LSA Technology Services Media Consultant, Frank Uhle has decades of experience in film projection that started in the university’s film societies. In this expanded InPerson article, he sat down with us to not only talk about his career at the university, but also to dive into his book, Cinema Ann Arbor (University of Michigan Press/Fifth Avenue Press, 2023), which chronicles the cultural phenomenon of film in the city and the origin of audiovisual support in LSA.
Q: What was your path from graduating from U-M to becoming a staff member here?
A: I was hired as a projectionist for the film societies. I finished art school and needed a job. The people who were in my film society used an organization called Film Projection Service. I heard about a job opening there and thought, “Wow, I’d like to do that.” They interviewed me briefly, but I didn’t have to fill out anything. Just a simple, “Oh, you can start next week.” This was 1983.
Q: What does a normal day working at LSA Technology Services look like for you now?
A: Every day is a little different. My team covers several buildings and waits for our Technical Assistance Group (TAG) team to Slack us with a request like, “There’s a professor in B134 of MLB who’s got no sound.” I’m the person who goes down there and tries to help them. About half of my time is spent doing that, and then the other half I help film classes with their in-class film clips, or at night when they show full movies. It’s very similar to what we did at the Film Projection Service in the old days because the film classes would require a person to show clips to illustrate what they were talking about. Then, at night, they would show the film for the students to watch to take notes on, or write a paper about.
Q: How has your job changed over the years?
A: It’s just mostly the technology because it was all analog when we started. There would be 16mm or 35mm movie film, a microphone with a wire going into the wall, and a slide projector. Now everything is digital. We can still show film, but primarily everything is digital. More or less, the same thing is that you’re helping people, which is the part I like. I like working with professors. I like troubleshooting and figuring out what problem is happening, trying to fix it, and keeping people going with what they’re doing.
Q: What’s your favorite part of your job?
A: I would say working with people and helping the professors. Sometimes they have interesting things they want to do for their class, and a number of film professors are good friends of mine. Occasionally, they’ll have a guest speaker who needs to be equipped with a microphone, like a director who’s flown in from Japan. Sometimes I will show a 16mm or 35mm film, and the other week we had an 8mm film with sound provided by an antique wind-up Edison cylinder machine.
Q: What do you think has kept you working at U-M for more than 40 years?
A: Probably the people. I like being part of a team. We have great leadership: Moni Dressler, Jean Arnold, Jim Pyke, and Anne Windsor, who’s my supervisor. It’s an easygoing group of people. I like working with people I respect and knowing we all have a shared goal of doing the best possible job for the professors. It’s nice to be able to trust them. If you are having a problem, you know that they are going to do their best to help you and vice versa. Even though a lot of what we do can be solitary (one person in a projection booth showing a movie), the fact that we’re part of a team is really nice. Additionally, working in LSA is interesting. You sit in on classes and hear lectures that are informative. I’ve actually learned a lot just being on the job.
Q: What do you like to do outside of work?
A: I’m always writing something. I’ve written a book and a number of articles on Ann Arbor music history. Some of them were in the Ann Arbor District Library’s celebration of the city’s 200th anniversary: a story about the Rationals rock group and another about DJ/record producer Ollie Mclaughlin. I’ve written a few things for a music history magazine called Ugly Things. The next issue has a piece I wrote about a ‘60s band called the Southbound Freeway, whose only living member is here in Ann Arbor, and he had some wild stories to tell. I also collect records and host a radio show on WCBN and play the rare records I collect. My wife and two daughters keep me pretty busy as well.
Q: What was the genesis of your book, Cinema Ann Arbor: How Campus Rebels Forged a Singular Film Culture?
A: The University of Michigan’s bicentennial was in 2017. Moni [Dressler, director of Academic Technology Services] asked me to do a history of our department to post on our departmental website because I went to the U-M library school, so I have a background in library research and archives. While I was doing that, I thought, “You know, I was part of these film societies that existed and kind of petered out in the late ‘90s.” That’s how this organization kind of started, because members of the film societies needed to have projectionists who were skilled to show the movies. They were originally paying U-M Plant department electricians to do the job, but they were pretty expensive. So in the late 1960s, the film society people thought, “We can do it better and cheaper ourselves.” They started a unit that was kind of like an independent contractor with offices in an auditorium storage room sort of hidden away, and they would staff these movie screenings at night. Then, eventually, they started getting asked, “Could you put out microphones for classes? Can you show a movie for a class?” There was already a unit that did some of that for daytime classes using students, and the evening people were the more skilled people, so they merged together eventually into what became Film Projection Service. It’s changed its name two or three times since then.
