Brown Dog Cinema Club

It began at the Mabel Tainter, over an argument nobody has settled and nobody will write down. There was a projector, and someone who would not let go of the plug. What we had there, as somebody put it at the time, was a failure to communicate¹Cool Hand Luke 1967. The argument is ongoing.

The founders took a position and never moved off it. Show up, keep quiet through the credits, stay for the row afterwards. The lights stay down until the credits finish, nobody explains the ending, and arriving late is forgiven where talking is not. That is the whole of the constitution, and it has needed no amendment.

We are, it must be said, a little exclusive. Whoever runs the door is as mad as hell²Network 1976 at the idea of a film society by committee, so the programme is chosen, not voted, and the door is narrow on purpose. If that troubles you, this may not be your club; if it thrills you, you already understand the terms.

For now the reels live in the back room of the Zymurgy Brewery, a temporary home while the club settles its next few rooms. More locations are coming, and members hear where before anyone else.

We hold, stubbornly, that an audience can be trusted. Are you watching closely?⁴The Prestige 2006 is less a line we like than the whole of the invitation, and the narrow door is what stands between this room and a duller future, the sort that would screen ninety minutes of nothing and hand it Best Picture⁵Idiocracy 2006. The programme is one person's doing on purpose. A thing like this, run by committee, curdles into a racket with a mascot⁶Death to Smoochy 2002, and we would rather close.

What happens on the good nights is harder to put down. The room goes quiet, the picture takes hold, and for two hours nobody is anywhere else. Members hear the programme first; everyone else may ask at the door. And whatever you do on the way out, leave the gun, take the cannoli³The Godfather 1972.

Somebody always starts one. Answer honestly; nobody is checking, which is rather the point. Where the stakes are this low, the only winning move is not to playWarGames 1983, and yet somebody always does.

Questions put to the club. Verified members vote; the tally is live.