Detroit has lost most of the neighborhood movie theaters that shaped its film culture, and the ones that survive — the Redford, the Senate, the Alger, the Penn, Cinema Detroit, the Ford-Wyoming Drive-In — are held together by people whose stories nobody has recorded. I want to fix that before it's too late.

The Last Reel is an audio/visual oral history of Detroit's independent and neighborhood theaters, built from interviews with the people who ran them, worked in them, and never stopped showing up: projectionists, owners, ushers, longtime patrons. I'll research and record these conversations myself — I've spent fifteen years interviewing filmmakers for The Projection Booth, my film-history podcast, and this is the same work turned toward the exhibition side of Detroit film culture instead of the production side. Local visual artist Aimee Chorkey will create original artwork responding to each theater and its history, pairing the audio record with a visual one.

The theaters on this list are disappearing fast, and some already have — Cinema Detroit lost its permanent home and now screens wherever it can find a room. The people who can talk about what these places meant are getting older too. This is a small, finishable project with a real deadline built into the subject matter: do it now, or the stories go with the people who lived them.

The finished pieces — audio interviews paired with Aimee's artwork — would be released publicly through the podcast feed and website, and ideally shown at a small public listening event or exhibition, free for anyone to experience.