Digital Cover Story - Split Screen

Split Screen: Craig Mince on Building a Cinema Culture Through Community

Entertainment, education, community. These pillars have defined a decades-long career in Indianapolis for Craig Mince, president of the Athenaeum Foundation. But things haven’t always been beer steins and Christkindlmarkts for Mince, who spent seventeen years working with the IMAX theater and fourteen years with the Indy Film Fest. Our executive director, Polina Osherov, sat down with Mince to talk about his perspective on Indy and his experience building community around the industry of entertainment.

Polina Osherov: All right, so you’ve been at this community work for a while now. Talk to me about the relationship between building community in the arts and building economic value within those communities. How have you seen it play out in Indy?

Craig Mince: I’ve always seen the money-making mechanism or the revenue generator as the thing that’s building that aspirational culture, right? So let's talk about film and tax credit incentives because I think those are great examples. 

My hope was that the tax credit incentives would create a culture, an environment, that studios or production companies would want to become a part of. You want to create a place that supports the needed talent so that production companies don’t have to bring those people in from different parts of the country. So the idea of having a thriving film community from an exhibition standpoint makes a lot of sense. 

It’s more than just tax credits, though. Indianapolis’s film exhibition has changed over the last 20 years. Downtown used to just have the Regal in the Circle Centre Mall and the IMAX theater at the State Museum. The Regal’s gone now, but the IMAX is still thriving. And we've got the Kan-Kan. And we’ve got Living Room. And now we have Alamo Drafthouse. They all bring different flavors to the market. 

So now you're building this community of filmgoers, film exhibitors, and film festivals. I think it becomes easier for these production companies to say, I can find talent in this market because these people are fans and they would jump at the opportunity to work in this industry.

You can really see how this is playing out in Cincinnati. Cincinnati is on the shortlist for the Sundance move in 2027. I mean, that's huge. Let's say, hypothetically, Sundance moves their operation to Cincinnati. The economic boom that market's going to get in the production world alone is incredible.

PO: You’re totally right. Do you have any insights on how Cincinnati even came to compete? 

CM: They've got the infrastructure. They've got an airport that's within 20 to 30 minutes of downtown. It's all walkable, much like Indianapolis. I think had we been a bit further along in our tax incentives and our production crew, we easily could have made a pitch for it. We're just a decade behind them as far as having that infrastructure and that plan. 

The beauty of Midwestern production is you can drive an hour in any direction and get different kinds of terrains. You've got hills here, forests here, sand dunes over here. So it's a very interesting area to do that kind of stuff. That’s what I saw on the exhibition side of film, sustaining and building that culture that then other industries would pilfer off of.

PO: In your experience, what comes first? Is it the community or the infrastructure? 

CM: Even though the infrastructure does build a community, I think the community needs to be seeded first. The infrastructure just adds to that community. Austin, Texas is another great example, right? For years it was this counterculture film town that just loved odd movies. And then the Alamo Drafthouse sprung from that, and then you started to see Robert Rodriguez and all of these production folks set up shop. The culture was there first, and then the production followed. 

PO: What's one thing that we can do as a state to grow the industry other than the tax credit? 

CM: Invest in the local talent more than anything. 

PO: Okay, what does that look like? 

CM: Say you bring in a big Hollywood film—or maybe even a smaller John Green story, as a hypothetical example. You're using local PAs, you're using local cinematographers, but here they may not be as skilled as somebody that you could bring in now from Cincinnati or Louisville or LA or New York or Toronto. So right away there’s this question if it’s even possible. I mean, even equipment rental is an issue—Indianapolis isn’t set up for that as much; a lot of it comes from Cincinnati. 

I think some investment from the state in those areas will make it easier. Grease the wheels, if you will, for when John Green is able to get Warner Brothers to agree to shoot an Indianapolis-based movie in Indianapolis. Having that culture, that community, that infrastructure to be able to bring the appropriate people together to take advantage of that tax incentive—that goes a long way. And until you have it all in place, I don’t know. It’s hard. 

PO: Yeah, I hear you on that. So, let’s change gears a bit. Tell me about your favorite film-related position.

CM: Running the IMAX downtown taught me a lot. I’ve always been a film fan, but it wasn't until I got that job that I really understood the exhibition industry. I learned a lot from that job. Respect for the content, respect for how it's done, and respect for being a vessel for somebody else's vision. Whether it be Spielberg or Scorsese, if you show this movie poorly, people are going to think it sucks.

It also connected me to a lot of people outside of the Indianapolis market, whether through studios or other exhibition chains. And I learned a lot outside of Indianapolis, which I was able to bring to the Indy Film Festival. 

PO: Talk to me a bit about the Indy Film Fest and how you feel like that work connects to what you’re doing now with the Athenaeum.

CM: Sure, so the Indy Film Fest was born out of a necessity to deepen the bench of product coming to Indianapolis. 

For the longest time, this market was thought of as puppy dogs and robot movies. There wasn't a lot of challenging cinema coming to Indianapolis when I started. And not to say that I had anything to do with changing it, but it changes the tide when you start to program challenging content that people really can start to dig their teeth into. And this was before streaming. So a lot of that content would only see the light of day through a film festival circuit. 

I think all this informed what I do now at the Athenaeum, which is a different style of storytelling. It's just done in a live medium rather than on film. And don't get me wrong, I show movies here all the time. I'm never going to not show movies. At the end of the day, it's storytelling, and how you do it is the ultimate vehicle. 

One of our core missions at the Athenaeum is to promote German heritage in the Indianapolis market, because the German immigrants brought a lot of the arts to the community. This year we’ll have the Christkindlmarkt. They started in Germany as kind of town square advent markets where they would sell meat and whatnot and kind of grew over time. But they were always very hyper local. It was the locals that were doing it. It wasn't people coming in from another market.

What we're going to do is we're going to take the same German ideals, German decoration, German items, but we're going to do it with locals. We're keeping the money in the local economy and activating this different kind of artists’ market. You get the same kind of feel and vibe that you would get anywhere else, but it's local, it's cheaper, which is great. And you know that every dollar you spend is going home with somebody that's going to reinvest it back in the market. 

PO: How long is the Christkindlmarkt going on? 

CM: It started on Black Friday, November 29, and it runs every weekend until December 22. It’s one of the few events we do that's free. You can come listen to mariachi bands during Las Posadas and German polka bands. Rob Dixon's going to be here playing some jazz, free on stage. It's just a fun add-on to something else you may be doing downtown during the holiday season. 

PO: Love it. Well, thanks so much for what you do, Craig, and for talking with me today. 

CM: Of course.

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This story was made possible thanks to the generous support of our friends at Life in Indy.