Q: Were the daytime projectionists supporting LSA classes?
A: Yeah! They were supporting film classes, primarily, and some art history classes. At that time, there weren’t many classes that showed slides or movies. Instructors would use a chalkboard and might have a microphone on. We would go around and put microphones out at the beginning of the day (a wired microphone that would plug into the wall and hang around your neck). Then later, an art history professor would be showing images on 35mm or big glass slides so someone would go and do that. Then, two hours later, they might come back and show a feature film on 16mm or 35mm.
Q: Why do you think film societies were so prevalent on campus then?
A: In those days, there were no DVDs or VHS tapes, no cable movie channels or streaming. The only way to see a film that wasn’t in a movie theater was to find companies that would rent older movies to you. But you had to have the technology. You had to have some projectors and an auditorium. Most colleges around the country had a film society. I went to Kalamazoo College my first year and they would have a film every Friday and Saturday night in the big lecture hall. It would cost about 50 cents and would primarily be for campus entertainment. U-M started a film society in the early ‘30s to show art films that weren’t available in local theaters. It was originally intended to be a cultural offering as opposed to entertainment. From the early ‘30s through the early ‘60s, it was just one or two groups showing the movies, but by the late ‘60s there were so many more films available for this purpose. There were films like documentaries about the Vietnam War, and films you couldn’t ever see in a standard theater or on television. By the late ‘70s, there were about seven film societies here. They were showing all different kinds of films, ranging from experimental short films to documentaries, to more recent Hollywood films, to art films by Antonioni or Godard. They became cultural gatekeepers. You couldn’t see these films without equipment, space, and funding to rent the films, and the students and community members in the groups curated the programming.
Q: This book is an interesting intersection of Ann Arbor history, film history, and University of Michigan history. What was your vision by the end of it?
A: One of the things that I really wanted to do was show how this very important part of my undergraduate life, the U-M film societies, was not just a little drop in a bucket. It had actually spread many ripples out. As I did more and more research, I found that these Ann Arbor film societies had a huge impact on the world of film. One of my housemates, John Sloss, who was a member of the film society I was in, Cinema II, is now a top independent film producer who lives in New York. He produces films for people like Richard Linklater, Todd Haynes, John Sayles, and Errol Morris. We were just campus film society guys at the time, but his experience in Cinema II, transformed him into a movie producer. He was in law school and ended up being one of the top independent film producers.
I interviewed Ken Burns, who grew up in Ann Arbor, for the book. He used to come as a high school kid to all these films and learned about film in a way he couldn’t anywhere else because Ann Arbor had so much film going on, more than most campuses around the country. We would bring in top film directors to speak in-person: Robert Altman, Frank Capra, Jean-Luc Godard, and Sam Fuller. If you grew up here, or you were a college student and you had some interest in film, it really opened up a world to you. In fact, the U-M film program was supported by the film societies for many years after the first film studies class was created in 1968. They would work with professors to book the titles they wanted students to watch, and show them to the public at the same time to underwrite the cost, because the university didn’t really want to support teaching film at first.
Lawrence Kasdan, who very generously read the book before it was released and gave me a wonderful blurb, was a U-M student and member of the most prominent film society, Cinema Guild. He ended up writing the screenplay to several Star Wars films and writing/directing The Big Chill and many other movies.
Michael Moore would drive down here from Flint and watch the movies we showed, which in many cases were Michigan or Midwest premieres. One night, he was watching a movie called Atomic Cafe, and the co-director, Kevin Rafferty, was there to introduce it. They got to talking afterwards and Rafferty told him, “I’m making a movie and I don’t know if you want to help me with it. I need some help.” And that’s how Michael Moore got brought into learning how to be a filmmaker. There’s probably a bit more to it than that, but it was a connection that was established through the kind of programming that was done here on campus.
