ArtNELA - Northeast La. Arts and Culture

We went up in the nearby building to get an overhead shot of the festivities.

MONROE, La. 8/29/09

I made it downtown to see Indiana Jones and The Raiders of the Lost Ark last week. Classic Steven Spielberg at his best, if I may say.

I also went to see District 9 at the Cinemark in West Monroe, which has really nothing to do with this article, but it was a great movie, too, and I just want to plug it, because if you liked Indiana Jones or the last Star Trek, you’ll probably like District 9.

Now, you may ask yourself, where in the heck is there a movie theater downtown?

Indiana Jones. Even better than Han Solo.

There is no movie theater, and that’s the beauty of it. This is a once-a-month, outdoor event, appropriately called “Downtown Cinema” — lower your speakers before you hit that link or you’ll get surprised by the audio commercial — that was cooked up by the youngish folks over at Portico Church in Monroe, who like a ton of other people in the area, needed something fun and free to do with a family on a Saturday night.

The church is moving and is in the process of purchasing a six-story building downtown and renovating it. In front of this building is a somewhat random patch of green that covers about a quarter of the block. Volunteers at the church got creative and ended up with the idea to bring in live music, popcorn and drinks, and a classic movie for an evening — all free and open to the public.

Portico Church volunteers who helped to organize the event.

These kind of events always stun me for a second when I see them. Who does anything for free? There’s got to be a catch, right?

But there’s no catch. You just show up with your posse, enough chairs or blankets to sit on, go grab some snacks from “The Popcorn Girl,” Janelle Briggs, a bottle of cold water, and enjoy yourself while the kids run themselves ragged on the grass. Forgot bug spray? No worries, because the church sets up a table with about twenty spray cans for general use.

If you’ve got a few bucks on you — and this is well worth it — a special treat comes in the form of hand-made ice cream from Maggie Moo’s Ice Cream and Treatery.

Kelly Aaen of Maggie Moo's Ice Cream hands out a cone of handmade ice cream at the Downtown Cinema. I highly suggest trying a scoop of this stuff at the Pecanland Mall.

Owner Kelly Aaen was there with a freezer-full of confections, and she gave me a scoop of the strawberry. “It’s the best ice cream you’ll ever taste,” she said confidently. And she was right. I’ll be bringing the kids to the Pecanland mall location soon to see what they think.

Finding the cinema in my car was a discovery. I felt like Indiana Jones himself as I drove around downtown looking for it. The streets were quiet, silent, dead as an Aztec city, and then suddenly, turn a corner and out of nowhere, lights and activity and music and over a hundred people. I had found the ancient temple, and the natives were celebrating … !

I didn’t swing in like Indiana, though, I just walked over with a pad and camera.

This night, the live music was courtesy of Kyle Craft and his band, and they were rockin’ pretty nicely with some originals and cover tunes under a white tent.

Since the band was the only tent-covered part of the event, I asked volunteer organizer Erin Stokes what the plan was if it started to rain.

This crew actually brought out a two-piece sofa, and said they might work on bringing out a whole living room at some point.

“We pray,” she laughed. “Actually, we haven’t really gotten to that yet. We just put the whole thing together, and so far we’ve been lucky. We wanted to give people something to do, and to use this lot, which is really the only green space here … the downtown area has so much potential. We’re all volunteers, and we just decided that rather than wait for the city to do something, we’d put it together ourselves.”

She’s not kidding — they really did put it all together, even down to constructing the 10′ x 14′ projector screen.

“We didn’t have the funds to buy one, so some guys from the church just built it,” Stokes said.

The perfect weather that evening was complimented by Christmas lights and Japanese lanterns strung on the trees, plus a few citronella candles on the ground to keep bugs out.

Not a bad way to spend an evening, really.

In the back of the lot, Tommy Perkins and company actually brought out a two-piece sofa and we’re taking their loungin’ quite seriously, more or less.

“We had some friends in town, and they helped us take this stuff out here. It’s to show our support for the church, because they’re doing a lot to revitalize the area, and this seemed like a fun way to do it and get some use of this old furniture,” he said.

“We’ve been talking about increasing this until we bring out an entire living room.”

That would be something to see. There used to be this nifty little movie theater in New Orleans that had sofas and recliners set up in small rooms where you could watch movies. It was great, very artsy, but it didn’t last long because most artists, of course, don’t have a lot of money to support such things. This would be a nice substitute. Maybe I’ll just haul a cot out there next month.

The first movie was shown in June. The next one, The Sandlot, is scheduled for Sept. 26, with a baseball theme running throughout the event, so bring your caps and baseball mitts, ’cause you never know when a game might start up. After that, there will be one more show around Christmas, and then it will start up again next summer.

I asked Stokes how they choose the movies.

“We shoot for the 25-35 year-old demographic,” she said. “We sit around a table and think up classic movies that everyone likes from the 80’s or 90’s. Raiders was tied with Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, but we couldn’t get the rights to that one. We actually buy the rights to show the movies — it’s a few hundred dollars for the weekend. We try to keep everything PG. It turns out that PG-13 wasn’t created until after Raiders came out, but we didn’t know that until later.”

They took care of it effectively, though. At that evening’s show, at certain points in the movie when it was required, they simply muted the language. It provided for sudden, but funny breaks, such as when Marion — played by Karen Allen, who was unlucky enough to get roped into that last miserable installment of Indiana Jones — decides to verbally karate-chop Indiana by yelling obscenities at him for two minutes. All we heard was, “Indiana Jones, you no-good …” and then she was yelling, silently, which got a laugh out of the audience.

Roy and Virginia White drove all the way down from Arkansas for their 40th Anniversary just to join the fun.

Stokes said funding is handled by the church and whatever donations they receive, and that everyone, including the band members, volunteers their time. They are also working on a “Christmas on the River” event with the Department of Economic Development.

Downtown Cinema is held at the corner of Desiard and Jackson Streets in Monroe.

Published in Delta Style, Sept. issue.

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