Shirley Lasseter has been sharing her love of film with Gainesville for more than 30 years.
In 1979, Lasseter set out to convince the Hippodrome State Theatre staff to install a movie theater in its newly purchased downtown building.
The most persuasive argument, she figured, would be a movie screening.
So she bought a 16 mm projector for $100 and put up a large sheet at the empty warehouse that served as the Hippodrome’s home from 1975 to 1980.
At what could be considered the first Hippodrome Cinema event, she projected “The Dove,” an Ingmar Bergman parody, and Richard Nixon’s funding speech where he mentions his dog, Checkers.
“Everybody just loved it,” Lasseter, 62, said. “The whole gang was there, and they said, ‘Yes!’”
This year, the Hippodrome Cinema is celebrating its 30th birthday.
Lasseter has been its director since the beginning.
The cinema is known for bringing foreign, independent and offbeat film to Gainesville.
Lasseter has loved film since she was a teenager, when she would hop on a bus to see foreign film in Miami art houses.
She can still rattle off the titles of European movies she saw decades ago: “A Man and a Woman,” “To Sir, with Love,” “Elvira Madigan.”
At the time, she was inspired to become a film director.
Now, she is the director of a program that screens the same genre of artistic, foreign film.
“It cracks your brain open,” she said. “It’s a whole different world.”
In 1972, the year the Hippodrome was founded, six artists banded together to stage contemporary theater.
Mary Hausch, one of the six founders, distributed fliers for a play in a bike shop that Lasseter was working at at the time.
Hausch and Lasseter knew each other from high school and had independently chosen to continue their education at UF.
After seeing the flier, Lasseter volunteered in all aspects of the theater.
She ran the bar. She painted sets. She ushered people in. She once fanned a lighting board to keep it from catching on fire.
The cinema was up and running at its new downtown location, 25 SE Second Place, by 1982.
Today, it’s harder to get people to pay to see film in an independent theater.
“There’s a point where you have to deal with the economics of the situation, no matter what your passion,” she said.
“You can figure out a new way to make it happen or let it go. We decided to figure out a new way to make it happen.”
This September, Lasseter started a street team to promote films at the Hippodrome.
Hausch calls her an “idea factory.”
“I don’t think those types of things would happen without Shirley,” Hausch said. “The sky is the limit for [her].”
The team promoted “Sleepwalk With Me,” one of the recent Hippodrome films, by announcing the film on UF’s campus while wearing pajamas and sleep masks.
After more than 30 years of working with the Hippodrome, Lasseter has no intention of retiring.
“For a long time, I was a cinema director and it was my job,” she said. “Now, it’s my life.”
