50 Years of Film

A half-century ago, Elliot Wilhelm, then the news director at radio station WCHD, had for some time pestered the Detroit Institute of Arts about starting a weekly film series. One day, in between newscasts, he dropped by the museum to pay another visit to Audley Grossman, the head of the DIA’s performing arts department.

At 23, Wilhelm was already a passionate film aficionado.

By the time he was 5, his parents had taken him to see Rear Window and Rebel Without a Cause , and in just a few years, the kid, hooked on films presented on local television’s Bill Kennedy at the Movies and Rita Bell’s Prize Movie , was introducing 8-millimeter silent movies to friends in his basement. In the late ’60s, while studying mass communications at Wayne State University, Wilhelm co-founded the Wayne Cinema Guild , where he presented avant-garde and classic films on Friday and Saturday evenings at the school’s DeRoy Auditorium.

As luck would have it, during the visit that afternoon, Grossman told Wilhelm that he had just applied for a $10,000 National Endowment for the Arts grant as part of the NEA’s initiative to help create regional film centers at museums due to the rapid closing of single-screen art houses that showed foreign films and specialized documentaries. Throughout the country, art houses had struggled to survive with the advent of multiplex theaters, where one rarely could watch foreign films that were not also shown on broadcast television.

After the grant was awarded, Grossman hired Wilhelm to serve as the programmer to see whether the newly established Detroit Film Theatre could succeed.

“I was told that once the money ran out, that was it, unless the film program brought people in on a regular basis and came close to paying for itself,” says Wilhelm, 74. “But I don’t think the DIA thought it would last more than six months.”

A half-century later, the highly popular Detroit Film Theatre continues to present 50 to 60 films over 52 weeks a year at the DIA’s 1,050-seat restored 1927 theater. Remarkably, Wilhelm, who was named curator in 1984, still selects and often introduces each film.

Wilhelm says that the average annual attendance at the DFT is approximately 50,000 and that the most popular series is the Oscar-nominated shorts that run for a month. “This year, we had 12,000 people attend, and I’m told attendance-wise that we have more people seeing the shorts in a single-screen theater than anywhere else in the U.S.,” he says. “It’s become a Detroit thing.”

As the longest-running public program at the DIA, the DFT is “one of the most comprehensive and acclaimed showcases of contemporary and classic world cinema in the United States,” according to the museum’s website.

Over the years, Wilhelm has shown now-famous films that in metro Detroit were first viewed at the DFT. Among them are The Piano, My Left Foot, The Crying Game, Stop Making Sense, My Dinner with Andre , and Sex, Lies, and Videotape .

Although others helped to promote the DFT in its infancy, Wilhelm says the big break came thanks to then Detroit Free Press film critic Susan Stark.

“Right away, she was an advocate for the DFT and promised to review each of the first-run films,” Wilhelm says. “Not all the reviews were stellar, but it brought the program to the attention of a wide audience.”

At the time, Wilhelm told Stark in a film preview article: “A lot of the DFT films are works commercial theaters are afraid to take a chance on so no one around here ever gets to see them. I feel there is an immense audience here for worthwhile if not ragingly commercial films.”

On Jan. 4, 1974, two days after Coleman Young was first sworn in as the mayor of Detroit , the Detroit Film Theatre debuted its inaugural film, Mon Oncle Antoine , the first of a 55-film weekend program that featured local premieres, revivals of screen classics, documentaries, and shorts. In Stark’s review of the movie, she wrote: “It is precisely the kind of movie, low key but high quality, that justifies the existence of a Detroit Film Theater.”

Wilhelm said he needed 200 moviegoers to attend the inaugural film to keep the doors open, but as it turned out, 887 attended, each paying the $2 ticket price.

For the next week, Wilhelm was told to show the French film The Fire Within (Le Feu Follet) by Louis Malle in the DIA’s much smaller lecture hall. However, after Free Press theater critic and arts writer Lawrence DeVine praised the film in a preview article, plans changed at the last minute.

“We had a line the next night that ran all the way to Woodward Avenue,” Wilhelm says. The film was moved to the theater, and from then on, all the films have been shown there.

In preparing the DFT schedule each year, Wilhelm screens hundreds of films by attending festivals such as those in New York and Toronto along with watching movies sent to him from distributors. He says the ratio of those screened to what is shown is approximately 15 to 1.

“Trying to guess what the public is going to like is really futile, but if you believe based upon your own responses that it’s something that really affects you, then giving it to other people can’t hurt,” says Wilhelm, who also hosted a weekly series of classic films on Detroit Public Television from 1995 through 2016. For the past nine years, he has been teaching film at Wayne State.

“If there are only 80 people in the theater and a number of them are impacted by it, then that’s a success,” he says. “Someone once stopped me in the DFT lobby and said, ‘That’s the worst movie I’ve seen,’ but in the next breath said, ‘I’ll see you next week.’ Not every movie is going to be for you, but he knew that he was going to see something more interesting that he couldn’t see anywhere else.”

Although Wilhelm is concerned about the diminishing number of people going to movie theaters in general and the recent closing of the Main Art Theatre in Royal Oak and The Maple Theater in Bloomfield Township, he remains optimistic that the trend will reverse. He says that currently, DFT attendance is around 85% of pre-pandemic figures, “which for a theater like ours is extraordinary.”

“Some people said that with high-definition televisions and all the streaming services, it will be the end of movie theaters, but fortunately, there are still a lot of people who enjoy seeing films on a big screen and sharing the experience with others,” he says. “When watching a movie at home, you can be easily distracted and have the ability to pause it, which is the antithesis of what the creators intended. There’s nothing like the sensation of the lights going down and knowing you’re giving yourself over to the vision of someone else for the next two hours.”

Nancy Herrick of Birmingham says that she has been attending the Detroit Film Theatre for at least 25 years, after being encouraged by a friend.

“I’d only been going to commercial theaters but soon discovered that I loved movies that were more unpredictable, had smart dialogue and unusual cinematography,” says Herrick, who along with her husband, Dennis, is a member of the DIA auxiliary group Friends of the Detroit Film Theatre.

Herrick can’t speak highly enough of Elliot Wilhelm.

“He is such a gift to Detroit,” she says. “People so appreciate Elliot’s expertise and his selections. He also has the courage to bring some films to the DFT that perhaps a lot of people wouldn’t otherwise choose to see. It’s always a treat when he introduces a film and shares his comments.”

Wilhelm says he never could have imagined that he would be leading the Detroit Film Theatre for 50 years.

“In the beginning, I thought it might be kind of a cool job to have for a while but I never expected that it would be for life,” he says. “I still get extra delight to hear and see audiences respond. It’s kind of addictive, and I can’t tell you how wonderful that is. Almost every day, I think about retiring, but guess what? I haven’t done it. I’m writing the fall schedule, so I don’t think I have time to retire.”

This story originally appeared in the July 2024 issue of Hour Detroit magazine. To read more, pick up a copy of Hour Detroit at a local retail outlet. Our digital edition will be available on July 8.

The post 50 Years of Film appeared first on Hour Detroit Magazine .