User:Torgo/Oak Street Cinema

The Oak Street Cinema is a small, single-screen movie theater in the Stadium Village neighborhood of Minneapolis, MN near the University of Minnesota campus. The theater has played both first-run independent films and repertory showings, including retrospectives of such filmmakers as Ingmar Bergman, Michelangelo Antonioni, Akira Kurosawa and others, as well as genre-based retrospectives. It has also been home to several local film festivals, including the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Film Festival. The theater has hosted visits from several well-known filmmakers and celebrities, such as Terry Gilliam, Michael Moore, Peter Fonda and many others.

History
The theater, originally called the Oak, was built in 1916, but was renamed the Campus Theater in 1935 and remodeled by design firm Liebenberg & Kaplan, who also designed several other area theaters, including the nearby Varsity Theater, located on the other side of campus in Dinkytown. It was designed in Art Deco style, and seated about 400 people, in addition to a meeting area in the basement for film students. The Campus Theater closed as a film theater in 1989 and was briefly used to perform stage shows before it re-opened in 1995 under the leadership of Bob Cowgill, now a professor at Augsburg College, and was again re-christened, this time to its present name the Oak Street Cinema. The theater has been owned and operated by the Minnesota Film Arts since 2003, an organization created when the theater, under Cowgill's leadership, merged with the U Film Society.

Closing
When Bob Cowgill stepped down in 2004, the theater fell quickly into debt, in excess of $145,000 by the end of 2005. Cowgill's successor, Jamie Hook, was fired by September 2005 for mismanaging the budget and missing grant application deadlines. In the meantime, MFA board members Al Milgrom and Tim Grady personally loaned the organization over $75,000, guaranteed against the value of the property, which Grady appraised at approximately $600,000. By the beginning of 2006, the board of the Minnesota Film Arts publicly considered selling the theater, resulting in a protest by Cowgill and community members and the creation of the group Save The Oak.

Two years later, in 2008, the theater still struggled along amidst continuing financial troubles, and finally stopped showing movies after the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Film Festival in May. Local papers reported that the theater was likely to be sold and demolished to make way for new student housing developments. MFA leadership acknowledged that selling the theater was necessary, but sought to calm fears that the theater would be demolished, at least anytime soon.