Downtown Phoenix Voices is an ongoing series of profiles on the many diverse and inspirational voices in the downtown Phoenix community. To read the previous installment in the series, click here.
_______________________
Steve Weiss, born and raised in Phoenix, is a passionate proponent of film and downtown culture. Celebrating the “tencennial” of his No Festival Required series last year, Weiss has had a prolific career making and screening films.
When Weiss discovered photography, he already was into the arts.
“You were either on the high school journalism staff — the yearbook or the newspaper — and I wasn’t into either,” Weiss said. “I was into fine art photography.”
Weiss discovered his passion for fine art photography in high school, and it carried over into college first at Arizona State University and later at the San Francisco Art Institute.
“It didn’t really relate much to photography, except that for the fact that I spent much more time in a red room at the time than I ever had before,” Weiss said. “I could see at night like you wouldn’t believe.”
Weiss returned to Phoenix in 1979 and worked in a camera store and photo lab. For a while he was a freelance photographer and photojournalist, primarily submitting work to the Arizona Republic, the defunct Scottsdale Daily Progress and even Billboard. He applied his photography skills to everything from medical documentation to industrial photography for a car company to location scouting for films to fine art for corporate clients.
From 1986 to 1990, Weiss taught photography at the Visual Arts Center, now the Phoenix Center for the Arts. Weiss discovered Art Detour and the downtown Phoenix arts scene in 1989. Excited by the emerging scene and looking for a niche to fill, Weiss started investigating downtown film offerings.
“My initial thought was that there was no film going on downtown, that there was everything else coming up in the arts and that film was the missing link,” Weiss said. “Actually, and this is a lot of what happens in downtown Phoenix, if you go and look for it you’ll probably find it.”
Weiss was drawn to the work of Jeff Cochran, who screened local art films on Fridays and Saturdays at his Monkey Show Movie Theater. Cochran’s Monkey Shows would draw an audience of about 50 people to watch local and art house films, like Cochran’s own feature-length mockumentary “The Disappearance of Baron Dixon.” Weiss became a devoted fan of the screenings.
Seeing the opportunity to show some of his own work, Weiss was soon reaching out to filmmakers to generate content for a package for the Monkey Show. However, by the time he had completed his first package, Cochran had decided to discontinue the Monkey Show and moved away. Weiss decided to find a way to show the films anyway.
“That’s really when I started showing films, because there was going to be a big hole otherwise,” Weiss said. “You had the music scene with Modified, you had the gallery scene, certainly theater and dance were among the larger groups, but film was the one thing that was missing.”
His first show was at Modified Arts in June 2002 to a crowd of about 50 people.
“We showed at least 15 shorts. We did an hour-and-a-half show with an intermission, in part because I didn’t know if we’d ever be able to do it again, so I just threw everything I had against the wall.”
The second show had 75 people in attendance. “‘This thing may have some legs,'” Weiss remembers thinking.
The monthly show took on the name No Festival Required, and over the course of its 50 shows at Modified Arts and Paper Heart, Weiss screened more than 600 short films.
Penelope Price, who teaches documentary filmmaking at Scottsdale Community College, first met Weiss when he was a location scout. Price and her students have worked with No Festival Required many times over the years.
“He’s been very instrumental in promoting local filmmakers in wonderful venues,” Price said. “For filmmakers, it’s like getting published. You have to show your work and get feedback. We were putting out short films right and left.”
According to Price, Weiss’s idiosyncratic style has livened the downtown film scene.
“He definitely has a particular style, and it is a little odd, there’s no doubt about that,” Price said. “But I adore going to his screenings. They are always interesting and always thought-provoking.”
Outside of No Festival Required, Weiss started programs for FilmBar from 2010 to 2011, and now works at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art screening films in the museum’s recently opened SMoCA Lounge.
Lesley Oliver, Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art’s marketing and public relations manager, wrote in an email that Weiss serves a niche audience of film connoisseurs who have few alternatives in the area. Oliver described Weiss as “a hero to unsung filmmakers who do not always have the easiest road to get their cinematic story out into the world.”
Weiss attributed this to his taste in films.
“There are two really easy ways to make money showing films: Show anything done by someone local and their friends will come and see it,” Weiss said. “The second is to show films that are ironic in nature, bad films that people can feel better about themselves, from ‘The Room’ to ‘Birdemic’ to ‘Rocky Horror’ to John Waters films.”
According to SMoCA curator Carolyn Robbins, Weiss’s work with SMoCA has emphasized educational documentaries. Weiss recently screened “Stand Still,” a documentary about Arizona artist Mayme Kratz, and will screen “Paolo Soleri, Beyond Form” about the eponymous artist and architect later this month.
“He came to SMoCA with experience in seeking out films that relate to the visual arts, so it seemed like a perfect fit,” Robbins said in an email.
Some of Weiss’s films can be found on his nofestivalrequired YouTube channel. His interest in a search for Phoenix’s historical continuity is evident in some of these shorts, like a film about housing development over what used to be a Japanese flower garden, or another about CityScape’s transformation of Patriots Square Park.
Weiss has noticed more and more acceptance of an indie aesthetic in mainstream films, and pointed to the popularity of Wes Anderson and Spike Jonze as examples. However, he still prefers truly independent films with small, local talent.
“I’m still more excited by the films that are just a person with an idea,” Weiss said.
Contact the reporter at bkutzler@asu.edu
