“There’s kind of an obvious problem with the fact that the thing that we watch most with our entertainment lives is short-form content. And there’s not a single way that we do that together,” said Karma Masselli on a quiet Sunday night in Bushwick.
For the last few weeks, Masselli has affixed a wooden sign above a smaller shuttered club near Knickerbocker Avenue and begun work on running Shorts Movie Theater (236 Troutman St.), the world’s first-ever movie theater dedicated entirely to playing shorts, all of varying length and changing every week. There is one screen, and it is in the back.
Masselli, daughter of two nonprofit managers from Connecticut, had directed at least two short movies herself before getting in the business of distributing them out of a former bar in Bushwick and through her own nonprofit, which she says has raised “almost half a million dollars,” for this pursuit. Notable investors, so far, have included Chris Quintos Cathcart, who co-runs Unapologetic Pictures, the production company behind that John Early movie Maddie’s Secret.
Building out a new movie theater in Bushwick set Shorts back “around” $400,000, Masselli reported, which includes the cost of converting a dance floor to a DIY movie theater, complete with armchairs. But she’s optimistic about the appeal of programming, which is selected by Masselli and three others. One recent week included “Grandma Nai Who Played Favorites,” Chheangkea’s Cambodian 2025 short, and “Homemade Gatorade,” Carter Amelia Davis’ monument to online weirdness. That’s just a modest sampling, and it’s the form that Masselli says will bring in crowds.
“If you make short films, it’s like you have this drug that everyone’s addicted to, and so we should be able to sell that to people,” Masselli told me.
Testimony about the new theater had already been spreading throughout the area, it seemed. In my DMs, I encountered Komal, who told me about going into Shorts, just the other night, for a showing of Morgan Krantz’s 2020 short comedy “Squeegee.”
“I went with a new friend and it was the perfect place to have a shared experience and be able to talk about it,” wrote Komal. “My friend had to leave but I stayed back and chatted with some people at the bar. I appreciated the accessibility / affordability of the movies and the concessions. I can see this becoming the heart of the neighborhood where people pop in and out between errands, while they wait for laundry / food orders, or spend an entire evening floating in and out of the theater.”
The liquor license from Mad Tropical didn’t, however, carry over, so the front of the theater largely operates as a late night cafe, a place to talk about some of those awesome shorts you just watched. At the front, a massive sign flips around, loudly and continuously, like something from a Wes Anderson movie. The names of each short appear whimsical, self-conscious.
Tickets are pro-rated, based on how many shorts are watched. Something to do with getting stamped after each viewing, continuing the cyberpunk train station motif of the whole thing, but nothing will cost you north of $10, Masselli assured me.
There’s something homespun about this, part of a riveting scene of local, single-screen microcinemas that have opened in recent years, like the horror-focused Negative Space Cinema (785 Hart St.), Union Docs (3-52 Onderdonk Ave.), which opened earlier this year, down the street in Bushwick, or the HBO comedian John Wilson’s Low Cinema (70-11 60th St.) over in Ridgewood.
On the walls, Masselli has commissioned a small mural from a friend of hers, Pilar Herrera-Land. It shows various characters from the world of the screen anachronistically holding cellphones, which they handle like dogs holding playing cards.
“The idea was to make a mural of all of these people on their phones because I wanted to kind of welcome the phone into the space,” she told me. The phones were where the original short-form content was being played, of course, on TikTok or Vine, or maybe Quibi.
Putting Shorts here, a few blocks away from Birdy’s (1215 Myrtle Ave.) was, perhaps, something new. But this was where it belonged, Masselli told me.
“There’s certainly something very Bushwick about Shorts,” she said. “I don’t think I understood it as a Bushwick identity until we were here, and then people started showing up. But I feel like there’s a dedication to new and strange things here that is very clear in the way that our neighbors are coming out to us and supporting us and cheering us on.”
Photos by Andrew Karpan.
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