Create
Arts Alive! podcast: Mike Hazlett, Green Light Cinema
When Mike Hazlett and his wife Sue relocated to St. Petersburg from Boston nine years ago, they asked themselves: Why doesn’t a city this cosmopolitan have an independent movie theater?
So began the tale of Green Light Cinema, which opened in early 2020, just before Covid shut everybody down for a while.
Green Light survived, and today the 80-seat cinema space at 2201 2nd Avenue N. has a dedicated customer base, film fans who aren’t interested in the latest superhero franchise blow-em-up down at the enormo-plex.
Mike Hazlett screens indie films, foreign films, award-winning films, documentaries and critical faves that wouldn’t stand a chance in the oversized movie domes with their $15 tubs of popcorn.
He shows classics, too, and he listens to what his audiences tell him they’d like to see. Ask him about his VHS Club series.
The Academy Award-winning documentary “No Other Land” screens Saturday and Sunday.
Still, booking prestige and “art” films requires no small degree of tact. And patience.
It’s what Mike Hazlett does all day, every day.
“We are attached to an industry that has not fully recovered from Covid, and the streaming platforms are cannibalizing theatrical,” he says on today’s edition of Arts Alive! “They can’t find the balance between leaving these films in theaters and putting them on these streaming platforms. And it’s a big problem.”
In other words, if he shows something beloved by critics and film festivals, it sometimes can be a race against the clock before Netflix, Hulu or one of the others throws it up on TV screens coast-to-coast.
Green Light is for people who want their movies writ large (even the small ones), on a big screen in an intimate space with great sound and zero interruptions.
He also discusses the theater’s community interaction, which means a lot to him, including the regular Rocky Horror Picture Show screenings with the Hell on Heels shadow cast, the annual Tampa Bay Gay & Lesbian International Film Festival, and acting classes taught in the theater, during non-movie hours, by St. Pete actress Eugenie Bondurant and her Station 12 Studio.
Click on the arrow to listen to the interview.
