The last of Omaha’s still active neighborhood motion picture venues, the Dundee Theatre, is celebrating 100 years – the last decade as part of the Film Streams brand.
Special Dundee Hundee events include a centennial series representing key markers for the theater and the medium. The Dundee opened in the silent era and transitioned to talkies. Then came color and widescreen, New Wave world cinema, the rebellious New Hollywood, the ratings system, followed by the blockbuster era and the indie movement.
“This theater has connected generations to different milestones in cinema,” Film Streams managing director Casey Logan said. “And we’re reflecting on all of that. It truly is where 100 years of community and movie history come together. That is something we hold dear. We’re in a fortunate place to preserve this building with all this history and make sure it has a future.”
For most of its life it was a for-profit venture. That changed in 2017 when the then-dormant theater appeared headed for demolition until an Omaha philanthropist intervened and donated it in the care of nonprofit Film Streams. After a successful fund drive, the Dundee was renovated and reopened that December.
“We feel incredibly fortunate to be the stewards of this building,” Logan said. “It’s just a different kind of responsibility. The fact that its history predates Film Streams is very special. It’s something we don’t take for granted.”
Executive director Maggie Wood called the theater “one of Omaha’s cherished cultural landmarks.” In commemorating that legacy Film Streams is cultivating reminiscences and testimonials from patrons and past staff.
“There’s generational aspects of people from different eras. For some, it’s where they saw their first movie. Others recall the midnight movies they attended,” Logan said. “Parents who went there as kids, like me, now bring their kids to the Dunee. Others talk about how they once went on a weird date there. People have lots of stories to share.
“They’ve got connections to certain films they saw. Many talk about just how much the theater continues to mean to them.”
The tributes reinforce for Logan what an anchor the Dundee is.
“You broaden that out from a building to a community and it’s clear how spaces like the Dundee become that throughline connecting thousands of people over decades. And there was a point where It could’ve ended, and so the fact it did survive is really special.”
“It’s remarkable that theater has survived a hundred years and may it last another thousand,” added Oscar-winning filmmaker Alexander Payne, who has a personal history with it.
Logan noted that theater exhibitors like himself and filmmakers like Payne are in solidarity with “Anora” writer-director Sean Baker’s plea at the 2025 Oscars that the film industry make and release movies for theaters first, not streaming, and that moviegoers support films at theaters.
“In the past, people would see their first movie in a movie theater,” Logan said. “But chances are if you’re a young person today you’re seeing your first movie at home. I’m biased, but there’s still a major distinction between watching a movie at home and watching a movie in a theater. The act of moviegoing is just something different. It’s an experience.”
Located at 4952 Dodge St., the theater takes its name from the historic neighborhood it occupies. It’s a livable, walkable area of well-kept homes, a quaint main street with mom and pop businesses, schools, a library, a community garden. It was the city’s western suburb a century ago but now a cozy urban oasis.
“It’s one of those neighborhoods that people have a real connection with,” Logan said.
Consistent with its surroundings, the theater is modest, not grand like the Orpheum or Rose. Yet it’s long been a landmark attraction for cinema lovers from far and wide. When the Cooper Foundation purchased it from the Goldberg Circuit in 1958, adding to a slate of theaters it owned, the decision was made to transition it from a commercial to an art house showing international cinema.
In the 1960s Cooper leased the Dundee, which the foundation’s Victoria Grasso said was among its smaller, underperforming properties, to Abbot Swartz. He cut a deal with 20th Century Fox for the exclusive local rights to “The Sound of Music.” He struck gold when the picture ran 118 consecutive weeks there, the most in North America and second worldwide.
Payne, of Omaha, recalled seeing it there six times at age 4 and his older brothers taking him to Saturday morning kids shows. In the early 1970s he enjoyed its revivals of W.C. Fields, Charlie Chaplin and Laurel and Hardy flicks.
Healthy runs of popular movies followed before a return to art fare. Then Cooper sold the theater to Edward Cohen and David Frank, who focused on family-attraction features. By the late ‘70s the theater struggled to compete with suburban cineplexes. In 1980 Frank and Cohen sold it to Dennis Moran. For three-plus decades the then-Omaha cop and real estate flipper and his wife Janet found a niche with independent American, foreign and cult films. Whenever in town, Payne joined die-hard devotees of its midnight movies.
