Operator Take-Up Productions Seating type Rocking Capacity 50 | Type Indoor microcinema Opened 17 July 2009 Phone +1 612-424-5468 | |
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Address 3258 Minnehaha Ave, Minneapolis, MN 55406, USA Similar Trylon and Perisphere, Riverview Theater, St Anthony Main Theatre, The O'Shaughnessy, Walker Art Center Profiles | ||
Trylon microcinema
The Trylon Microcinema is a 50-seat movie theater in the Longfellow neighborhood of Minneapolis, Minnesota. The microcinema was founded and is currently run by Take-Up Productions, a group of volunteers who got their start at the Oak Street Cinema before establishing the Trylon in a former storefront. Since opening in 2009, the theater has featured a variety of regular programming ranging from career retrospectives of famous directors to B movies and cult films. The Trylon has been well received by critics who have praised its film lineup, intimacy, and atmosphere.
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History
Minneapolis's Oak Street Cinema, a volunteer-run repertory cinema, ran films seven days per week until cutbacks in programming had to be made for financial reasons. A collective of the Oak Street volunteers formed Take-Up Productions, which was established to promote showing films not typically screened in larger movie houses. The organization began with outdoor screenings, starting with Watermelon Man, which was projected against a white brick wall behind a coffee shop, and then began to rent out theaters throughout the Minneapolis–Saint Paul area, including the Riverview, Heights, and Parkway. Some screenings, such as that of Lawrence of Arabia and a series of Alfred Hitchcock films, drew hundreds of viewers.
Barry Kryshka of Take-Up Productions owns and manages the Trylon. The Microcinema sits in an old storefront in the Longfellow neighborhood along Minnehaha Avenue that was rented, in 2009, at a rate of $800 a month. Kryshka contracted Bright Star Systems, Inc. to retrofit the space with 50 old rocking seats purchased from a nearby cinema chain, a 20-foot (6.1 m) projection screen, two 35 mm movie projectors, and a minute concessions stand. Trylon acquired its name from an eponymous theater in Kryshka's native Queens, New York, itself named for the Trylon sculpture at the 1939 New York World's Fair. The Trylon opened on the weekend of July 17–18, 2009, with a showing of Sherlock Jr. featuring live musical accompaniment from Dreamland Faces, a local accordion–musical saw duo. Each of the venue's first 12 showings sold out.
Programming and reception
Every three months, the Trylon Microcinema publishes a full schedule of screenings, approximately 10 percent of which are of first run films. The venue features a variety of regular exhibitions, ranging from the Trash Film Debauchery series of B movies, to the Defenders in which local cinephiles curate and defend screenings of personal favorite cult films, to Sound Unseen, a documentary project covering behind-the-scenes aspects of musicians' creative processes. The Trylon also hosts showcases of the films throughout various directors' careers. Take-Up Productions continues to use other venues such as the Heights and the Riverview for screenings necessitating larger houses. The Microcinema is staffed entirely with volunteers.
Critical reception for the Trylon has been positive. It was voted the best movie theater in the Minneapolis–Saint Paul area in 2011 and 2012 by City Pages, who wrote in 2011 that "no theater in the Twin Cities can match [the Trylon's] passion and energy for the movies." In an unranked list of Minneapolis–Saint Paul's best cinemas written for WCCO, Eric Henderson called the Trylon the "pluckiest upstart in the Twin Cities" and described the experience of walking into the theater as "stepp[ing] onto the set of a Michel Gondry fantasy-noir about a scrappy theater thriving in the midst of a Prohibition-style ban on the moviegoing experience." J. L. Sosa lauded the Trylon on Film School Rejects, praising the concessions selection, the physical intimacy of the space, and the cinema's programmers for their "impeccable taste in both high- and lowbrow culture."