Another person I interviewed was Rick Ayers. He had been the head of Cinema Guild, which was the most popular student film society and the longest-lived. His older brother is Bill Ayers, who helped found the Weather Underground, which was trying to stop the Vietnam War by planting bombs at the U.S. Capitol and the Pentagon. Rick, in 1968, destroyed his draft card, left the university, and went to Canada to avoid the draft. He eventually also ended up joining the Weather Underground and living under an assumed name for most of the ‘70s. Personal stories like his were important for me to include because it showed how the film societies were tied to the cultural and political realities here on campus. And the lives of some of the people I spoke to were pretty fascinating.
But film was the main connection, and there were multiple members of the film societies who would go on to work in the industry and even be nominated for or win Oscars. John Nelson of Cinema Guild has won two Academy Awards for visual effects, and Jay Cassidy of the same group has been nominated for three Oscars for film editing. The late Richard Glatzer, directed several Sundance award-winning films, including Still Alice, and Neal Gabler went on to be a well-known author and film critic. And there were many others. The intense focus on film provided by these societies, which was in some ways more than what film classes offered, led to a deeper interest in the subject and caused many to take it on as a career. One of the important things I wanted to highlight in the book was the way people who came through Ann Arbor were affected by this cultural phenomenon that happened on this campus specifically, and went off and did all this cool stuff in film, and are still doing it.
Q: How has film exhibition on campus changed over the years?
A: It’s hard to describe the experience in a way that does it justice, but it was such a vital part of campus life, and it’s completely gone now. People say, “Well, you can go to see movies at the Michigan Theater or the State Theater,” but there were movies as often as seven days a week throughout the school year in Lorch Hall, Angell Hall auditorium A, MLB 3 and 4, SKB 2500 (then called the Natural Science Auditorium), and sometimes in the law school or East Hall. On weekends especially, there would be lines out the door, down the hall, and out of the building if a new hot movie was playing. Important filmmakers would be brought in to talk several times a semester. In the evening, you could just go down to campus and there would be movies. There would be new movies, old movies, foreign films, even silent movies with someone playing the live piano. The Ann Arbor Film Festival, which was co-founded in 1963 by Cinema Guild, was held each March in Lorch Hall, and for 20 years, starting in 1971, an 8mm film festival was sponsored by the Ann Arbor Film Cooperative, which was the first and largest such event in North America.
The film societies would print thousands of copies of their big calendars at the beginning of the semester to describe all the films they had coming up. You’d have to go pick them up and there’d be up to seven different societies putting them out. Each had a different focus: Cinema Guild tended to show classic Hollywood and foreign titles, the Ann Arbor Film Cooperative was much more edgy, Alternative Action was politically-oriented, Mediatrics was very mainstream, and Cinema II was a hodge-podge with slight emphasis on the French New Wave. People would put them on their walls or refrigerators, and circle all the movies they wanted to see that semester because there was no other way to see them. They couldn’t be streamed, rented, or bought on DVD. You had to say, “Wow, on October 3rd this movie I’ve been waiting to see for five years is going to be playing in Angell Hall auditorium A.” It was sort of like going to a concert, in a way. There was a sense of excitement about seeing movies that is much different than it is today. There was no, “Oh well, if I miss it I’ll catch the second half on Netflix,” because if you missed it you were bummed out. If people were sick, they would take a bunch of cough drops and go to the movie because they had to see that movie. There would be movies that you knew that you’d never see anywhere else.
The logistics of getting a film! You’d have to call someone in New York or Chicago. They would say, “Well, we have a copy available on this date.” You’d rent it. Then, they’d ship it to you. On the night of the show, the projectionist would get there, and the people from the film society would set up. They would have a cash box. They would have tickets. You’d have this older retired man who would be sitting there and have to count the tickets because the university made them do that. That was another part of the story in the book. In the early ‘70s, there were a whole bunch of scammers. There was a cult-like hippie group that started showing movies. They were making all this money from movies, but they weren’t really a student group. They were led by a charismatic guy who made them read Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book and were dedicated to some revolutionary principles. I interviewed one of the members who told me the story. They were eventually kicked off campus because they were not paying for their rooms and not paying the film distributors. The distributors almost ceased leasing films to Ann Arbor entirely because this group and another group were such flagrant scammers.
