The Syracuse Cinephile Society is coming up on its 50th anniversary, and Monday night marks the beginning of a seasonal, 14-week series of classic film screenings held at the Spaghetti Warehouse that celebrates the milestone. Gerry Orlando has been the society’s president since 2007, and offered up some information about the weekly series.

The Daily Orange: What exactly does 50 years mean to you?

Gerry Orlando: I’ll tell you, 50 years to me is very exciting because in this age of streaming and DVDs and cable TV and everything, we are still packing the room. We get an average of between 60 and 70 people. Many weeks there are even more. And what I’m really proud of is that we’ve changed with the times. I mean, we were showing 16mm films and a lot of those prints became old and shrunken and very hard to show. So we’ve gone digital and we have an upscale digital system that doesn’t look like video. It looks like you were in a movie theater. People just rave about how good it looks. Just so you know, we work directly with the studios. We pay rights for everything. And we have a really good relationship with them and the distributors so if there’s a new film restoration that comes out they’ll give us authorization to show it.

D.O.: How do you choose which movies to show? 

G.O.: Well, the basic thing that we do — if you look down our schedule — you’ll see that there is a variety of genres. And so we try to have some things like at least one musical and at least one science fiction or horror film and maybe a romantic drama. I try to have it from different eras because I don’t want to have everything from the early 1930s. If one movie is 1933, maybe the next one will be a little later — maybe 1945 or ‘46…Where it gets tricky is now because we’re working with the studios it’s almost like they open up their vaults to us. So we have almost everything to pick from and it’s hard when you get to the stars because I may schedule one film and then I’ll want to schedule one for that same season and then go, “Oh, now wait a minute, so-and-so is in there and she’s in this other one so this other movie is just going to have to wait until another season.” That’s to be sure we’re not duplicating actors.

D.O.: What is it about the people around here that they have a love for film? Is this something I could find in other towns?

G.O.: Well let me tell you about the people who come. Most of them, they’re not diehard film buffs, OK. They’re usually out for the evening. So it’s almost like the whole place is like a dinner theater-type atmosphere. They come for dinner, they eat first, dishes are cleared and then we start the show. But most of them are just general people and a lot of them are seeing these films for the first time. It might be a classic Humphrey Bogart film, and you think, “Oh, everybody has seen that.” And there are people who come that are in their sixties and they’ve never seen it before. We even get younger people, people in their twenties and thirties. That’s what I’m really pleased about, it isn’t just a bunch of old people coming, you know? It’s not really like a niche group.
D.O.: How about the movie you’re going with on Monday, “I Love You Again.” Could you tell me why you went with that one?

G.O.: Because we usually like to start with a light, fun movie. William Powell and Myrna Loy, they’re big favorites with our audience and it’s something that has a lot appeal to it. Just about everybody likes that movie. It’ll bring in a good crowd. Just a really fun movie to kick off the season with.

D.O.: OK. And how about next week — why’d you go with those two in that mystery double feature? 

G.O.: Well, Sherlock Holmes, those are always big favorites. And those look terrific. We’re showing the restorations — I’m telling you they look like were filmed yesterday. And “The Case of The Black Parrot” we’re showing because the star of that, William Lundigan, is a Syracuse native. He was born in Syracuse, raised in Syracuse. And people like that. Normally when we have a double feature, what we like to do is to show one that is really popular and then the opening one is a little more obscure…We like to give them something that’s “OK, yeah, I know this one. I want to see it again. I want to see a restored print of it.” We had one guy a couple years ago, he wanted to see “Random Harvest,” he loves “Random Harvest,” but he’s only seen it on TV.  We showed the restoration that looked like it was filmed yesterday and he was leaving almost in tears. He said he’d never seen it look that beautiful before. You really need to come down and see. I am just so proud of what we are putting up on that screen.

Published on September 11, 2016 at 8:27 pm

Contact: jtbloss@syr.edu | @jtbloss