That’s to be expected from the Alamo, a cinema/restaurant/performance space that has taken movie lovers on canoe trips to deep-woods “Deliverance” screenings, led spelunking expeditions to watch “The Goonies” underground, and shown “Jaws” to fans who floated in inner tubes while scuba divers grabbed their feet from below. If William Castle (the ’50s showman famous for rigging theater seats to vibrate during “The Tingler”) has an heir, it’s League — a movie-smitten exhibitor who’ll do anything to get others as excited as he is.
The Alamo has become famous among film fanatics — Entertainment Weekly called it “the best theater in America,” and it was name-dropped on “Heroes.” But League, who founded the theater with his wife, Karrie, in 1997 and built it into a Texas chain, isn’t content simply to (as the local slogan goes) “Keep Austin Weird.” He wants all of America to get the Alamo experience, which consists of a simple but tremendous pleasure: Watching movies in the best possible projection environment while ninja-silent waitstaff bring you dinner and drinks.
The first out-of-state Drafthouse opened a year and a half ago in Winchester, Va. Stephen Nerangis, a partner in that eight-screen outpost, says that when he visited the original, “we felt like we had walked into the coolest theater in the world, and we wanted to bring that atmosphere back with us.” Now, he says, the Winchester franchise draws viewers “from all over the East Coast.”
For their home theater in Austin, the Leagues recruited chefs from serious restaurants and put microbrew beers on the menu — flat soda and stale popcorn don’t exist here. But the Alamo has happily given away 40-ounce bottles of malt liquor when showing blaxploitation flicks, dished up all-you-can-eat pasta for Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns and pretended to serve human flesh during cannibal movies.
The Alamo recruits stars to introduce films — not just ordinary celebs, such as Quentin Tarantino and Peter Jackson, but quirky guests: the 60-foot-tall fire-breathing “Robosaurus” that welcomed ticket holders to “Transformers.” (Yes, the Alamo’s gimmicks are often more satisfying than the movies they promote.)
Nationwide expansion of the 11-theater chain has become Tim League’s main focus. He is not a reticent man (he once entered the boxing ring with “Girlfight” star Michelle Rodriguez to debate the merits of “Avatar”), but he’s mum about which city will get the next Alamo. For a year he has hinted about New York and Los Angeles branches, but complications — New York liquor regulations, for instance — have pushed them back.
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