John Wilson learning how to open a movie theater in Ridgewood

Filmmaker John Wilson‘s next project is a real life How To: he’s opening a movie theater in his neighborhood of Ridgewood, Queens. As reported in Curbed, when Ridgewood’s oldest movie theater got turned into a fitness center, he tried to salvage some memorabilia; that didn’t work out but it led him on a quest to acquire other vintage movie theater artifacts. After seats, posters, marquee signs and other objects began filling up his home, he decided the best thing to do with it was to open his own movie theater.

Wilson’s theater is called Low Cinema (70-11 60th St), and is set to open in a few weeks. His partners for it are Davis Fowlkes and Cosmo Bjorkenheim, who’ve had a hand in Williamsburg’s similar Spectacle Theatre. The name comes from the building it’s in, a single-story structure. It seats around 50-60 and will specialize in 16mm prints of old films that showed at libraries and prisons — “I’m really excited to show more punished formats here,” he told Curbed — and the lobby is full of all the “crud” he’s collected. “I just wanted everything to be kind of maximalist across the board,” Wilson told Curbed. “The design of everything is pretty loud because where else can you use a lot of this material?”

Here’s the space via a 2022 pic on Google Maps:

Meanwhile, MoMa recently shared a documentary short about Wilson and his unusual process for his films. Watch that below.