Oklahoma Film Exchange: Preserving Oklahoma's Last Screening Room

Written By: Matthew Viriyapah

The Oklahoma Film Exchange is a group of volunteers working to try and preserve what may be the last screening room in America.

(OKLAHOMA) They spent most of August playing a free movie every day, asking for donations in exchange.

Read this story on KOSU Radio here.

They're offering one more weekend of free programming with the aim to resume normal operations in September and beyond.

Oklahoma Film Exchange's Cam Hunter and historian Bradley Wynn talk about the effort to preserve the history of the Paramount screening room.

Oklahoma Film Exchange's Cam Hunter on saving the space:

We're asking like about $10 if people can do it. But if not, it's free. Like, just come out and see what we're about,. Like, come hang out.

We want this to be a live events gathering place. We've been, like, endearingly using the term "third space," which means just, like, you can come and have a space to be yourself, hang out. You can watch movies here, you can see a comedy show here. You can hopefully see a drag show here.

Yeah, just anything and everything that we can pull off, we want to be able to do.

We want to definitely break outside the box of even just cinema. We're going to do stuff people haven't heard of. We want to introduce new thoughts and ideas behind cinema with our picks and everything.

Just really showing people new things is, I think, what we're really gunning for here.

Historian Bradley Wynn on the history of Film Row:

So Film Row in and of itself starts very early on as what we call a film exchange. So think of a Blockbuster Video, right? Film exchanges were Blockbuster Videos of their time.

And these were Blockbusters that were owned by the studios. So you had Warner Brothers, Paramount, Fox Walt Disney, etc.

And what they would do is studios would produce a product and they needed to get it out to theater owners. And so film exchanges were where theater owners would go to view the product to show in their theaters.

There were 37 film exchange networks across the nation. This is the only one left standing intact.

The reason why we call this area Film Row was because over time, as the film exchange offices that were scattered all over the city coalesced and migrated into this area due to fire codes, because film stock at the time was very flammable. It was nitrate based. And so it was nothing for it to go up in flames. And because it had the same chemical equivalency as gun cotton and polyester film as we know today wouldn't come about until the 1950s and 60s, I believe.

And so the film exchanges were pushed on the outskirts of the downtown core, which was mainly timber constructed. And so Film Row grew out of that. And then the ancillary businesses that supported theater owners grew up in those areas too. So this became a one-stop shop.

You could come down here and get everything from carpeting for your movie theaters and theater seating, concession equipment, your movie posters, all your press information. You know, everything that you would need as a theater owner to promote a film would be down here.

And then the studios themselves, through their exchange offices, would provide, you know, stars and starlets from films, and they would help promote their films as well. And so that's how Film Row came to be.

The golden years were certainly in the 1930s and 40s. Hollywood in and of itself also experienced quite a lot in those time frames.

You have to remember, again, the technology of transporting film by plane, for example, wasn't possible because of its flammable nature.

So Oklahoma City was crisscrossed by a lot of railroads as well. Light rail, etc. And so we had tracks that would bring in the film stock from wherever it was coming from, mainly California, into this area.

Bradley Wynn on why to save the space:

You have to look at it more than a screening room, right? You have to look at the totality of things.

So when we look back at urban renewal and realize how much the city's history, its core was absolutely gutted. And then when you look at the Murrah Bombing in 1995, which also destroyed more properties because of structural damage. And you look at how Oklahoma, prior to the bombing, was almost erased completely from the map.

There was no sustainability for its future.

When post-bombing occurred and these pocket communities that would grow and eventually become things like Uptown and Midtown and Automobile Alley... When these property owners and business people began to look at their area to try to assess the damage... When they really began to discover what they had and didn't realize of historic significance...

When you look at a tragedy like that and when you realize how much you had lost, there's very little of Oklahoma City's history left remaining and standing.

In this particular area, though, we have a whole chunk. A whole chunk of the city that is original.

And I think that if we lost this screening room, I mean, it would probably be lost. This whole area, it would be developed in some other ways. You know, the screening room in and of itself is unique because it is maybe the last surviving ghost, if you will, of that area. Because it's still being used as a screening room.

And as far as we know, it could be the last screening room ever in the entire United States from that entire era.

And so I think that if we lost the screening room, that would be a huge loss of a historical thing. But we also have to look at it, as citizens of this city, that we have responsibility.

We have a responsibility to respect the legacies that were left, whether intended or not. We stand on the shoulders of those who came before us. And this is one of those unique places, unique spaces in which that that history is still tangible.

You can come in there and touch it, and you can sit in it, and you can be a part of that story which continues until it doesn't. And I think that's why we need to save it.

I'm also fortunate to have in my possession an actual screening log from 1973 to 1983 for this particular screening room that was kept by the projectionist. So the very first films that are shown here, starting in January 1973 are The Sting, American Graffiti.

And then in 1983, we have Raiders of the Lost Ark. And you have a lot of films in between. One of the interesting things you note when looking through this screening.

So there was a wide variety of films shown here, including Star Wars. Yeah, all of those films from 1973 to 1983. All those movies in between were screened in this room.