On a popular stretch of Missoula’s Hip Strip stands an old theater with an iconic marquee. From the outside, the Roxy might look like any small-town cinema that’s weathered the decades. But inside these walls, under the leadership of Mike Steinberg, something remarkable took shape. Something he calls “community cinema.”
Family, Porn, and Inferno
The Roxy first opened its doors in 1937 as a family-owned business. Over the decades that followed, it morphed with the times, serving first as a second-run theater, then taking on new and sometimes scandalous identities.
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"It was a big popular porn theater," Steinberg says with characteristic frankness, "as well as European films, arthouse films, foreign films, smaller movies.” By the 1980s, the theater had fallen into disrepair, eventually becoming a “two-for-a-dollar show” where beer bottles rolled freely down the isles during screenings.
When fire gutted the Roxy in 1994, developers fought to turn the damaged site into a parking lot. But the neighborhood wasn’t ready to surrender to asphalt. The Roxy eventually reopened in 1997 as a three-plex, though it struggled to find its footing in an era dominated by home video and multiplexes.
When the International Wildlife Film Festival purchased the building in 2000, the Roxy gained a reprieve, though it sat largely dormant except during the festival's annual run. It was this version of the theater that Steinberg discovered twelve years ago. A space full of potential energy.
"The Roxy is a completely curated experience...It’s driven by what’s available in the marketplace, what’s of interest in the community; what’s of interest in the zeitgeist of the culture."
Redefining the Mission
"I proposed doing something where you took the mission of the [Wildlife Film Festival], expanded it, and in fact, even changed the name of the organization. Call it the Roxy Theater. And the Wildlife Film Fest would be a program of the Roxy," Steinberg explains.
The board, Steinberg recalls, "didn't really know what I was talking about." Community cinema wasn't yet a familiar concept. "When we now see what it is, anyone could say, ‘sure, go do that.’ But it wasn't really clear what we were doing or how we would get there." By broadening the scope and programming, the theater found new ways for the community to engage with and support it.
"It helped to make sense of owning a building like that. It made sense of being a nonprofit that the community supported," Steinberg reflects. "By expanding to programming that was not just the wildlife festival, suddenly there's... ‘Oh, you know, Betty's Divine really wants to come in and support this movie, and Frame of Mind wants to come in and be part of the horror film fest.’ It was clear that this support was well beyond the narrow scope of a wildlife fest.”
The reimagined Roxy offered something fundamentally different from the typical moviegoing experience. “It’s sort of hard to talk about it without talking about what it’s not,” he says. "Movie theaters accept the first-run releases that are available to them and play them until nobody wants to see them anymore. They continue playing them in some cases either because they’re obligated to or because they don’t have anything else coming in to replace them. So it’s very much a retail operation," Steinberg explains. The Roxy is different.
"The Roxy is a completely curated experience. The first-run movies that play at the [Roxy] are chosen by the programming staff, and they're chosen based on the audience that comes to the theater. It’s driven by what’s available in the marketplace, what’s of interest in the community; what’s of interest in the zeitgeist of the culture."
This curatorial approach extends beyond just showing current releases. When Martin Scorsese's "Killers of the Flower Moon" featuring Montana’s own Lily Gladstone was released, the Roxy paired it with a "Scorsese's 80s" retrospective.
Thoughtful programming creates conversations between films and responds to cultural moments. And it offers audiences something deeper than mere entertainment.
“And it’s a trick. The whole thing is a trick. Like, people come there because they’re like, ‘oh, I love movies.’ But guess what? Your world just got suddenly better because your experience was community driven and mission focused.”
Building Community Through Film
Through this approach, Steinberg was enacting the mission hidden within the simple act of showing movies. “The mission of the Roxy Theater that we redeveloped is to make the world a better place through film, community, education,” he explains.
“And it’s a trick. The whole thing is a trick. Like, people come there because they’re like, ‘oh, I love movies.’ But guess what? Your world just got suddenly better because your experience was community driven and mission focused.”
This “trick” actually reveals a deeper insight: that meaningful community change doesn’t happen through big declarations, but through creating spaces where people come together around shared experiences. “You’re in the theater and the lights go down and suddenly you’re plunged into something together,” he says. “And that is raising your consciousness. That is raising your capital in ‘community’ and making the world a better place.”