Other Omaha filmmakers got their early cinephile fixes there, including the late Joan Micklin Silver, who recalled the impact seeing Hitchcock’s “Shadow of a Doubt” made on her.
“It was definitely the formative theater of my youth,” Filmmaker Dan Mirvish said. “Growing up in the neighborhood, it was the default theater for myself and my family. For me, professionally, it was a tremendous resource. When shooting ‘Omaha (the movie) in ’93, Denny let us use the theater to screen our ‘weeklies.’ It was a tremendous boost to cast and crew to see what we were filming on the big screen. It’s been great to be back there with my films through Film Streams and their amazing renovation.”
By the 1990s, it was the city’s last neighborhood theater and only full-time art cinema, thus helping nurture Omaha’s film culture and community.
“That stretch can’t be underappreciated,” Logan said, “because they were keeping it going while theater after theater like it closed. It just would have been very easy for it to go away at some point.”
Even the Cinerama-screen Indian Hills went by the wayside.
Over time the Morans opened other theaters and the Dundee seemed to suffer from competing interests and resources. Any survey then would have noted its worn condition, funky seats, cramped lobby and risk-your-life Dodge Street-facing entrance. When the couple closed it in 2013 for renovations and it remained shuttered four years word leaked that a prospective buyer planned razing it. Susie Buffett and her Sherwood Foundation stepped in to purchase it and an adjacent building and gifted them to Film Streams.
Adding the Dundee was a long-held dream of Film Streams founder Rachel Jacobson and other Omaha film enthusiasts, including Payne, who served on the Film Streams board. The Dundee is where all of his films have had their Nebraska-Midwest premieres.
“I’m so grateful to Denny Moran for all that he put into it and also grateful that the dream Rachel and I had that maybe someday we could fold in the Dundee Theatre into Film Streams was realized.” said Payne.
Film Streams raised $7.5 million to reimagine the theater as a destination, adding a patio, a restaurant space, a lounge and a micro auditorium. The formerly tired, dreary interior became a gleaming showcase while retaining its old character. The new Dundee began with one food partner before Clare Watson Bartomolei and Carina Figueroa opened their Lola’s there in 2019.
“When we were looking at the Dundee… we really thought about what it means for this to be sustainable for decades to come,” Logan said. “We envisioned areas where people can meet before or after the movie. We love the idea that someone’s just not quite ready to go home after something they’ve seen and need somewhere to sit and talk about it. The restaurant, lounge, patio and common area was built with that in mind.”
The farm-to-table fresh yet refined food at Lola’s is an aesthetic match and its staff make sure diners there to see a movie get served on time.
“Lola’s has been able to create a community hub that operates in conjunction with the theater,” Logan said. “We’re seeing that space become what we had hoped. I think that’s all tied back to what it really means to be a community cinema.”
Assuming ownership-management of the Dundee also made sense since its mission aligned with Film Streams, which gained a new central location in the bargain and doubled its number of screens, titles and showtimes from its flagship the NoDo Ruth Sokolof Theatre.
“Adding the micro cinema really did a lot,” Logan said. “There’s a significant difference between having three screens, which we would have had with only the main theater at the Dundee and having four.”
The intimate micro is where much of Film Streams’ educational programming unfolds.
From the start, Logan said, the goal’s been to build on the community capital the Dundee earned with its own “mission-based, community-supported, community-driven” ethos. Public approval has followed.
“The response was enormous,” Logan said. “Memberships increased 60% a few months after the Dundee came online. 2018 was an incredible year for movies. We could not have picked a better year to expand. We saw extraordinary attendance, still really good in 2019, then COVID hit in 2020. Some membership we gained when the Dundee reopened we lost.”
The Dundee and Sokolof closed for a year.
“Resuming operations after COVID was not just turning the lights back on and having things back as before,” Logan said. “It’s been a slow build. But the community support has been there all the way. What’s really positive is seeing memberships head back up and moviegoing come back up. The audiences coming out for the repertory programming are really good. Younger audiences are coming to those classics.
“People are bringing moviegoing back into their lives. This is true around the country. It is on the rise. All of that is perfect timing for this 100th anniversary year. I’m very optimistic with where we’re headed.”
