There’s no question more often asked at the Tropic than "Where do you get your movies?" and the answer is complex. Despite its non-profit status, the Tropic is a fully licensed commercial movie theater, enabling us to book first-run movies from all distributors. Through a web of contracts and guarantees and the services of a professional art-theater booking agent in Los Angeles, we vie with other theaters nationally for the right to show the movies that interest us. But it’s not just a matter of ordering a film like a pizza. Our access is limited by a couple of factors.

First, the studios carefully control the rollout of a film, targeting it to certain markets and holding it back from others pursuant to their marketing plans. For example, we started trying to get The Last King of Scotland last November, but the distributor had decided to pull it off the market until Academy Award nominations came out in January, believing that they could generate a better buzz and more ticket sales then. So we had to wait.

Second, most first-run films are still distributed via 35mm prints, which cost several thousand dollars each to make. For wide release blockbusters like Star Wars, they’ll make thousands of prints to saturate the market on three thousand screens or more. But Last King of Scotland, as an art-film example, never got on more than 540 screens at its maximum, because the distributor didn’t see the potential in producing more prints. Since Key West and the Tropic are not exactly the biggest markets in the country, we have to wait our turn for the limited number of prints of an art film. To date Last King has grossed about $16 million in the US, compared to $380 million for the latest Star Wars episode. We constantly argue that they could do better by making more prints, but it’s out of our control.

To enhance our access to films, and get around some of these problems, we’ve recently signed an agreement with Emerging Pictures in New York to gain access to digital distribution of new films. EP digitizes the films and transmits them to us in high definition via a dedicated internet connection. There’s no issue of prints and much less concern about rollout. EP is only getting started now, but they’ve already given us films like The Italian which we're showing this week and upcoming documentaries like An Unreasonable Man (about Ralph Nader) and Iraq in Fragments. And they’ve delivered such boffo events as the Metropolitan Opera series and the soon-to-be-shown Full Frame Documentary Festival. Look for much more from EP over the coming months.

All of this doesn’t come cheap. The Tropic spent more than $120,000 last year on film booking and licensing fees. Thirty-five to fifty percent of every dollar you plunk down at the Tropic box office goes to acquiring the legal public performance rights to films. We’d rather not write those checks, but there’s that pesky FBI warning. And in any event, there is a lot to be said for the principles of copyright, the guardian angel of writers and artists.

Please email any inquiries to info@keywestfilm.org.