Save Me a Seat Receives Vermont History Journal Review!
This review is excerpted from Vermont History Vol. 91, No. 2 (Summer/Fall 2023): 126–130. © 2023 by the Vermont Historical Society. ISSN: 0042-4161; on-line ISSN: 1544-3043
As a film buff growing up in Yonkers, New York, Rick Winston spent his free time and spare change in such legendary Manhattan movie palaces as the New Yorker, the Thalia, and the Bleecker Street Cinema. These experiences made such a strong impression on him that, after leaving the metro area for rural Vermont, he established his own arthouse cinema to feel more at home. Winston co-founded the Savoy Theater in Montpelier in 1980 and the Green Mountain Film Festival in 1999—highlights of a journey chronicled in this charming memoir.
Winston’s cinematic tastes were developed in a complex cauldron of Baby Boom prosperity and political tension. His parents, high school teachers, both came under scrutiny during the anti-Communist “Red Scare” purges. In fact, his father, Leon, resigned from his teaching job after being targeted by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Mother Julia appealed her charge and kept her job. (Winston published an award-winning book about that historical period, Red Scare in the Green Mountains, in 2018 with Rootstock Publishing.)
The Winston household was also a hotbed of film appreciation. Winston remembers his father’s encyclopedic knowledge of movies, and his boyhood bedroom television was often tuned to Million Dollar Movie, which delivered a steady diet of films across genres. Seemingly everywhere Winston went as a kid, he encountered movies. Even at summer camp at Buck’s Rock in New Milford, Connecticut, where Winston’s parents were counselors, he made friends with children of blacklisted filmmakers and saw such classics as Vittorio De Sica’s neorealist gem Bicycle Thieves.
Winston attended Columbia University for three years before transferring to the University of California at Berkeley. Both institutions, he recounts, had active film societies on campus. Hanging out with other budding cineastes would prove formative—as would his decision to visit some Buck’s Rock chums in Plainfield, Vermont. Winston ended up making Vermont his home in 1970. On a lead from a Columbia classmate, he looked up Walter Ungerer, then head of the film program at Goddard College. Before long, Winston had a job there. Goddard gave Winston a chance to see great movies but not with the regularity he craved. “Now, living in rural Vermont,” he writes, “the lack of opportunities to see classic or foreign films finally provided the impetus for me to take that fateful step from passive viewer to active, participant whatever form that might take” (pp. 62–63). In 1973, Winston started the Lightning Ridge Film Society, showing films in Montpelier’s Pavilion Auditorium.
That’s the backstory of Winston’s memoir. It flows well into a narrative structure that could make a good screenplay. The inciting incident—to borrow from screenwriting parlance—is the Savoy Theater’s premiere on January 9, 1981. Joining Winston at the helm was former Goddard colleague Gary Ireland. Winston’s wife, Andrea Serota, would join him at the Savoy in 1999, when Ireland left Vermont.
Buoyed by Winston’s conversational style, Save Me a Seat! is segmented into six sections that function like plot points. Action rises with the challenges of operating the Savoy. Winston’s communal ethos served him well in building a network of people—gratefully cited in the book—to help him find, acquire, and exhibit films beyond the blockbuster repertoire. The Savoy story is a tale of adaptation, resiliency, and, above all, community. The 1989 launch of Downstairs Video, a rental trade in the Savoy’s basement, made Winston’s enterprise a popular crossroads—a “cultural speakeasy,” Winston remembers loyal patron Tom Hall calling it (p. 114). The Green Mountain Film Festival, which kicked off in 1999, connected the Savoy to an important event on the Vermont cultural calendar. The climax is the ultimate collision of Winston’s goals with market forces and other challenges. At the risk of sharing spoilers, those tensions resolve as the action falls to a denouement that finds Winston no longer at the Savoy but still an active film educator around the state.
Save Me a Seat! is strongest in its reflective modes. Sidebar-like sections tagged as “trailers” offer Winston’s take on poignant films and film experiences. The “trailer” on the Alfred Hitchcock film Rear Window (pp. 9–10) revisits Winston’s boyhood response to the film and the joy he found in sharing it as a Burlington College instructor. Iranian filmmaker Samira Makhmalbaf’s 2002 release Blackboards, in which itinerant schoolteachers wander the war-ravaged Iran-Iraq border in the 1980s, is featured in a “trailer” that revisits its Green Mountain Film Festival screening near the start of the US “shock and awe” campaign in Iraq. The “trailer” titled “I Was a Teenage Popcorn Scooper” shares four interview excerpts from four young adults who ran the concession stand at the Savoy. Taken together, the “trailers” punctuate Save Me a Seat! with interstitial passages that add depth to Winston’s story, possibly compelling a reader to jot down a film title or two for future viewing.
Even the Savoy’s toughest travails bring Winston to points of fond reminiscence. Recalling the Montpelier flood on March 11, 1992, when ice jams forced the Winooski River over its banks, reads as a celebration of community bonds, one brimming with gratitude for the volunteers who rescued the Downstairs Video inventory from surging waters. Winston hits a humorous note with the image of his pacing anxiously about the Savoy while awaiting a film delivery dangerously close to screening time. The “fracturing conflict” among the board of the Green Mountain Film Festival merits only a mention, yielding to the more enduring memory of his involvement as something he “will always cherish” (p. 171).
Winston devotes substantial space to chronicling the myriad tasks involved in operating a movie theater, challenging the notion that it’s simply a matter of showing up in time to run the projector. These minutiae are not all compelling, but they accrue to a painstakingly detailed behind-the-scenes look at what it takes to open a lens on the wider world of film culture for people living in a small rural state. Combined with plentiful anecdotes, they also manage to capture a beloved independent theater’s ephemeral moment in media time.
Save Me a Seat! is unlikely to inspire the next arthouse cinema proprietor in Vermont, but it may inspire gratitude for the labors of love that have enriched Vermont’s arts culture in the post-World War II era.
—Erik Esckilsen
Erik Esckilsen is a professor of interdisciplinary studies at Champlain College and a frequent contributor to Seven Days newspaper.