Meanwhile, Film Streams is part of a coalition of residents and business owners trying to get the Dundee neighborhood state Creative District status. On the horizon in 2026 are improvements to the theater. In 2027 the Dundee will be part of the Film Streams 20th anniversary celebration.
Dundee Hundee Series
Planning began a few years ago.
“We had the foresight of creating a series like this. It was a major undertaking and we made it even more challenging by making it a big research project,” general manager of programming Elijah Hoefer said. “We tasked ourselves with going through the history of the Dundee Theatre and cataloging every single film that played since its original release.”
In the theater’s early days, he said, “different films screened every single day,” equaling hundreds of titles per year.
“Our catalog is complete up to about the ’80s, which accounts for 8,000 films,” he said. “We went through those to find what really connected with the Omaha audience and what really stood out as holding a place in the cultural hemisphere and history of cinema and advancing the art form.
“We eventually came to 5 to 10 movies per decade that we thought were heavy hitters and then cut that down to our one per decade selections. These are touchstones within cinema history but also within Dundee’s history.”
More iconic films from the last century will screen at the Sokolof.
March 28: Metropolis (1927)
(live musical accompaniment by Anvil Orchestra)
For this 1927 silent classic, director Fritz Lang applied German Expressionism to science fiction for a cautionary tale that anticipated the totalitarian and Messianic Nazi regime and the robotic, AI revolution. A foreign film with a dark, speculative take on the future wouldn’t seem a likely box office hit but it was, even enjoying a four-week Dundee run.
April 24 and 27: It Happened One Night (1934)
The American Populist director Frank Capra betrayed an anarchic comedy streak, especially in this breezy 1934 on-the-road rom com that still feels and sounds fresh today. The movies were only five years removed from the silent era when this screwball comedy pointed the way forward with its naturalistic dialogue.
May 24: The Red Shoes (1948)
Michael Powell pushed the boundaries of dramatic feature filmmaking with this fever dream about artistic obsession. An unabashed art film from Great Britain set in the fussy ballet milieu might have seemed too sophisticated or strange to captivate general audiences but it became a major hit across the pond and in the U.S., playing eight weeks at the Dundee.
June 21: Rebel Without a Cause (1955)
James Dean’s method and Nicholas Ray’s madness resulted in a heightened work of teen angst and middle class family dysfunction keyed to bravura camera work, jump cut editing, primary colors and jarring sound for a pure cinema experience.
July 26 and 27: The Sound of Music (1965)
This wildly popular adaptation of the Rodgers and Hammerstein stage musical raises sentimentality to high art with sweeping visuals, gorgeous locations, romantic entanglements and looming dangers. Its success helped save 20th Century Fox but was the last mega hit Hollywood musical, as a once genre staple faded away until its recent revival.
Aug. 28: Harold and Maude (1971)
As studios floundered to remain solvent and to make their output relevant in the late ‘60s and dawning ‘70s executives gave free rein to brash new directors whose hip attitudes and styles spoke to the cultural revolution. Hal Ashby was one granted carte blanche. Among a string of critically acclaimed films he made was this original take on May-December love.
Sept. 20: The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
Between the Dundee shifting from family friendly to art house the theater did screen this 1980 massive sequel to the game-changing “Star Wars” that helped set off both the modern blockbuster and science fiction-fantasy phenomena. Many consider the Irvin Kershner-directed film the best entry of the original “Star Wars” trilogy conceived by George Lucas.
Oct. 18: Pulp Fiction (1994)
Quentin Tarantino turned cinema on its head with the poetry of his dialogue and the nonlinear construction of his storylines. As Film Streams’ Casey Logan noted, it’s a touchstone movie for Omahans of a certain age who seemingly all claim having seen it at the Dundee and for many, including himself, he said, it’s the first movie he remembers seeing there.
Nov. 22: Amélie (2001)
This French confection of a comedy starring Audrey Tautou and directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet captured hearts everywhere, Omaha and the Dundee included.
Dec. 19: Little Women (2019)
Greta Gerwig’s adaptation of the Louisa May Alcott novel proved once again the enduring appeal of 19th century romance dramas. A side note: Gerwig’s 2023 “Barbie” became the most successful Film Streams offering at the Dundee.
Series packages and individual tickets are available. For showtimes, prices and other details, visit https://filmstreams.org.