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Happy 80th to Cinema Arts Centre's Vic Skolnik

Katti Gray

June 23, 2008

Last evening's scheduled 80th birthday party for Vic Skolnick, co-founder with his beloved Charlotte Sky of the anti-multiplex known in these parts as the Cinema Arts Centre, actually was a belated celebration. Officially, Skolnick waded into his four score years on April 25. June, however, seemed a more favorable date for throwing a party, what with potential partygoers all hyped over flowerings of landscape and sunnier skies.

If you ask Skolnick and his wife what was the real point of the evening's public regaling of him, an upright and sometimes uproarious octogenarian, they will say it was less about the man who helped breed their Huntington village art house than about the institution itself. Cinema Arts is 35 years old in 2008.

If it were a human being, it would be said that Cinema Arts is in its prime, chronologically speaking. As gathering place, a place of nurture, a locus for persuasive and sometimes heated conversation around topics tackled on film as unvarnished history or as truth-based fiction, Cinema Arts has encouraged a people-to-people engagement over matters such as ecology, feminism, slavery and Nazism.

In this, Skolnick, Sky and their now-adult son, Dylan - trained when he was a preschooler in the techniques of the reel-to-reel and still on board with Mom and Dad - have been a team. "It's a troika," Skolnick said. "He was born in 1967. He was there for the birth of the cinema. You know how people say a kid was born in the trunk? Well, I like to say he was born in a film can. He was our first projectionist."

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He could work multiple reels, hooking them off and on that lone projector, discarded by the local library, in the trio's possession back then. They showed movies in a Huntington dance studio on loan from a friend. The troika hung a sheet. Patrons dragged their own chairs through those doors, watched the first reel and waited while young Dylan switched to the second take.

"We served them coffee and called it an intermission," Skolnick said of finessing the less-than-ideal conditions. "People were a lot more amenable then to informality and they had such a hunger. ...

"The changes we've made have been gradual. But when I look back 35 years, it's been an amazing transformation for us. The industry making the changes it's made meant we have had to adapt. The videos, the proliferation of 'plexes. ... We've gone from 16 mm to 35 mm to video and now to digital and Surround Sound and Dolby."

And that brings us to the deeper reasons for last night's affair. For Skolnick's 80 years, $80,000 is what the troika is asking. Being current does exact a price. Revolutions of any type require financing.

Daring to build an enduring institution in a suburb where even Skolnick, Sky and the younger Skolnick wondered whether a facility peddling so-called art-house films would thrive over the long haul indeed has gotten Cinema Arts noticed. "I didn't see it as building an institution necessarily," Sky said. "We were always struggling to be current and creative. So, no, I actually never thought it would be as established as it is now ... with people calling, even from out of state, asking how could they do what we were doing."

Before reaching their own public acclaim, the Lincoln Center Film Society and Brooklyn Academy of Music conferred with the Huntington village team on how the three have managed their achievements, Sky said.

From the multimillion-dollar facility they built with gifts from the Kaufman Foundation, which also noticed the goings-on, the family still is betting against the vagaries of this moment. The big corporate distribution centers are gobbling up the small distributorships Cinema Arts has depended on all the years, Skolnick said, and he cannot yet know how that might alter access to the less-than-mainstream movies his team prefers.

Technology gets newer all the time and who knows, he says, how well Cinema Arts can cover those ongoing costs of staying current.

He trusts and hopes that his only child can and will keep this train running until, to borrow a famous lyric, forever is through.

"One never knows about the future," Skolnick said. "We started very humbly, and it's my senior hour here. We wanted this to last, and we've worked like hell to make it last this long."

Katti Gray's e-mail address is katti@kattigray.com.