Rodeo Cinema welcomes new management team to the Stockyards

OKLAHOMA CITY (Free Press) — The historic Rodeo Cinema in Stockyards City is kicking off its second century with a new management team and a renewed focus on the indie community of OKC.

Theater operations – including film screenings, concerts, live events, interactive specials, and more – will now be overseen by the team of Melodie Garneau, Amy Janes, and Shannon Smith, all OKC film community mainstays and leaders behind the massive Filmmakers Ranch studio in Spencer.

The announcement comes after more than a month of slowed – then temporarily halted – operations at the hundred-year-old theater space in Stockyards City. 

Garneau led a casual, open-to-the-public discussion Monday night welcoming filmmakers and fans and hearing ideas for how the theater can better serve and engage the community.

Rodeo Cinema remains a non-profit theater owned and controlled by the Rodeo Cinema Foundation, who asked Garneau and her team to take the reins at the Stockyards location.

“Obviously, this is a theater that’s devoted to independent film and local film, and that’s what we want,” Garneau told the modest Monday night crowd. “Unfortunately, people don’t always know that it’s down here, or they don’t want to make the trek. So we want to change that.”

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Melodie Garneau, one of three new leaders of Rodeo Cinema at a public discussion about the future of the theater on Monday, Dec. 16, 2024. (B.FIELDCAMP/Okla City Free Press)

Spreading the word and pulling in more of the wider OKC community will likely require larger, wider-reaching event programming and creative screenings and concerts of a type that other city arthouses aren’t focused on.

Garneau said that means fewer new, first-run movies and less competition with other city theaters.

“The cost for first-run films is sometimes astronomical,” she said. “So our goal is to make this an event-driven thing, and that means doing as much local as we can with local films or live music or even live podcast recordings.”

The group is also fielding suggestions and proposals from the public for screening and event ideas and ways to engage audiences.

It’s no big stretch for Garneau, who once owned the Paramount Building on Film Row and similarly operated its movie theater as a screening and community events space. 

She said Rodeo Cinema founder and foundation leader Clark Wiens personally asked her to bring that same approach—as well as her contacts in the Oklahoma filmmaking world—to help revitalize the Stockyards theater. 

“Clark actually reached out to me months ago, back in the summer,” Garneau told me following her presentation Monday night. “He just said they really wanted to try some changes here because they haven’t been seeing the business and numbers that they’d like.”

That’s not a surprise. 

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The Rodeo Cinema in Stockyards City SW of downtown Oklahoma City is a nonprofit movie theatre company. (BRETT DICKERSON/Okla City Free Press)

More and more theaters are lately leaning into classic and cult movie screenings – long Rodeo’s bread and butter – with every major theater chain in the city now hosting weekly or monthly classics programming.

Flix Brewhouse on Broadway Extension regularly screens fan-favorite cult films (and offers food and alcohol) and the Sam Noble Theater at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art (the sponsor of this column) has recently been seeing high attendance numbers for their first-run indie, foreign, and art film showings. 

So where does all of that leave Rodeo Cinema? How do they set themselves apart in a moviegoing market unexpectedly spoiled for choice?

The way the new team sees it, the answer is to more deeply embrace the theater’s standing in the local and historic communities of Oklahoma. 

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Shorts film fans watch the deadCenter Film Festival’s Short Film 2 program Saturday, June 12, 2021. (BRETT DICKERSON/Okla City Free Press)

“We really want to bring a lot of Oklahoma film here,” the leadership team’s Smith told the crowd Monday, “and to focus on the history of that storytelling by honoring our past storytellers, exhibiting our present storytellers, and hopefully inspiring the future.”

They’ll be spotlighting that history with their first big event and re-opening celebration on January 24th with a screening of “Daughter of the Dawn,” a 1920 silent film produced in Oklahoma and starring an all-Indigenous cast of Kiowa and Comanche citizens.

For Garneau, the opportunity to showcase that kind of cultural history and to engage with the city’s enduring creative community was too good to pass up, even if she originally had other plans. 

“Honestly, I was getting ready to retire,” she told me. “But they asked me to do this and I talked to Shannon and Amy and I thought ‘well, maybe I will.’”

Rodeo Cinema’s new management team is accepting suggestions for community-focused screenings and events at rnrmanagementgroup@gmail.com and rentals@rodeocinema.org

For more information, including a full schedule of upcoming films and events at both the Stockyards and Film Row locations, visit rodeocinema.org


Catch Brett Fieldcamp’s film column weekly for information and insights into the world of film in the Oklahoma City metro and Oklahoma. | Brought to you by the Oklahoma City Museum of Art.


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Brett Fieldcamp has been covering arts, entertainment, news, housing, and culture in Oklahoma for nearly 15 years, writing for several local and state publications. He’s also a musician and songwriter and holds a certification as Specialist of Spirits from The Society of Wine Educators.