Happy 50th birthday to The Loft Cinema! 🎉 Here's a look at its past, present and future

You’d be hard-pressed to find your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man fighting the Green Goblin, Sandman or Dr. Octopus on screens at The Loft Cinema, 3233 E. Speedway.

The nonprofit, art house theater has nothing against the web slinger or the wildly popular film franchise that he swung in on.

“They are great and I go to see them, too,” said Jeff Yanc, The Loft’s program director. “But they play everywhere. We don’t feel the pressure to have to show them.”

What you get at the Loft instead: dramas, comedies and horror flicks from far-flung parts of the world; thought-provoking documentaries; independent movies from up-and-coming filmmakers, some from right here in Southern Arizona.

And for five decades, that is exactly what its patrons have enjoyed about it.

As The Loft celebrates 50 years in 2022, we look at where it has been, where it is now and where it is going.

The Past

Technically, The Loft has been around a little longer than 50 years.

The theater opened in 1963, in a building at 504 N. Fremont Ave., that was previously home to, among other things, a Mormon temple and a space for live theatrical productions.

It had seating for about 150 people and was only open to guests 18 and older. The first film shown on the premises was the 1962 drama “The Trial” with Tony Perkins and Orson Welles, based on a novel by Franz Kafka, according to Star archives.

The theater shifted over to showing adult films for a couple years in the early 1970s before Nancy Sher, the daughter of the president of the theater's parent company, converted it back into an art house in 1972.

She called it The New Loft and that rebirth is the point from where The Loft Cinema is marking 50 years.

The films shown at the theater in the 1970s ranged from foreign language delights to concert footage.

Charley Brown, a videographer and longtime fixture of The Loft, first as a volunteer and then as an employee from the late 1970s right up until the start of the pandemic in 2020, remembers watching “Quadrophenia” and “A Clockwork Orange” there in his younger years.

“It was definitely less of a formal experience than it is now,” Brown said. “It was a very underground feeling.”

One of Brown’s favorite memories of The Loft was working with the “Rocky Horror Picture Show,” which continues to this day at the theater and is considered by The Loft to be one of its legacy events.

Brown joined the cast to perform at The Loft in 1980 when it was still at the Fremont location.

“The original Loft was an actual loft,” Brown said. “There was a bicycle shop down below and stairs leading up to the theater. Often times, during Rocky Horror, whenever Dr. Frank-N-Furter is coming down the elevator, he is stomping. The audience stomps at the same time. It was an old building. We often thought how one day we might end up in the bicycle shop.”

Brown continued to work and perform with the different groups running Rocky Horror, with names like A Jump to the Left and Heavy Petting, through several theater ownership changes and helped carry on the tradition after the Loft relocated to its current location on East Speedway in 1991.

The former Showcase Cinema space, which had been sitting dormant for several years, was an adjustment.

“It lost some of its charm,” Brown said. “The old theater was little and very tightly packed, more like an intimate party. This was a huge building where you had to yell really loud to be able to be heard because there is so much more space. At the same time, it was nice to be able to have that space.”

He stuck with Rocky Horror at The Loft, even after owner Joseph Esposito sold it in 2002 to the Tucson Cinema Foundation, ushering in a new era for the long-running theater.

Brown said his time involved with the production left him with lifelong friends around the world.

“I have a place to stay in most states,” Brown said. “I can travel anywhere on a whim or a call.”

The Present

The Loft wouldn’t be in the position it is today without the dedication of two of its leaders: Executive Director Peggy Johnson, who spearheaded the effort to acquire the theater in 2002, and program director Yanc, who has raised the bar on programming and creativity offered each day.

Johnson had been a patron of The Loft since moving to Tucson in 1974.

“My circle of friends always went to The Loft,” Johnson said. “We would hang their calendars on our fridges. When a new color came out, we would get excited because we knew that meant new films.”

When Johnson saw that the theater was for sale in 2000, she went back and forth with owner Esposito for two years, in an effort to get him to sell it to her.

“Joe told me, ‘Peggy, this is a really hard business. Give yourself a break and let it go,’” Johnson said. “I told him I was committed to try to make it work.

“Our mindset from day one was that we are going to keep good film in Tucson forever.”

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Rather than continuing the business as a for-profit venture, the new owners turned The Loft into a nonprofit institution, under the name Tucson Cinema Foundation.

“We didn’t have enough money to buy it,” Johnson said. “We didn’t want to get investors looking for returns on their investment. When you are a nonprofit, you book films that will draw people and make money, but that is not the only reason to book a film. You aren’t driven by that bottom line. You are driven by excellent, diverse films from different voices that don’t usually get heard.”

