Cliff Froehlich
Cinema St. Louis Executive Director Cliff Froehlich is retiring at the end of June after 19 years with the organization. During his tenure, Froehlich has helped to program countless films and bring many great filmmakers to St. Louis as part of the St. Louis International Film Festival, helping expose St. Louis film buffs to the most exciting and interesting cinema from around the world. Soon, his just announced replacement, current CSL development director Bree Maniscalco, will take over the helm. But before he transitions out of his role, we sat down with Froehlich to chat about his last year with CSL, some of his favorite memories, and what he hopes the future looks like for film in St. Louis.
You announced your retirement back in February. What has your last season with Cinema St. Louis has been like since then?
There is something of a lame duck aspect when you announce your retirement that early. I wanted to give a long runway. However, I was originally planning to stay all the way through the end of 2023, when I originally decided to retire, but last year was such a difficult lift that I decided that I wanted to move up the timeline. I had already told the board that I was exiting at the end of 2023, so they knew that they needed to start preparing, but they did have to obviously accelerate their plans. So, at any rate, I gave them plenty of time, and that meant that I ended up having a long period of time in which they were obviously searching for a new [executive director], and also I was making decisions that were going to affect the person who took over for me. I felt a little uncomfortable in some instances. There are some decisions that have to be done right away. You can't delay. But in others, there are opportunities to wait. As much as is possible, for any major decision that's going to affect the organization or the festival this year that could be delayed, I've been delaying it. I want to give my successor an opportunity to make the decisions that sort of guide the organization into the future. It's also been nice. People have said gratifying things to me with regard to my tenure with the organization and thanking me for my work. So from that point of view, I get a little bit more time, I guess, to have people say nice things about me. But by the same token, on some levels it's nice to pull the Band-Aid off quickly. This has been a long process.
Bree Maniscalco was just named the new executive director for Cinema St. Louis after working with CSL for many years. Any thoughts you can share about the choice?
I'm very excited to see where Bree takes the organization in the future. I helped to recruit her as the development director. I was pleased when she ended up getting the job. I had nothing to do with choosing my successor though. The board was the sole responsible party with regard to making decisions. But I was very happy when they decided to move in that direction. I think she's a perfect choice. She really knows the organization, she's obviously going to provide a great continuity moving forward, and there's going to be more changes made once she's fully in charge as far as some new hires that will come aboard. It's a lot to learn, but, thankfully, because she's already with the organization, it's going to make it a lot simpler than if somebody from the outside had come in.
Do you have any specific favorite memories that really jump out at you from your time with Cinema St. Louis and SLIFF?
Usually they involve specific people that we brought to the festival or events that were staged. My first year, back in 2001, the festival had had a rough year the previous year, and I wanted to have something that really sort of put a marker down with regard to my own tenure. I didn't have a lot to work with from the point of view of money. Back in those days, we had a very limited budget, and it was a difficult situation. So it wasn't easy to pull things off, but we managed to bring in Ken Burns. He had a new show at that time about Mark Twain, which obviously made a great deal of sense for us. I managed to contact Ken, get him to play that series. It was just a two-parter. It wasn't one of his massive, multi-part films. Then I successfully recruited Bob Costas to do an interview with Ken in conjunction with the program. Bob was still at KMOX back in those days, and that interview ended up being broadcast over KMOX. So that was really a great event. We were very, very happy to have that as the signature event in my first year. That remains one of my favorite memories...Then in 2013, we managed to bring in Oliver Stone on the 50th anniversary of the assassination of JFK to show his director's cut of JFK. That was a pretty fabulous event. As you would expect, Stone was pretty entrancing. So those those are probably two of the big ones that I found most gratifying to be able to pull out of my hat.
Then there are plenty of other filmmakers that I really admire that we managed to bring into town as part of the festival—people like John Sayles, whom I've long loved, Paul Schrader, a whole range of really extraordinary filmmakers that we were able to give a tribute to. And when I came on board we instituted an award called the Cinema St. Louis Award that honored people from St. Louis who do significant things in cinema. Among the people we've honored are John Goodman, Kevin Kline, Marsha Mason...those events were all also extremely memorable. And then including people who are not as well known, but who have done great work, people like director Ken Kwapis, the late George Hickenlooper. We've established really strong connections with the people who are working in film and television who have St. Louis roots, and I hope that that's a tradition the festival continues.
What has been the most rewarding aspect of your time with Cinema St. Louis?
