“If you don’t care about money and you just want to do something cool, you can do it.”
When Richard Linklater thinks back on the Austin Film Society (AFS), now celebrating its 40th anniversary, it all boils down to that. A powerful example of creating something cool that you love and then the money might come later, AFS has given over $2.7 million in grants to filmmakers and boasts 20 acres of studio space with its Austin Studios — where productions have created 37,000 jobs and over $2.6 billion of economic impact for Austin.
On the evening of March 6, AFS will be celebrating its 40th anniversary at the annual event it hosts, the Texas Film Awards, which also touts 25 years of inducting Texans from the film and TV world into the Texas Film Hall of Fame.
In terms of swank and style, AFS has come a long way. But according to its founder, Linklater, who spoke to IndieWire via Zoom in advance of the festivities, the essential DNA of those early days is still there—and should be a lesson to cinephiles everywhere else about how to create a community.
That’s all Linklater was looking for in 1985 when he was about to turn 25, had a decent chunk of money in his pocket from working on an offshore oil rig, and was looking for a community of fellow film lovers upon moving to Austin. If there isn’t a community already there, you can create one. And Linklater did. It’s a roadmap you can follow, too.
“I was privileged in that, because I had worked offshore, I had money. I’m the one person who didn’t need to have some crummy job,” Linklater said. “So I could spend all my time not only watching movies, reading, writing, whatever I was doing, but also editing [his first feature, the Super 8-shot ‘It’s Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books’].”
“I wanted to see all these films, so I thought I’d be sending out a beacon to, who are the film freaks, who wants to be my buddy?”
He and his new flatmate, recent University of Texas at Austin film grad and regular Linklater DP Lee Daniel, met after they were kicked out of their respective houses. Clicking immediately, they started coming up with a program sensational enough to pitch to Scott Dinger, the then-owner of Austin’s Dobie Theatre. As long as they could bring in enough of an audience to rack up decent concession sales to make it worthwhile for Dinger, they could screen their lineup, which they provocatively titled “Sex and Blasphemy in the Avant-Garde.”
The titles included were Salvador Dalí’s “Un Chien Andalou,” Kenneth Anger’s “Scorpio Rising,” Barbara Hammer’s “Multiple Orgasm,” George Griffin’s “The Club,” and Curt McDowell’s “Nudes (A Sketchbook).”
“We were successful just from the jump,” Linklater said. “It’s ironic, too, because it’s right when film societies were sort of dying out around the country because of video, and the print quality was dropping, and it was just a slow demise. But we start one here in Austin, and we saw at our first two shows everything just … it was successful from the absolute beginning.”
Linklater admits that “success” as defined here meant simply being able “to pay for the film and pay for the shipping and printing the flyers at Kinkos, if we’re not getting those for free because someone we know works there.” This was not a way, at first, to support yourself financially or employ anyone — Austin Film Society was all-volunteer for its first 10 years, and Linklater himself worked as a valet and bellhop to support the rent for a dedicated AFS screening space above Captain Quackenbush’s Intergalactic Dessert Company and Espresso Bar on the western edge of the UT-Austin campus.
Linklater had also put together “a board” of prominent film-loving Austin locals, such as film programmer and professor Chale Nafus and Austin Chronicle and SXSW founder Louis Black. Having a board meant AFS was official enough as a non-profit to receive grants from arts organizations. But getting free ads in the Austin Chronicle promoting AFS screenings helped, too.
Austin Film Society was able to fly in a filmmaker for the first time in 1988. The director was James Benning, given a $300 honorarium, who would introduce his experimental film “Landscape Suicide”: “He just got off the airplane with a paper sack, which is his thing, and a print in one hand, and just hung out for a few days.” (Linklater recently ran into Benning again at the Berlin Film Festival in February 2025, where Benning had premiered “Lost Boy” and Linklater his Ethan Hawke-starring Lorenz Hart chamber-drama “Blue Moon.”)
Linklater never showed his own films at AFS until he discovered another thing to have the organization “kick up another notch” financially: The benefit premiere. “When ‘Slacker’ came out [in 1991], I was Like, ‘Oh, let’s show it at The Paramount [Austin’s classic 1,200-seat movie palace] and have all the proceeds go to the Austin Film Society. And it’s like, wow, we just made a chunk in one night.”
Admitting that his mindset was “poverty mode” well into the ’90s and that he and those in his orbit had lived “like a poor student through your whole 20s,” Linklater fretted about raising AFS ticket prices for the benefit screening of Quentin Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction” in 1994.
“It took me a while to realize Austin was changing,” Linklater said. “I grew up in the Depression era ’80s. $2 was our fee. I was still stuck in that era. No one I knew, or no one in Austin, had any money. You maybe worked at [UT-Austin’s] Burger Center. It was really no economy outside the university in the state.”
“When ‘Pulp Fiction’ came out, I said, “God, will people pay $10 a ticket?” And we sold out. This is pre-digital ticket. It sold out like ‘Boom!’ I said, “Oh, we should have charged a lot more.” The rest of the ’90s was a time of extraordinary growth culminating in the hiring of eventual CEO Rebecca Campbell in 1998, the opening of Austin Studios in 2000, the inauguration of the Texas Film Awards and Texas Film Hall of Fame, and AFS starting to award its filmmaker grants itself. In 2017, Austin Film Society opened its own AFS Cinema, the city’s only nonprofit arthouse theater.
Linklater now strongly believes that this is a roadmap cinephiles in other cities can follow. “If you don’t care about money and you can get a pretty good arrangement with a theater, you can make it happen,” he said. “I always say, you and a few friends [can make it happen]. Everyone has their own skill set. Oh, they’re good at making the flyers. Oh, they like putting up flyers. Oh, they’re good at booking the films. It’s not really that hard. It’s administrative. You’ve got to send a check, you got to ship [the print], you got to receive [the print], all that. One person can actually do a lot [of this on their own]. I know that. But it’s more fun to do it with a group. It’s like being in a punk band except we were showing films or putting up flyers late at night all over town. I think we’re due a renaissance.”
If you had asked Linklater three or five years ago if he was bullish about cinephilia he might have said no. But post-pandemic, he senses a shift that exhibitors need to recognize.
“I’ve been to a lot of places over the last years — just festivals and campus situations — and I feel a real hunger now. And I see our audiences at the Film Society and other places I’ve been: young. Young. Cinema’s not aging out. There’s young people, I’m talking under 25, student-age and little bit beyond who are filling out theaters to watch movies of all kinds. Current movies, old movies. I’m so excited about that because just when you’re thinking kids these days, they’re looking at their phones; they’d rather watch two hours on YouTube, it’s not really true.
“Humans have a need for community. Film people, you find that community in your movie theater. That’s your church. That’s your gathering spot. That’s your bird feeder. If you’re a hungry bird, that’s where you go.”
Was this something just unique to Austin? Linklater doesn’t think so, either.
“I really want to create a system that makes it easier for people to get started [creating their own film screenings],” he said. “Maybe we’ll have starter kits for these film societies, help them out with the bookings, whatever. It is an early idea, but it’s real. We’re working on it right now.”
If the Austin Film Society model could be exported to the rest of the country, cinephilia’s future should be bright indeed. It’s a roadmap for what’s possible. You’ve just got to be willing to build the road.
