parking lot under the spotlight of the security light. It’s etched in my memory as an incredible scene of the aftermath of a Saturday night movie.”
In recent years, Hegeman’s son Ryan Reiter has taken over the cinema. And he has changed the programming to appeal to the younger generation.
“People who were coming there were in their 30s and 40s — it was a date night scene. Their sense of filmography went way back to “Ben-Hur” and Gene Kelly and Groucho Marx, all of the Godzilla movies,” Hegeman said. “Nowadays, the idea of a classic is ‘Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.’ We don’t find the audience for the older films like we used to. People don’t have the depth of recall or appreciation. So we have catered to people’s tastes as the generation has moved on.”
Hegeman says Austin’s SXSW started off as a simple outdoor cinema, so he feels confident that Fremont’s can come back in a big way.
“What appears to be a setback, we want to turn this into an opportunity. Let’s dream big. Let’s put it out there to the community at large,” Hegeman said. “We have so much energy and capital in this town, and creative force, that I’m sure that people will see the ways and means to put something together.”
