Celebrating 10 Years, Jacob Burns Stays True to its Mission

There are dozens of places in Westchester to watch a movie. None of those other venues offer what the Jacob Burns Film Center has been bringing to its audience and community.

The center may be best known for its wide mix of art house, independent and foreign films, from the little known moviemaker to the giants of the industry, but it has never just been about showing movies. From the time Executive Director Stephen Apkon had a vision to bring a cultural arts center to Westchester, there was the dual mission of film and education.

A decade later, the presence of the Jacob Burns Film Center and its accompanying media arts lab is not only felt in Pleasantville but throughout Westchester and the movie industry.

“I don’t think I dared to dream about what it would look like 10 years down the road,” said Apkon, who led the group in the late 1990s that established the non-profit organization that bought the former Rome Theater on Manville Road and became its home in June 2001.

“In many ways it so surpassed so many of our expectations and at the same time stayed true to our mission. I think the success for us goes beyond the number of films that we’ve shown and the special events that we’ve had. At the core we’re tied to the sense of community.”

That sense of community brings dozens of filmmaking classes each year to elementary school to high school students throughout the county, has offered countless local teenagers their first taste of employment and helped with economic revitalization for a village that like most downtowns must vigorously compete to fill its storefronts.

It also brings movies to patrons who would likely be forced to travel into Manhattan for the same experience. Special evenings feature discussions with  some of the best known filmmakers in the world, packing the house almost every time they’re scheduled.
Programming Director Brian Ackerman, who came aboard at the outset, said while the Jacob Burns is a smashing success today there was plenty of uncertainty at its opening 10 years ago this week.

“Nobody had a really clear picture of whether it was going to work,” Ackerman said.

He said attracting a wide array of audiences with varying tastes in film has been one of his key objectives. The films and documentaries have spanned the genres, exploring serious discussion topics during the annual Global Watch series, for example, to the time when the Italian film series of the 1950s and ’60s prompted Woody Allen to marvel at how 500 people could pack a theater for “8 1/2” some 50 years after its release, Ackerman recalled.

There are many factors that have contributed to the film center’s success, Apkon said. Pleasantville is centrally located walking village serviced by Metro-North. The film center’s patrons are an engaged and savvy audience that appreciates good art and stimulating discussions. It is blessed to be surrounded by a vast collection of filmmaking talent who live in Westchester, such as Ron Howard and Stanley Tucci, among many others, who have willingly contributed their time to the film center’s mission. 

Apkon said regardless of whether the director is a big name or a fledging talent, the difficulty to create a good work in today’s economics is daunting.

“It’s not like they’re under the harsh spotlight of New York City or Hollywood, and for any of these filmmakers, it doesn’t matter whether you’re a young, emerging independent filmmaker or whether you’re Robert Redford,” Apkon said of how the Burns has been able to snag some of the biggest names in cinema. “It’s hard to get a film made today. It takes many years, it takes much money on whatever scale, whether it’s a hundred million dollars or it could be $100,000.”

The importance of the center is not lost on those who have seen it serve as the centerpiece for revitalization. How much the Burns is responsible for jumpstarting Pleasantville’s downtown renaissance is open to debate, but what was widely seen as an increasingly moribund downtown in the late 1990s came back to life after its opening. Former mayor and current county legislator John Nonna said the introduction of the Jacob Burns into the community was what started to make the village a destination.

“It’s hard to quantify but it’s hard to imagine Pleasantville right now without it,” Nonna said.  “It was certainly the biggest piece of the puzzle.”

Philip McGrath, owner of the Iron Horse Grill on Wheeler Avenue, has seen the positive changes to the downtown firsthand, having started his restaurant in 1998, a few hundred yards from where the theater would open.

“Before the Burns came to Pleasantville the brightest light in the downtown was the Coke machine outside Archie’s corner store,” McGrath said.

Aardvark Pet Supply owner Barbara Clemmens, a former Pleasantville Chamber of Commerce president who was active in the organization at the time of the film center’s opening, said the theater has been “a wonderful presence in Pleasantville.” She is quick to point out that the Burns was not solely responsible for the village’s rebound. However, there is no denying that it has been a boon to the business district, particularly the restaurants and the businesses that are open at night. But it has also lifted the visibility of the entire village.

“I don’t think anybody can say that the Burns hasn’t done a lot for Pleasantville,” Clemmens said.

The growth of the Burns, and in particular its education programs, which helped spawn the December 2008 opening of the media arts lab, may have been the biggest surprise of the first decade,  Apkon said. The swift evolution of new technology, such as the introduction of youtube, has transformed the public from consumers to storytellers and consumers, he said.

“At the core we’re about story,” Apkon said. “We’re about story as it’s presented on the big screen, about story as it’s created by children and by adults and as storytelling evolves so will we. I think one of the exciting things over the next 10 years is to see how it evolves.”

Like most organizations, there have been challenges to overcome with the community. When the theater first opened there were complaints about parking, said Barry Schwartz, owner of the Try & Buy toy store since 1993. There can be a few difficult weeks before the holidays on Thursday nights or the weekends, but Schwartz said over time the village has addressed most of the parking issues.
More importantly, the film center has exposed the village in a positive light and brought thousands of visitors who otherwise would never have set foot in Pleasantville.

“Pleasantville is not a second thought anymore,” Schwartz said. “It gets top-of-mind awareness.”

Since the film center is a nonprofit organization, a periodic criticism is how it does not pay taxes or make payments in lieu of taxes. However, Apkon said an accurate price tag cannot be affixed to what Pleasantville gains by the center’s presence, much like having the Girl Scouts and religious institutions in the community.

Tens of thousands of students have benefitted from the center’s education courses, including many disadvantaged youth;  55 percent of the youngsters take those courses for free. Today the film center employs about 50 people fulltime and has an annual budget of roughly $6 million, Apkon said.

“Ninety percent of what we do at the film center doesn’t make economic sense,” Apkon said. “It makes community sense. It makes sense to a divergent population, it makes sense to work with everybody in our community to engage in dialogue to show films that raise important issues.”

Most of all, as the Jacob Burns Film Center continues to grow and evolve, Apkon’s goal remains the same: to stay true to the mission they established before the start, remaining community based and never getting too big.

“It’s not necessarily a big challenge but it’s something for us to keep our eyes on,” he said. “We’re very sensitive to that.”