Cinema Center: film as art

Founded 1976

Founding: When the Spectator Theater, Fort Wayne's last art and specialty movie house, on The Landing, lost its lease, a group of film enthusiasts organized to fill the void. Fort Wayne Cinema Center was founded in 1976 with first funding from the Fort Wayne Bicentennial Committee; its first presentation was Howard Hawks's The Big Sleep, shown on September 11, 1976, in the Fort Wayne Art School auditorium in West Central.

Fifteen years of floating, then a home: For fifteen years the film society showed where it could — the Allen County Public Library, the Fort Wayne Museum of Art, the Unitarian Universalist Meeting House, a conference room at One Summit Square. In 1991, with Arts United, the Foellinger Foundation and the Lincoln Foundation among its backers, it settled into the Hall Community Arts Center at 437 East Berry Street, where it runs a 126-seat theatre with digital projection. It remains Fort Wayne's only theater dedicated to film as an art form — independent, foreign, documentary and classic programming — and its annual Hobnobben Film Festival is its showcase. Jonah Crismore led it in the 2010s and Art Herbig by its fiftieth year: in 2026 Cinema Center marks fifty years with a "Celebrate 50" campaign aimed at $100,000.

Sources:

1. Fort Wayne Cinema Center, "Our History" (cinemacenter.org) — the Spectator's lost lease, the September 11, 1976 first film, the floating years, the 1991 Hall Center home, the 126-seat theatre.
2. Input Fort Wayne, "Cinema Center: Fostering community and conversation through film for 50 years" (2026) — the fiftieth year, Art Herbig; The Waynedale News (February 2026) — the Celebrate 50 campaign and its $100,000 goal; Downtown Fort Wayne — the Hobnobben festival.