Exclusive | HBO stars new 44-seat micro-moviehouse screens film oddities, classics in offbeat NYC space
Queens has plenty of microbreweries — now it has a micro-moviehouse.HBO star John Wilson’s new Low Cinema in Ridgewood has just 44 seats with a quirky interior and a roster of films ranging from the classics to bizarre military and prison movies.
The 750-square-foot theater at 70-11 60th Stt will screen 16 millimeter and digital films starting in mid-May, said Wilson, the 38-year-old known for “How To With John Wilson.“I’ve been [a cinephile] since I was a teenager and it’s always been a dream to open up something with friends and open up a theater,” Wilson, who lives down the street from Low Cinema, told The Post.Wilson’s theater is the first to open in the nabe in nearly a century — the last being the lavish Oasis Theatre, which opened in 1927 but is now a CVS Pharmacy.The Ridgewood Theatre on Myrtle Avenue, once the longest continually-operating theater in the nation, was the last cinema to shut its doors in 2008 after a 92-year run.
The building now operates as a Blink Fitness, but retains the original marquee.Local cinephiles said they have been forced to trek to Regal Atlas Park in Glendale or Brooklyn to catch a flick.“Ridgewood is a movie desert,” said Cosmo Bjorkenheim, who co-owns the theater with Wilson and fellow artist Davis Fowlkes.“There’s no movie theaters here … That’s what Low Cinema hopefully will be: the idea is for it to just be a neighborhood movie theater.“[It’s] the whole gamut — from obscure schlock to stone cold classics,” Bjorkenheim said of Low Cinema’s movie picks.The theater’s interior is as offbeat as its film offerings, with vintage seats, salvaged signage and other artifacts – as well as a paper-mâché E.T.
sculpture that Wilson made himself using recycled Christmas decor and “real” human teeth, he said.Its walls are adorned with celebrity portrait plaques of Jack Nicholson, Sandra Bullock and Pierce Brosnan, all rescued from a now-closed Hollywood-themed Burger King on Myrtle Avenu...