• Courtesy
• Rick Winston

The irony of the title of Robert D. Putnam's 2000 book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community is that it describes something absurd: Isn't bowling an intrinsically social activity, best enjoyed with friends and surrounded by an upbeat crowd?

Rick Winston would surely say the same of moviegoing. In his new book, Save Me a Seat! A Life With Movies, he describes his passionate, lifelong devotion to the art of film. Yet this is more than one person's autobiography. Having discovered cinema as a youth, Winston has spent the past six decades finding ways — as an organizer, entrepreneur and educator — to bring people together to watch movies. His book reads like a communal memoir, celebrating the roles that many people played in the cultural revitalization of north-central Vermont during an era of tremendous political, economic and demographic change.

Winston has lived in Calais since 1970 and served as founder, curator and programming director of Montpelier's Lightning Ridge Film Society (1974 to 1980), Savoy Theater (1981 to 2009), Downstairs Video (1989 to 2009) and cofounded the Green Mountain Film Festival (1999 to 2012). He has taught film appreciation at Goddard College, the Montpelier Senior Activity Center (50 eight-week series so far), the Kellogg-Hubbard Library and Community College of Vermont. And he has visited more than 50 libraries through Vermont Humanities' Speakers Bureau, facilitated 28 film series for the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at the University of Vermont and a long-running series at the Chandler Center for the Arts in Randolph, and cohosted more than 200 episodes of the public-access TV program "Talking About Movies," which are archived for view on the ORCA Media website.

Born in 1947, Winston grew up in Yonkers, N.Y., which gave him easy access by bus and train to the art houses of Manhattan. Since his parents, both high school art teachers, cheered on his early enthusiasm, he often made his way into the city to watch classic and new films. In Save Me a Seat!, he cites some that serve him as personal and pedagogical milestones: Marcel Carné's Les Enfants du Paradis, Orson Welles' Citizen Kane, Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal. Another major influence was the TV series "Million Dollar Movie" (1955 to 1966), which showed the same film every day for a week, so cinephiles such as young Winston could watch them over and over, studying their techniques and structures.

From 1950 to 1963, Winston attended Buck's Rock, a radical art colony summer camp in Connecticut, and from 1965 to 1968, he studied film at Columbia College in New York City. He transferred to the University of California, Berkeley for one tumultuous school year, 1968-69, participating in many of the anti-war protests and strikes that disrupted his classes.

While waiting for his draft notice, Winston returned east and visited Vermont, where he found a beautiful place in a whirl of creative ferment. In 1970, his parents purchased land in Calais, and Winston and his brother Jon moved there to homestead.

Winston soon met Walter Ungerer, the one-person film department at nearby Goddard College. Though Winston had no degree, Ungerer offered him the chance to join a boldly innovative group of instructors there, including playwright David Mamet, musician and writer Marc Estrin, and gamelan leader Dennis Murphy.

In 1974, Winston launched his first venture as a cinematic activist, hosting showings of historically and aesthetically important movies in Montpelier's Pavilion Auditorium under the aegis of the Lightning Ridge Film Society, which was named for the road Winston lives on to this day.

• Courtesy
• Save Me a Seat! A Life With Movies by Rick Winston, Rootstock Publishing, 262 pages. $18.99.

After seven years, the movie appetites of Winston's audience outgrew a periodic festival, and he decided to start a full-time business. In 1981, he began offering nightly screenings at the Savoy Theater, named in honor of then-landlord Ernest Massucco's family origins in Italy's Savoia region. He later discovered that a "Savoy Theatre" moving-picture venue had occupied the same location in 1910.

Although Montpelier was (and is) tiny compared with Burlington, the smaller town became and has remained a busy locus of film culture in Vermont. For the whole region, the 1970s and early '80s were a time of cultural efflorescence. Winston and his counterparts at Bread and Puppet Theater, Word of Mouth Chorus (which became Village Harmony), Fyre and Lightning Consort, Circus Smirkus, and Lost Nation Theater were discovering new ways of sustaining arts ventures. Meanwhile, "alternative" enterprises such as Hunger Mountain Co-op, Horn of the Moon Café, Bear Pond Books and Buch Spieler Records were reinventing local business with a Vermont flavor.

Winston carries a reader at a sprightly pace through a bumpy-road chronicle of necessarily endless experimentation and adaptation. He and his Savoy partners, who included Gary Ireland and Andrea Serota, had to contend with evolving technologies and ever-changing financial dynamics; the shifts from theatrical viewing to home video to DVDs to streaming; and the transformation of U.S. film distribution, as corporations devoured independent networks. Add to those systemic upheavals the episodes of citywide flooding, equipment mishaps and costly miscalculations of audience interest, and you have a wild tale of small-town entrepreneurship.

The business lessons that Winston offers will be fascinating for anyone who has struggled to keep an arts organization going day in, day out. But what most distinguishes this book from other memoirs is the verve that he conveys for sharing with audiences works that are "a universe apart from films [they] had seen before," films that can open their eyes "to the potential of film to do more than entertain."

As a teenager, Winston loved reading the essays and reviews of critics such as Parker Tyler, Arthur Knight, Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris, who wrote about movies with the conviction that this relatively new medium could be as beautiful and powerful as literature or any other art. Winston's own continuing education as a film lover has never narrowed or become staid. His book incorporates "trailers," or lively, illuminating tributes to movies he wants readers to know about — and see. And Save Me a Seat! is full of intriguing still images from films he cites, along with wonderful graphics from his own projects' publicity materials. Winston's excitement about movies and the conversations they generate is inspiring and catching.

The years have brought more indie film venues to Vermont, but the Savoy remains. In 2009, Winston sold the theater to Terry Youk, who closed the video store and opened a second, smaller viewing room; in 2016, James O'Hanlon bought the business. Deluged by the July 2023 flooding in downtown Montpelier, the theater has raised more than $45,000 in community donations and will reopen this Friday, September 1.

For his part, Winston has immersed himself in the role of educator, which requires and allows for his own ongoing learning. The book demonstrates that he has never stopped asking a key question: What has been done with cinema, what is happening now, and what is possible?

From Save Me a Seat! A Life With Movies

It would take a lot of hours to figure out exactly how many films were shown at the Savoy during the twenty-nine years I was there. I can only estimate roughly that there were upward of two thousand. For many of these titles, there are memories and associations that have remained with me: I can't hear any mention of Akira Kurosawa's Dersu Uzala without recalling that it was the first time we received a print in such rough shape that we had to demand a new one. When I see a reference to Andrzej Wajda's Man of Marble or Tony Richardson's Tom Jones, I remember the only two instances when an electrical storm knocked out all of downtown Montpelier's power, canceling our shows. Whose Life Is It Anyway?, with Richard Dreyfuss, marked the first (but not the only) time, shortly after our 1981 opening, that only one person showed up for a show. I asked our lone customer, Mary Messier, if there was another time she might come, but her nursing schedule meant this Sunday late show was her only chance. The show must go on! And it did. When I think of that heartwarming (and sometimes scary) 1943 classic Lassie Come Home, I remember five-year-old Zephyr Billingsley in her mother's arms, carried wailing from the theater. About ten years later, Zephyr became one of our teenage popcorn scoopers, and about fifteen years after that she was bringing her own son to the Savoy matinees.

Correction, August 31, 2023: An earlier version of this story contained an inaccurate description of Columbia College. It is still an undergraduate college of Columbia University.