While many of us now watch movies hunched over our phones or tablets, the Roxy insists on keeping movie-going public and shared. This is evident in thoughtful programming like the “Scorsese’s 80s” or in hilarious stunts like the 12-hour Groundhog Day marathon, where people willingly sat through the same Bill Murray film on repeat. All day long.
Having a dedicated place to engage with art publicly really strikes at the heart of the Third Place.
Theaters, Coffee Shops, and the Architecture of Community
Third places refer to social environments that are separate from the two primary environments: home and the workplace. "The more isolated we become, the less connected to those places that we are, the more we're suffering," Steinberg observes. He points to the value of not just close friendships but also "incidental relationships" with people like baristas, librarians, or fellow moviegoers—connections that "give us a sense of who we are in relation to the world around us."
There’s strong evidence and consensus that show major downsides to lacking third places. Communities risk greater isolation, weaker civic participation, depression, and diminished social trust. This is something many of us experienced in 2020.
"My sense of leadership is finding creative people and getting out of their way… finding the right people to do the right thing and just letting them do it."
The Art of Curation (No Auto-Sorting)
Steinberg sees human curation as another endangered element the Roxy preserves. Against the tide of algorithms that simply "fuel our compulsion to consume," he champions those who say, "Hey, here's this film that's really important that's not going to get played. People might want to see it. And the result would be life-changing for them or at least a conversation or an experience that could alter their view."
Steinberg speaks with particular conviction when discussing algorithmic consumption. “People think about their phones as these communication devices,” he says, “but mostly what’s happening is you’re being sold.” This is contrasted against the curatorial choices made at the Roxy, where films aren’t selected based on cold calculations of maximized engagement, but by humans responding to humans.
“Creating art is not about any of those things,” Steinberg says, talking about the difference between contemporary definitions of art and content creation. “Creating is about the life-changing experience of the artist creating. And isn’t it cool that we can take in some of that and have our lives changed as well by what that artist has done?”
This distinction matters to him. Big platforms have largely reduced creative works to “content” and artists to “content creators.”
For Steinberg, the impact of true art can’t be reduced to metrics. He references a concept from The Ecstasy of Influence (from an essay by Jonathan Lethem) to explain how creative works ripple through culture, one artist inspiring another in an endless chain of human connection and iteration that transcends the marketplace.
“Art making is not for consumption. Art making is not for copyrighting. Art making is not for the bottom line of a corporation,” he emphasizes.
Speaking in reference to a piece of art hanging on the wall of the coffee shop where Steinberg sits, he says, “The creation of that object was a focused work of an individual who went inside, brought out what they understood about what was in front of them, and made it, and then stepped away from it. And it was the evidence of human existence… the creation of something. Whether it’s a mandala that gets wiped away the moment it’s made or if it’s chiseled in stone, the purpose of art making is the making.”
Passing the Torch
After twelve years of shaping the Roxy into what it is today, Steinberg recently stepped away. "There's a certain sadness with leaving the Roxy just because it has been my identity for twelve years," he says. "I'll be spending the next twelve years telling people that I don't work at the Roxy anymore."
His greatest hope for the theater's future lies in preserving what allowed it to thrive in the first place. Not tight-gripped control, but actual collaboration. “You need to incubate creative ideas together. My sense of leadership is finding creative people and getting out of their way… finding the right people to do the right thing and just letting them do it," he explains. What’s important is the “vibe of the place, the culture of the place, the sense of belonging for the community and the people who work there."
As Steinberg turns to his own creative projects like filmmaking, writing, and running his record store, he leaves behind a model of what thoughtful leadership can accomplish.
The Roxy Theater represents the value of shared experience. It’s proof that "community cinema" is more than a catchy phrase. It’s the Roxy’s little “trick.” People arrive seeking entertainment, but discover something more valuable.
In Steinberg's words: "Your world just got suddenly better because your experience was community driven and mission focused and you saw other people and you remembered what movie going was about."
And that’s really what the Roxy is. A space where the simple act of watching movies becomes a way of knitting a community back together.