It really goes back to our actual mission statement. We want to expose St. Louis to the best in world cinema, whether that's documentary or international film, great shorts that are only seen theatrically in a festival context, or American independent cinema. There's so many great movies, really extraordinary films, that simply never surface other than at a festival. Yes, if you're a really devout cinephile and you're doing some digging on your own, you can locate certain films and find means of watching them online. There are ways of seeing many of the films that we play eventually, but seeing these films in a theatrical context is almost impossible unless you travel to other festivals or we bring it in. So that's really what I've been most happy to do, to enable folks to be exposed to movies that they would otherwise never encounter. And then once they do encounter it, they fall in love. The great thing about festivals is frequently you're featuring both a filmmaker and/or a subject or subjects of the film, which leads to great conversation. And in a festival like ours, where it's much more human-scaled—it's not some sort of massive event that like Sundance—we end up having the ability to allow people to interact with filmmakers, have one-on-one conversations. After the Q&A, you can always walk up to a filmmaker, and chances are they'll be happy to chat with you. It really goes to, as I say, the heart of our mission. Those are the things that I'm most happy to have done over time. And I think that's why festivals need to continue to exist. Without them, there's still going to be a vast sea of great movies out there, but finding those films is very hard for somebody who is not a professional whose work it is to identify the best movies and to exhibit them. If you're just on your own and you're a film fan, you may stumble across some of those things. And if you do reading, you'll encounter a number of them. But it's only when you have sort of a curatorial vision that you end up having the best opportunity to experience that.
What do you hope the future looks for Cinema St. Louis?
The thing that we've lacked over time is a venue of our own...We've worked with tons of different venues over the years, and I'm sure we'll continue to do so. But not having an anchor, having a place where you can have an ongoing conversation with filmgoers by presenting films year-round, that creates a challenge. Now, it's also a challenge if you have one of those, because then you have to maintain it and ensure that people are coming on a year-round basis. So, you know, it can be a curse as well as a gift. But that's something that I hope in the future the organization might be able to do, to have a home base, so to speak. It's not like the St. Louis International Film Festival can only play at a single venue. That's impossible. We always need more than one screen. In fact, in years past we have used as many as 12 screens running simultaneously on our busiest day. But having a place where you don't have to constantly worry about negotiating, “Is it going to be available? Is something fundamental going to change that means that we're not going to have access to it?” All of those things are constant worries, and every year is slightly different. So having that, I think, is the big next step that Cinema St. Louis would want to take. It's not an easy thing to accomplish, and there's no guarantee that will ever happen. But I think that would be the next logical step in the evolution of the organization.
What are you going to miss most about your role?
I'm not totally separating. At the conclusion of June, I'm obviously officially retiring and will no longer have a full-time role. I won't be [the executive director], but I will serve as consultant for most of the remainder of the year and perhaps [beyond that] so we can ease the transition with regard to the new ED and make certain that I'm able to help out, answer questions, give whatever advice and counsel I can. And then we'll see how it works out.
I do hope that I maintain some level of connection to the organization, whether as a part-time employee, independent contractor, or a volunteer. I know I'll still be doing occasional presentations of films, introducing and then discussing them, and I hope to contribute to The Lens, our blog, which in my estimation has the best film criticism, not just in St. Louis, but is a really extraordinary film critical hub for the nation. I hope more people take a look at it. We'll see whether or not this happens, but I would love to be able to continue to do some modest programming, by perhaps continuing to do one or both of the retrospective programs that we do, our repertory things: Golden Anniversaries, in which we do films celebrating their 50th anniversary, and our Classic French Film Festival. Again, this will be determined entirely by the new ED, but if they're open to it, I would love to continue to have some small programming role.
In a sense, you're taking a step back, but you intend to stay involved in the broader film community here.
Yeah, I absolutely plan on continuing to do some level of work. Again, I can't make a determination on my own as to what level of work that's going to be. That'll be partially dependent on what the new ED wants to do with me. It's an uncomfortable position for a new person in the sense that having the old guy hanging around like a ghost is probably not an ideal situation. So they have to find a comfortable level where they'd say, “Yeah, he can do this,” and be comfortable with my contributions. I am planning on being as respectful as I can be with regard to the new person. I do not want to tell them what I would have done in their place, but I certainly hope to have an opportunity to contribute to Cinema St Louis moving into the future.
I don't plan on just kicking back and sitting on my couch and watching movies. I will watch movies, but I do want to be actively engaged in the community. I've also taught for about 38 years as an adjunct at Webster University, so I'll be continuing that work. I always describe myself as a recovering journalist, because I spent the first half of my career at the Riverfront Times and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and actually St. Louis Magazine, so I hope to sort of ratchet back up, not to former levels, but at least do a little bit more writing for publication. Then I have a personal project that I plan on engaging in shortly after I retire.
Can you tell us a bit more about that personal project?
It will probably go no further than my computer, but I plan on writing a sort of film-going memoir in which I trace my interest in film from its origins through college and grad school, where it sort of took off, then my evolution as a critic, and then onward to being a film programmer and running a film organization. And woven into that will be things about specific films, brief reviews—sort of mulling, revisiting various films that were really key to my own development, things of that nature. It'll be a sort of a memoir, but with criticism also woven into its fabric. Again, I don't anticipate it's going to find a publisher, but I have an interest in doing it for my own sake. And if by some chance other people have an interest, I'll find a means of sharing at least perhaps a portion of it on The Lens. I suspect I could convince my colleagues to allow me to offer a few excerpts along the way.
