Support Canyon Cinema with a Prepaid Account

Posted March 31st, 2020 in Announcements, News / Events

stills from Blues (1969) by Larry Gottheim

Like many smaller arts organizations, Canyon Cinema has been hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic. Over the past few weeks, we have suffered an onslaught of booking cancellations as film classes go online or are outright suspended. Though all of us at Canyon are healthy and pursuing appropriate safety measures, the film rentals are what keep our fifty year-old organization fit and moving forward. We rely on the income from the distribution program to support our operations and to effectively serve our extensive network of filmmakers and customers. 

We’re now asking you, our institutional customers to help lessen the impact of this calamity on Canyon Cinema by signing on to a special program in which you create a prepaid account for future film rentals and digital screening licenses. By sending Canyon $1,000 (or more) toward future rentals, you would give us the operating funds necessary to ride out this pandemic. Then when classes resume, most likely this fall, you would have the simple resource of pre-paid rentals.

In response to the necessary shift to online classes and teaching among most of its educational customers, Canyon Cinema is offering streaming access to a significant portion of its catalog. As an added incentive for those institutions that create prepaid accounts, we are offering a 20% reduction of all streaming fees. This newly created streaming program will offer educators new access to a substantial portion of Canyon Cinema’s catalog, including films by James Broughton, Lawrence Jordan, Marjorie Keller, Bruce Baillie, Greta Snider, Alice Anne Parker, Jonathan Schwartz and Julie Murray, among hundreds of available titles.

How Canyon Cinema Prepaid accounts work:

  • Sign up for an account (starting at $1000+) by email us at info@canyoncinema.com and a member of our staff will follow up with you. 
  • Your school/organization is entitled to up to $1000+ in streaming access, future print rentals, and screening licenses.  
  • Prepaid account holders will get an extra 20% discount off streaming fees and institutional DVD sales. 

As you know, Canyon Cinema serves as a major point of access for film departments that place an emphasis on avant-garde and artist-made cinema. Encouraging scholars and researchers to engage with the collection remains a keystone of our educational mission. Through our distribution program, films that often exist exclusively on celluloid are introduced each year to students in classrooms across the United States. 

I would like to leave you with a final thought: for over fifty years, Canyon Cinema has remained an essential resource for the appreciation and exhibition of artisanal and alternative cinema. But it isn’t only our tradition, our catalogue, and our staff that we represent. Canyon represents the artistic output of almost 275 significant film artists. These artists rely on Canyon Cinema to promote and distribute their works. Without us, they would lose access to the audience of students, scholars, professors, makers, and general art enthusiasts. And you would lose access to them.

Support Canyon Cinema with a prepaid account of $1,000 or more. 

If your institution isn’t able to participate in this program as it is described, but may be able to help Canyon in other ways, please reach out. And consider a tax-deductible donation if your budget allows.

If you are not the person who can make or advocate on Canyon’s behalf to your institution, please forward this message along, or let us know and we’ll redirect this pitch! 

Yours truly,  
The Board of Directors, Canyon Cinema Foundation

Michael Renov, President
Jeffrey Skoller, Treasurer
Lynne Sachs, Secretary
Brian Frye
Max Goldberg
Jonathan Marlow
Rebecca Meyers
Steve Seid