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Austin Film Society
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Austin Film Society (AFS) is a non-profit film society based in Austin, Texas. Founded in 1985 to exhibit independent, experimental, foreign and various other non-mainstream art films, the film society has grown from just film exhibition to fostering independent filmmaking in Texas and has served as a cornerstone in building the film industry in Austin. The film society also owns and maintains Austin Studios, hosts the annual Texas Film Hall of Fame gala, and oversees the Texas Filmmakers' Production Fund grant program. The film society was founded by film director Richard Linklater, who currently serves on the board as artistic director. Other notable members on the board and advisory board include Tim McCanlies, Robert Rodriguez, Charles Burnett, Guillermo del Toro, Jonathan Demme, Mike Judge, John Sayles, Steven Soderbergh, Paul Stekler and Quentin Tarantino.
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AFS was created in 1985 by film director Richard Linklater, cinematographer Lee Daniel, Austin Chronicle editor and South by Southwest (SXSW) founder Louis Black, University of Texas at Austin film professor Charles Ramirez-Berg and film programmer and professor Chale Nafus. Their original goal was to bring hard-to-find, sometimes obscure films for screening in Austin. Early screenings held in a makeshift projection room upstairs from a local coffee shop drew a moderate cult following. AFS eventually grew in scale and began developing various programs to boost film production and education.
In 2000, with a unique partnership with the City of Austin, AFS created Austin Studios on a section of land from the former Mueller Airport. Former airplane hangars were converted into five studio production stages while several terminals were turned into production offices. Austin Film Society is currently located on the Austin Studios property, overseeing the daily operations of the studios, in addition to actively bringing in new film productions from small independent films to large studio pictures.
Austin Studios is a 20 acre film and video production facility with 10,000 square feet of production office space and over 100,000 square feet of production space. The space includes five production stages converted from airplane hangars, two production office buildings, and numerous onsite vendors including Chapman/Leonard, Film Fleet, Gear, Great FX and Heartland Studio Equipment.
Austin Studios is also home to the Austin Film Society breakroom and screening room with 35 mm, 16 mm and video projection capabilities.
Various studio films shot at Austin Studios include: Miss Congeniality, The New Guy, The Rookie, The Life of David Gale, 25th Hour, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Secondhand Lions, Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over, Man of the House, Friday Night Lights, The Adventures of Shark Boy and Lava Girl, The Wendell Baker Story, Idiocracy, A Scanner Darkly, Infamous, and forthcoming films The Hitcher, The Return, Stop-Loss, and Grind House. Various TV shows, commercials and music videos have also been shot at the studios. The Flaming Lips video "Psychic Wall" from The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie was shot in one of the stages and shows a behind the scenes look at the hangars. Austin Studios is also the former home to the Thunderdome, headquarters and skating facility of the Texas Rollergirls, as seen in the A&E reality series Rollergirls.
In November of 2006, the city of Austin voted in favor of Proposition 4, which allotted a $5 million bond to improving Austin Studios. Planned renovations include soundproofing the stages, climate control, and improving the digital infrastructure of the facilities.
Since its inception in 1985, the Austin Film Society has screened more than 2000 films. The 'Essential Cinema' series offers weekly screenings that are free to film society members, and range in monthly themes from director retrospectives, to regional or genre specific series. The 'Texas Documentary Tour' is a monthly series which hosts groundbreaking documentaries usually with the filmmakers in attendance. Both series are usually screened at the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema.
AFS also hosts the Quentin Tarantino Film Festival, where Tarantino spends over a week in Austin screening some of his favorite films from his private collection and sharing his unique encyclopedic knowledge of obscure films. The Tarantino Film Festival first began in 1996 as a 10 day event at the Dobie Theatre (at which Tarantino showcased his favorite "sleazy genre films").
AFS has also hosted numerous regional and world premieres of films including: Sin City, Bad News Bears, School of Rock, The Adventures of Shark Boy & Lava Girl, Jackie Brown, and various other films usually directed by Austinite filmmakers like Richard Linklater and Robert Rodriguez.
The film society also hosts smaller screenings of independent films and rough cuts to private audiences at the AFS screening room. New artists services programs like the Docs-In-Progress series allow filmmakers to screen rough cuts to AFS members as a test audience. More recently the cast of The Real World Austin screened a rough cut of their SXSW documentary The Real SXSW.
The Texas Filmmakers' Production Fund is a grant program for emerging Texas-based filmmakers. The program was created in 1996 in response to the lack of public grant funding for filmmakers in the state. As of 2006, the film society has given out over $500,000 worth of grants to over 190 filmmakers since its inception, providing the seed money for several projects that went on to screen at festivals like Sundance, Cannes, and SXSW.
The Austin Film Society recently sponsored the cast of The Real World Austin to produce a documentary on SXSW. In several episodes AFS facilities and staff can bee seen.
- "Austin Studios Takes Flight", Austin Chronicle, December 8, 2000.