Alamo theaters take last stand against mediocre film-going experience

He says he expects Nerangis’s team to expand before too long, probably getting closer to Washington. Meanwhile, other entrepreneurs are putting their own spin on the film-plus-food concept, including Brooklyn’s tiny “gastropub theater” reRun and L.A.’s hoity-toity ArcLight.

League welcomes any competitor making moviegoing more fun. “I didn’t invent this concept,” he says. “We ripped it off and made it our own. That’s what a lot of people have done.”

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( Courtesy Alamo Drafthouse ) - Alamo Audience in full Steve Zissou costume watch Wes Anderson's ‘The Life Aquatic.’

But running projectors and serving concessions is only one corner of the film-buff ecosystem, and League has designs on others. He entered the distribution business last year, launching Drafthouse Films to distribute the button-pushing terrorism comedy “Four Lions.”

And last week at Cannes, he announced he would co-produce “The ABCs of Death,” an anthology film whose 26 chapters will be directed by such edgy filmmakers as Ben Wheatley (“Down Terrace”) and Nacho Vigalondo (“Timecrimes”).

The Alamo has expanded its influence in other ways, including cross-country “Rolling Roadshow” tours and co-founding Fantastic Fest in 2005 to showcase the kind of genre movies — horror, sci-fi, uncategorizable Japanese weirdness — that League and his pals love most. Exposure at the fest has been crucial for some filmmakers — none more so than Gareth Edwards, an unknown who premiered his debut “Monsters” at Fantastic Fest’s South by Southwest spinoff and was soon hired to direct a mega-budget “Godzilla” film, planned for 2014 release by Legendary Pictures, producers of the recent “Dark Knight” movies.

“Monsters” was essentially a rough draft when League selected it, but League smelled something good.

“Tim League was the only person from any of the festivals that had confidence in our movie,” Edwards says, adding that for the premiere, the Alamo team dressed as knights to make the British filmmaker feel at home and primed the audience with drinking games. “Showing your film at the Alamo,” he says, “is like joining some crazy film fraternity.”

Next up: a fanboy-centric promotional arm. The pyrotechnic “Hesher” party was the latest in a string of PR efforts that began as simple expressions of fandom (homemade T-shirts and the like) but grew into a moneymaking side business. Alamo graphic artists promote movies with everything from limited-edition posters to, in the case of the new flick “Hobo With a Shotgun,” a retro-style video game available in the iTunes app store.

But don’t expect League’s team to produce “Gnomeo & Juliet” Happy Meals; a movie has to win League’s heart to be worth the Alamo’s time. “We get approached by a lot of folks to do posters and marketing,” he says, “but we’re only going to do it on things we think are cool.”

DeFore is a freelance writer.