Q: Were there any other controversies involving the film societies?
A: There were lots of dramatic stories. In Lorch Hall in 1967, they showed the movie Flaming Creatures. The filmmaker Jack Smith liked to push the envelope, so it was probably made in part to shock people. It’s an experimental film, it’s not like there’s any plot you can discern. A bunch of disconnected, outrageous stuff happens in different scenes, and there was some full frontal nudity. The city of Ann Arbor sent the police vice squad out to watch it. A few minutes into the film, they went to the projection booth and said, “Stop the screening and hand over the print.” The audience then walked over to City Hall and had a sit-in for four hours. They later arrested the projectionist and four members of the film society, including [the late FTVM] Professor, Hugh Cohen, and charged them with showing an obscene film. After months of wrangling and a fundraiser at Hill Auditorium that featured Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground, the case went to trial. But on the first day, one of the students decided to plead guilty, and they dropped all the charges against the others.
That kind of stuff was happening all the time during the film group years. There were protests. People would show The Birth of a Nation, which is an extraordinarily racist film. It was one of the first blockbusters in film history in 1915, but it glorified the Ku Klux Klan. Many people said, “You shouldn’t show it,” but other people said, “That’s censorship. You should show it. People should know what it’s about.” There was a back-and-forth for decades about that. Other films were protested against because of pornography, negative stereotypes of gay men, and supposed slander against the Catholic Church. There were even several bomb threats called in to try to shut down screenings, though the film societies didn’t back down. The film society era really was a wild west kind of scenario. It was crazy sometimes, and I really wanted to tell the story because there were too many wacky things that happened along the way. Once I started doing research, I found out so much more than I had heard about as a member of Cinema II. The story turned out to be a whole lot more than just people watching subtitled movies and having intellectual conversations about them.
Q: What was your favorite interview you did for the book?
A: I have to say the person I dedicated the book to, who died a year ago, Professor Hugh Cohen. He was there for many of the events that the book chronicles. In addition to being arrested for showing Flaming Creatures, he was one of the first judges of the Ann Arbor Film Festival in 1964, along with critic Pauline Kael. Professor Cohen taught one of the first film classes on campus, and so much more. In fact I created a page on the website for my book dedicated to him, where you can listen to one of my interview recordings.
Q: Since you didn’t study film, how do you feel that art and library science helped you in the work you do?
A: Specifically to this book, the research I did directly came from the library science degree, and art school influenced the design. I didn’t do the final layout, but I made sure I got all the images, over 400 in total, and helped direct where they were placed. Along with interviewing about 80 people, I did a lot of archival research and found negatives of unseen photos shot for the Michigan Daily. I collected people's private scrapbooks and borrowed photos from others. But I was just stunned at how well the graphics team, led by Nate Pocsi-Morrison at the public library, did the design work. They have an imprint called Fifth Avenue Press, which produced the layout, and then U-M Press stepped in to publish it as a coffee table hardcover. In fact they did such a terrific job that the book was one of five finalists for the Alice Award for archivally-sourced illustrated books. I’m proud to say it was also named a 2024 Michigan Notable Book by the Library of Michigan and won a State History Award from the Historical Society of Michigan. So my background in research and design helped merge it all together well.
And with LSA Technology Services, I have always liked supporting the educational mission of the university, and I also like having a bit of a challenge. When we have a special event or a film screening, there are always some details that have to be worked out on the fly and require creative problem solving. It’s very satisfying to help put on an event that people leave with a smile on their faces, whether it is a film, special lecture, or multimedia performance.
Q: Have you always been passionate about film?
A: Being in the world of student film societies and seeing the other people around me who were very excited definitely made me more interested than I had ever been. A lot of my interest also came from seeing a film in a room with a bunch of friends and other unknown-to-me audience members in the dark. You’re watching a Charlie Chaplin movie and people start laughing, and it’s just this communal experience. It just kind of makes you feel excited about seeing a movie in that way, with an audience. It’s definitely not the same as just watching it at home on your own, but if you’ve experienced that, you can pretend you’re sitting in a room with a bunch of people, even if it’s just the empty chairs in your TV room.