Two months after the The Loft launched, Johnson managed to bring in author Christopher Hitchens to attend a screening of “The Trials of Henry Kissinger,” a documentary inspired by one of his books.

“Initially we were told he couldn’t come,” Johnson said. “But I got his email. I emailed him and said we were sorry he couldn’t make it. That we were an art house, we had only been open two months and we were trying to breathe some life into it. He emailed me back and said, ‘be right there.’”

Hitchens was the first on a long list of notable figures to attend screenings since 2002. Among some of the other visitors: actor Philip Seymour Hoffman, producer Ismail Merchant, and Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana, screenwriters of the neo-Western love story, “Brokeback Mountain.”

“‘Brokeback Mountain’ was the film that turned us financially,” Johnson said. “We made so much money on the box office with that film that we dragged ourselves out of the red and never looked back.”

A lot of the credit of The Loft’s success in the last 16 years goes to Yanc, who joined the theater staff after closing his book store, Reader’s Oasis, in the Rancho Center just east of The Loft, in 2006.

A life-long film nerd and a regular attendee of The Loft since his parents took him there as a child, Yanc joined the team by pure happenstance.

“When we closed the store, I was going to The Loft to ask if I could volunteer there,” he said. “It turned out, they needed a program director. I had a master’s degree in film history. It morphed into an actual job right away.”

Yanc’s primary duties are to book compelling films and to come up with cool ways to enhance the experience for moviegoers.

“When I was a kid, my parents took me to The Loft to see a double feature of the ‘Creature of the Black Lagoon’ and ‘It Came from Outer Space,’” Yanc said. “It was just so cool. I realized at that point that this theater will show everything and anything. That is what stuck in my mind when I started working there. This place will show anything, so let’s just keep that going.”

Under his watch, The Loft has produced some wildly popular regular events, including its Mondo Mondays series, focusing on the trashy, weird and just plain bizarre side of cinema, and the theater’s All-Night Scream-O-Rama events, the equivalent to the scary movie sleepovers you and your friends had when you were kids.

“I am a big horror movie fan,” Yanc said. “The Scream-O-Ramas took a while to take off. It didn’t hit big right away. But it eventually started selling out. It has been gratifying watching something small become so big.”

For the 50th anniversary, Yanc and his team have come up with several ways to celebrate, including a monthly screening of films that came out in 1972. It started in January with “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie,” a French surrealist flick that won the best foreign language nod at the Academy Awards in 1973.

The February screening was the film adaptation of the Broadway musical, “Cabaret.”

In August, The Loft plans to show the very first film shown at The Loft in 1972, Federico Fellini’s “The Clowns.”

Yanc said the pandemic’s slowdown has allowed his team to ramp up the creativity.

“Putting the brakes on so many ideas and plans during the pandemic was frustrating,” Yanc said. “It is great having the juices are flowing again.”

The Future

With COVID numbers in free-fall, Loft leaders have been able to sharpen their focus on what lies ahead.

For the immediate future, Yanc said they will be phasing in many of the regular features that were canceled outright due to the pandemic.

They rebooted Rocky Horror last October and restarted the monthly filmmaker series last month with a focus on the works of Wes Anderson.

In March, the theater will bring back Mondo Mondays with a showing of “The Return of the Living Dead” on March 7.

“Mondo Monday has been off the calendar for the last two years,” Yanc said. “That’s one of the things that people asked the most about. It has a dedicated following. It is a fun, unique thing that no one else in town really does.”

Eventually, Yanc said they plan to bring back its First Friday Shorts series, which allows aspiring filmmakers to bring in their short films each month for cash prizes, and its All-Night Scream-O-Rama events.

“I don’t know how comfortable I feel just yet to be in a theater with a bunch of people for 12 straight hours,” Yanc said. “But it will return eventually.”

More long-term, the theater will be upgrading its facilities, things like the bathrooms and its upstairs theater, to make them more accessible to those with disabilities.

The Loft will also be constructing a permanent outdoor screening area for movies.

“We built a temporary sort of space during the pandemic and people loved it,” Yanc said. “We never really had a place to do that at The Loft before.”

Johnson said nationally the numbers of people returning to theaters have been inching upward and that is reflected in the numbers at The Loft. She is happy to welcome them back.

“I think people appreciate that The Loft is local and that we are taking a lot of precautions with reduced seating and masks,” Johnson said. “People returning to the movies are opting for The Loft, which is very validating for us.”