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January 3, 2023
Seattle lost one of its greatest cinephiles this past October when Dennis Nyback, 69, succumbed to cancer. A programmer, curator, and collector, Nyback is responsible for launching and/or perfecting such movie houses as the Rosebud Movie Palace, the Jewel Box Theater, the Pike Street Cinema (all Seattle), and the Clinton Street Theater in Portland. To put it mildly, the Pacific Northwest artistic landscape simply wouldn’t be the same without him, and the Grand Illusion Cinema in the U District hopes to pay its respects with a proper tribute early this January.
“I knew the Grand Illusion would have to do something,” said Brian Alter, longtime GI volunteer (having acted as lead programmer, manager, and a handful of other jobs for almost 20 years now). “Not only was his history deep within the Seattle film scene—he was the projectionist for the first Seattle International Film Fest among so many other things—he had a very unique connection to the Grand Illusion. He was a projectionist here in the mid-1970s back when it was called ‘The Movie House.’”
Alter took inspiration from old email correspondence with Nyback—”He’d check in from time to time with the email subject: ‘Dennis here’”—and in particular a pitch called “A Week at The Movie House.”
“I knew I didn’t want the tribute to be too serious or dour,” Alter continued. “Dennis’ mantra for his own programs was that they’d always be ‘educational, entertaining, and 90 minutes.’ I also wanted to show the films from 35mm prints if possible, since that’s how they were shown in the ’70s and we try to show 35mm whenever possible.”
Next up is Akira Kurosawa’s 1961 film Yojimbo, starring the legendary Toshirô Mifune. One of the great samurai films, Yojimbo finds Mifune as a stranger in a new land who pits two crime lords against each other for the sake of the town’s citizens. An international sensation, it also inspired Sergio Leone’s 1964 spaghetti western A Fistful of Dollars, launching Clint Eastwood’s celebrity into the stratosphere.
More from Alter: “The email also mentioned ‘samurai films,’ which was a little daunting to me—I appreciate all kinds of films but I’m hardly a samurai completist. I imagine he projected quite a few samurai films in the ’70s, and a ‘Samurai film fest’ flyer still hangs inside the auditorium entrance at the GI. Still, it was easy to pick one of my favorite samurai films, Yojimbo, and there’s no way Dennis didn’t love that film. It’s another wildly entertaining and highly influential classic and I knew we could get a 35mm print from Janus Films. In fact, Janus doesn’t even offer a DCP of the film for exhibition.”
One particular programmed piece details Nyback’s legend as one of the few who collected Scopitones, or early versions of music videos. So rare was his collection that Nyback ended up being covered on MTV in the late 1990s. The evening also acts as a charitable outing, as all proceeds will be donated to the American Cancer Society in Dennis’ name.
“I wanted to try and show something that was an original Dennis Nyback program,” Alter explained. “In the late ’90s, Dennis became semi-famous for his collection of Scopitones (short music films from the ’60s played in vending machines). At some point, he transferred an 80-minute program of his Scopitones to video and sold it on his website (I watched a VHS tape of Scopitones in the late ’90s, long before I knew Dennis). Since we can’t show his Scopitone prints, we’ll show the DVD that features a snippet of Dennis’ MTV interview!”
If you’re in the mood for the surreal, how about putting a little Luis Buñuel into your brain? If you went to film school or at least took a couple courses, it’s likely you’ve set eyes on the Spanish-Mexican filmmaker’s work, whether it be his Salvador Dalí collaboration Un Chien Andalou, his debut feature L’Age d’Or, the Catherine Deneuve-starring Belle de Jour, or final film That Obscure Object of Desire. But as the United States goes through late capitalism, it’s high time to check out his satire on upper class foolishness with 1962’s The Exterminating Angel, about a group of rich a-holes trapped inside a mansion.
“As I was putting the series together,” Alter said, “I got in touch with Dennis’ longtime friend Kevin Shannon. Kevin pitched Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel as he knew it was one of Dennis’ favorite films. I’ve seen other Buñuel films, but not that particular film. Anyway, it seemed appropriate that we should show something Dennis held in such high regard.”
Nyback’s flair for cinema history takes center stage with Through the Porthole, a collection of 16mm shorts assembled by the Sprocket Society. A plethora of pleasures, oddities, tame, salacious, and everything in between, it’s a peek inside Nyback’s vast archive. And just like “Scopitone A Go Go,” all proceeds will go to the American Cancer Society.
Alter can’t wait until Seattle bears witness to this event. “Almost everything Dennis showed at the GI was on 16mm (I once projected a rare 35mm print he had of Motley Crue’s video of ‘Shout at the Devil’), so I knew we had to do a 16mm program. Dennis’ collection is in the process of being properly catalogued and preserved, so we couldn’t get any of his prints. Most of his programs were compilations of short films based around a subject, so I asked Spencer Sundell of the Sprocket Society, who frequently presents similarly structured programming in Seattle, to put together a 16mm show. Spencer just so happens to own a print of a cartoon that Dennis’ said was his favorite, too!”
(Full disclosure: Grand Illusion is 100% run by volunteers, and I am one of them.)
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