State of the Art

Magnificent Obsession

Our reporter infiltrates the shadowy world of the Tacoma Film Club, a fight club of the mind

Recently, on a warm Wednesday night, a group of cinephiles met in a vacant storefront in downtown Tacoma’s Theater District. Outside, buses growled. The streetcar chirped, fountains bubbled, pedestrians passed. Nothing seemed amiss. 

But inside 924 Broadway it was a different story.  There, seated in a circle reminiscent of a pagan ritual, fourteen men and women were obsessively dissecting the classic 1971 film The Last Picture Show. It was the Tacoma Film Club’s monthly powwow. They didn’t just discuss the movie, they tore at it, devouring it like some beast cooked on a spit.

The Last Picture Show is a stark portrayal of small-town Texas circa 1951, starring a young Jeff Bridges, Timothy Bottoms, Cloris Leachman, Ben Johnson, Eileen Brennan and Ellen Burstyn, as well as Cybill Shepherd and Randy Quaid in their film debuts.  Peter Bogdanovich, who later played the shrink of Tony Soprano’s shrink on TV, was what cinephiles call the Auteur, who made the Aesthetic Choice to shoot the film in black and white. (Also, back then he had no money.)

Timothy Bottoms and Cloris Leachman in The Last Picture Show; Columbia Pictures.

“I was amazed at how much adultery could go on in such a small town,” said a grandmotherly woman, impressed by all that Texan bed hopping.

“In 1968, I spent two months as a minister in Creston, Washington,” a man responded. “I lived next door to all these characters. I remember this one guy gave his wife the clap and the next day it was all over town.”

I didn’t ask whether he meant the story or the clap.

“I thought the tumbling tumbleweed thing was a bit much,” another woman chimed in.  “I used to live in Texas, and...”

“West Texas?” asked Film Club Director Glenn Buttkus, rather aggressively.

“Yes.”

“You did see tumbleweeds in West Texas, didn’t you?”

“No!”

“I’ve got one in the grill of my car from driving through there this summer,” said Buttkus. “I’ll bring it in sometime and show it to you.”

A Vietnam veteran and former professional actor who owns thirty thousand films, Buttkus is handsome in the Al Pacino mold — small but rugged, with dark, slicked-back hair. He is the kind of charismatic leader who makes fringe groups like the Tacoma Film Club thrive. Moderating the discussion with the sensitivity of a barometer, he alternately provoked and soothed to maintain an exquisite tension. When the conversation turned to Texasville, the 1990 sequel to The Last Picture Show, his approach switched from aggressive to gentle.

“How’d you feel, Wendy, about Texasville?” he asked, employing the manner of a couch-side psychologist.

“Oh, boy,” answered Wendy. “Nothing was working right...I gave it a one. I love you people, but...”

Texasville, which used many of the stars from The Last Picture Show, enjoyed none of the critical acclaim of its older sibling. Late 1980s production values are largely to blame, according to several sources, as well as late 1980s fashion and music, and possibly cocaine.

Almost unanimously, the Tacoma Film Club found the characters unlikable.

“You didn’t care that Jeff Bridges was going to jail,” noted a gray-haired gentleman named Roger, sipping champagne from a plastic cup. “You didn’t care that Randy Quaid wanted to shoot his dick off.”

“Sometimes you have to see a film like this to appreciate the better films,” Buttkus soothed. Some of these better films were coming up next: the selections for next month’s forum were three Paul Newman tours de force: The Hustler (1961), Cool Hand Luke (1967) and Mr. and Mrs. Bridge (1990).

Of Cool Hand Luke, Buttkus said: “I finished boot camp that year, 1967, in San Diego. I had to take four buses out to the mall to see the film. And I saw it four times.”
After the meeting adjourned, I hung around to learn more.  The Tacoma Film Club is five years old, Buttkus told me, and consists of around a hundred cinephiles, with a core group of about forty. The organization is governed by an executive committee of five to six people, with a three-person producers committee charged with selecting films for discussion. (Just how much dissenting opinion Buttkus tolerates in the committees is unclear.)

On the first and second Friday of each month, the producers screen the films at the Center for Spiritual Living, a small church at J Street and Division, near
Wright Park. 

“At our screenings, people come an hour early and stay an hour late, and that’s when the fellowship happens,” Buttkus told me, obviously trying to draw me into the fold.
Adopting a fatherly tone, he continued, “Most people like movies, but they don’t really know why.”

Maybe, I considered, they’re afraid of admitting what that inner desire might mean.

At Film Club gatherings, Buttkus said, “you begin to think a little more.”

It was only then that I realized how much even I, a reporter who prides himself on dispassionate objectivity, had begun to think — about films and the people hooked on them — and, yes, about myself.

I shook Glenn Buttkus’s hand, returned his smile and walked out the door into the warm, calm, oblivious night.

Seattle International Film Festival

Tacoma Film Festival: Cinephiles’ Delight

Movie-mad men and women won’t want to miss this year’s Tacoma Film Festival, October 1 – 8, with 130-plus movies, 45 of them from the Northwest. The opening-night bash at Annie Wright boasts Lovers in a Dangerous Time, about a teenage affair reignited at a high school reunion. The finale, at the Grand Cinema, is the dreamlike indie flick The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle (above), based on filmmaker David Russo’s years as a night janitor. Russo will be onstage to explain what it feels like to go from miserable obscurity to Sundance Film Festival (and Tacoma Film Festival) fame overnight. For more info, call 253.572.6062 or visit Tacomafilmfestival.com.