After going nonprofit, St. Pete’s Green Light Cinema raises $8,000 in a week

There’s a movie poster in the lobby of St. Pete’s Green Light Cinema for a 1996 satire called “Man with a Plan.” It’s about the long-shot Congressional candidacy of a 73-year-old Vermont dairy farmer named Fred Tuttle.

Green Light owner Mike Hazlett came up with a plan, too, after he and his wife, Susan, moved to St. Pete 10 years ago. He saw a need for a small independent movie theater like the ones he’d known and worked for in New England.

“On paper, 80 seats, a city of 250,00 people—I thought it was an open lane,” he recalled recently over lunch at Mio’s, a short walk from Green Light in St. Pete’s downtown.

The endeavor turned out to be almost as quixotic as Fred Tuttle’s crusade for Congress.

It wasn’t just the fact that Green Light opened during the pandemic in October 2020. The Hazletts were also the victims of circumstances beyond their control, like the contracting film industry, the competition from at-home streaming, and an audience pool that shrinks when the snowbirds go home.

So on July 8, the couple revealed a new plan.
[location-1] “To help us survive and flourish,” they announced via social media, “we’ve decided to restructure and have formed a nonprofit association—The Friends of Greenlight Cinema.”

“I would make this case,” Hazlett told Creative Loafing Tampa Bay. “The vast majority of independent movie theaters—Burns Court in Sarasota, Tampa Theatre—they’re all nonprofits.” The big corporate chains, he added, are also being underwritten—“by split stocks, restructured debt and the like. The entire industry is being underwritten one way or the other.”

Green Light has managed to endure these past three years with the help of strategic partnerships. Eugenie Bondurant’s highly popular Station 12 acting studio holds classes at the theater, splitting revenue with Hazlett. The theater is home to the Tampa International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival and Second Screen Cult Cinema series. Hazlett has branched out to show films at Webb’s City Cellar. Activities like these and a reasonable rent by downtown standards ($6,000 a month) allowed him to break even last year.

Break even, that is, without paying himself anything. And that’s with just one paid staffer, the affable Zack Howard, who works the ticket and concessions counter. While Susan, a corporate accountant, makes “a nice living,” said Mike, “I can't work forever for free.”

With nonprofit status, Green Light can not only seek donations but sponsorships and grants. He sees big potential in the cinema’s future, like a possible expansion of the acting studio. And more than that, he can continue to bring St Pete the films he loves.
“I feel like we’ve done really good stuff and the programming we do matters,” he said. “A place like this, a city like this, whether they know it or not, needs it.”

So far, it seems that the citizens agree. The online appeal raised close to $8,000 in a week, much of that in the day immediately following the email. He has a board now. And he’s optimistic that he can reach his goal of bringing in donations totaling approximately $120,000 annually. That would be a substantial boost to his annual $300,000-$350,000 budget, which would include a salary for himself.

Still, the overarching problem is not just keeping an art-house cinema alive. It’s the movie industry as a whole. According to an April 2024 report in Variety , worldwide box office is headed for a marginal decline of 3% this year, “a setback that follows three years of recovery from a pandemic era low in 2020.” Mike Hazlett says that only 15% of available tickets were sold on average at U.S. movie theaters last year, whereas Green Light sold 30%.

Every theater is vulnerable to the potential moviegoer rationale, “I’ll wait till that comes out on streaming.” But just as a blockbuster like "Oppenheimer" had exponentially more impact when seen in a theater, that’s also true of smaller, quieter films.

“Janet Planet,” a film that played recently at Green Light, is a case in point. Its extended closeups, long silences, and wide shots of the rural Massachusetts countryside would not have made the same impression on a home screen.

And get this: Box office tally for Janet at Green Light wasn’t great —just 150 tickets sold over a six-day run—but that was the highest among any of the theaters showing it in Florida that week.

This is a common occurrence for Hazlett and Green Light. From January through April of this year, the theater was no. 1 in Florida week-long grosses for two of this year’s Oscar-nominated international features and for the Oscar short-film program. Ava Duvernay’s “Origin,” the Finnish film “Fallen Leaves” and several others also were among the top performers during that period.

It’s gotten to the point now that distributors that deal in indies—A24, Sony Pictures Classics, and the like—are calling Hazlett to see if he wants their films. That’s one way he gets a bead on films that may turn up at Green Light before they reach the mainstream cineplexes (if they ever do). His savvy programming also reflects close attention to advance reviews and film festivals.

Green Light’s decision to announce its nonprofit initiative followed closely upon Governor Ron DeSantis’s withdrawal of funding from the state’s arts nonprofits. It’s another example, said Hazlett wryly, of “my impeccable sense of timing.”

But if Green Light managed to endure the pandemic, chances are good they’ll weather this storm, too.

“Despite the difficulties and challenges of this business,” Hazlett says, “there are great, great films being made and no one else is showing them.”
Across the Green Light lobby from “Man with a Plan,” there’s another poster for a film that Hazlett says is his favorite: the 1983 comedy-drama “Local Hero.”

For film fans in the area, the title’s not a bad description of Hazlett himself.

To donate to The Friends of Green Light Cinema, look for the Donate button at greenlightstpete.com .

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