So, I'm surfing the Internest because I want to forget about how much homework I have, and I stumble on this gem on the New York Times website. I got so excited that Omaha was mentioned for something other than the College World Series and Bright Eyes. Well, then I read it and seemed effing demeaning to Omahans. It sounds like we're a bunch of hicks who don't know good movies, who need this woman to give us all a little culture. Whatever, it is what it is.
When Omaha Met Cinema
By ERIC KONIGSBERG
Published: March 16, 2008
WHEN I grew up there, in the 1970s and ’80s, Omaha was a great place to live if you were interested in insurance, softball leagues, college football, steak or hamburgers.
Chris Machian for The New York Times
Rachel Jacobson, shown outside the Film Streams theater, which she founded, said when she started, she encountered "a kind of resistance that I guess I hadn't expected."
I took an interest in a great many of those things (the exceptions being softball and insurance). But my parents, transplanted New Yorkers, were under-stimulated — particularly my film-buff mother, who lamented the tendency of local moviehouses to decline (as “foreign films”) most anything that didn’t star Henry Fonda or Benji. It was not uncommon for her and my father drive three hours to Kansas City, Mo., early on a Saturday to take in two or three movies not available in Omaha and — so that my father might endeavor to deem the trip “practical” — stop by Brooks Brothers between curtain times.
Omaha still doesn’t have a Brooks Brothers, but last July Rachel Jacobson opened Film Streams, a nonprofit independent cinema that is betting on the belief that the town’s interest in movies has — or might be — broadened.
In doing so, Ms. Jacobson, a native Omahan, has faced a couple of particular challenges. First and foremost, she said in an interview, the showing of small films —though there are certainly more of them being made nowadays — is not great business. “That’s why a nonprofit is the way to go,” she said. “Because that’s the only business plan that allows you to show good movies. The multiplexes have just taken over, especially in cities like this.”
And a city like that — Omaha, that is — hadn’t, and perhaps hasn’t, yet realized that what it needs is an arthouse film center. In raising $2.2 million so far (about $1 million of which has been spent to get Film Streams up and running), Ms. Jacobson encountered “a kind of resistance that I guess I hadn’t expected” when she began work on the venture in early 2005.
Such resistance has included a wealthy, “extremely intelligent businessman” who kindly informed Ms. Jacobson that he had seen all of two movies in the last five years (he ended up contributing $5,000, nonetheless) and a number of people who said it had never occurred to them that films, like museum exhibitions and opera, could constitute art.
“One time I was speaking to a group of Northern Natural Gas retirees, and a man asked if there was a language barrier when we showed foreign films,” she recalled. “Not everybody knows about subtitles.”
Another would-be donor asked how Ms. Jacobson planned to censor the nude scenes in order to screen “Lady Chatterley’s Lover.”
“I lived in New York for five years after college, and I came back to Omaha with the attitude that everyone gets it,” Ms. Jacobson said. “So I was a little bit wrong about that.”
Ms. Jacobson, 29, is anything but a snob about Omaha — she’s just a film snob. “I always planned to come back home at some point to be near my family,” she said. “I wanted to work in the movie business, and there aren’t exactly a lot of jobs in film that you can have in Omaha. It’s been a challenge figuring out what you can give people without a lot of trying to convince them, and what you can’t.”
