How do you feel about being named Douglas Jones? And are you a Doug, a Dougie, or a Douglas?

I am officially a Douglas on my birth certificate. But rarely does anyone actually call me that, unless I’m in some sort of trouble with either my mother or my wife. So I’m usually just a Doug. And, you know, I like the name. You don’t necessarily see a lot of other – while there’s lots of other Joneses, it’s a hugely common name, there aren’t necessarily that many other Dougs. I wouldn’t be in a class and there’d be another Doug in the classroom, I don’t think that ever, ever happened. When I was a little kid, I used to wish my name was Jeff for some reason. And one of the reasons was that Doug Jones lent itself to the teasing name of Bug Bones. Which really bothered me when I was, like, five. But now, as an adult, I’m totally fine with it.

There was the kid’s show, ‹Doug›, when I was growing up.

I was a little bit older than that. I knew it was out there but I wasn’t watching it. Dougie Fresh, the rapper – he was someone that people would reference to me, would ask if that was me, or bust out some of his lyrics at me. It was really only with the Internet, when I realized, there was a baseball pitcher who was named Doug Jones. There used to be a number of pastors that, if you did a Google search, you would find their churches’ websites if you looked up Doug Jones. And now of course, there’s the actor Doug Jones, who is very very busy and is getting a lot more well-known, and then there’s the candidate in Alabama. And there’s Dougie Jones from ‹Twin Peaks›. As my coworker just said as she was walking out: „It really seems like the year of Doug Jones!“.

What did you eat for breakfast?

I had a banana and a Dr. Pepper.

Where do you live? What is your neighborhood like?

I currently live in Williamstown, Massachusetts. It’s a small town, way tucked up in the northwestern corner of the state. And the area is kind of interesting because officially it’s a very rural area, surrounded by a lot of farms and a lot of just open land. But Williamstown itself is the home of Williams College and also the Clark Art museum. And then MASS MoCA, which is the country’s largest contemporary art museum, is just fifteen minutes away, in North Adams. Right next door. So I’m in this little bubble of art and college, a little cultural bubble, surrounded by what is actually a very rural area. It’s a small-town feel here. We have one traffic light in the entire town. Main Street consists of about three to four blocks. But then, it’s nice, where I live, it has a very neighborhoody feel, in a classical way. Tree-lined streets, you know, kids can walk to school, which is just a few blocks away. So, in some ways it’s a very comfortable sort of town and it has all these aspects that you’d expect to find in larger places with a higher population. It’s a nice mix. You can walk to the library. You can walk to the coffee shop. I walk to work pretty much every day.

What does your typical day look like?

A typical day is getting up at seven – wait, no: getting up at six and making sure that my son is awake and getting ready for school. Then usually going back to bed. And then getting up at 6:30 to make him his lunch. He’s a vegetarian, so he doesn’t eat the school lunch, we give him a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and various fruits and vegetables. Then I putter around the house, go back to bed, until eventually I get up, get ready for work. Depending on the weather I often will walk to work because it’s a 20-minute walk and it’s a nice time for me to plug into – listen to a podcast. When I used to live in Cali≠fornia I would drive and it would take me an hour to get everywhere. So I would have all these podcasts I would listen to. Now that I have a 20-minute walk, I’m a little bit behind in my podcast listening. So I like to use that opportunity to have a little quiet time for myself.

What does your work consist of?

I’m the executive director of a nonprofit movie theater. My work varies between being up in the office and just doing usual office job kind of stuff, answering emails, various kinds of paperwork. Sometimes I will need to go downstairs into the theater itself. So I might be selling popcorn, selling tickets, doing something up in the projection booth. When I’m done with work, I’ll walk back home, listen to the second half of a podcast. And then it’s usually scrabble together some kind of dinner – we rarely all sit down as a family and eat a dinner together. My son is usually eating something in his room, my wife may have already eaten something by the time I get home. But my wife and myself, or all three of us, often sit down, maybe watch something on TV. At some point, they’ll all go to bed. I’ll stay up later, read, listen to music, watch a movie. And that’s kind of the basic broad strokes.

What are some of the media works you’re really interested in right now?

My two favorite podcasts right now are „The Flophouse“, which is a podcast where three friends get together every week and watch what is generally acknowledged as a flop, a movie that didn’t do very well in the theaters. Sometimes more contemporary, and sometimes they’ll do something a little older. And then they’ll just talk about it. It’s a comedy podcast. I also really enjoy listening to „The West Wing Weekly“, which is a podcast where in every episode they talk about, they’re slowly watching every episode of „The West Wing“. And in every episode of the podcast they talk about one specific episode. Which is nice because just this past year, when we were in the midst of this whole election process, I actually did a complete rewatch of „The West Wing“. TV shows, it varies. I think the one show that gets all three of us together right now, my wife and my son and myself, is oddly enough „Project Runway“. And other than that, I’ll watch – even though I am not at all a food person, I’m very far away from being called a foodie, I don’t enjoy cooking myself, I find it comforting to watch the cooking competition shows – ‹Top Chef› or ‹The Great British Bake Off›. There’s something about watching them pull all the ingredients together and make something that I find very satisfying, even though I would never do it myself in a million years.

How big is the theater?

It’s small. I have two other people who work with me up in the office, on the administrative side of things, that I see every day or so. Then downstairs in the theater itself, it’s a combination of about a half dozen people who are employees who are working in the box office, but we also rely a lot on volunteers from the community. So people sign up and come in for a particular time and help us with selling popcorn, candy, and soda.

How long has the theater been in Williamstown?

Next Thursday the theater will be marking its 101st anniversary. The first movie was screened right here in this theater on November 30th, 1916. And there have been lots of changes, different names and owners and whatnot. But the basic address – where we are, in this building – people have been coming to see movies here for over hundred years.

What was the first movie screened there?

For a long time we did not know. We thought it had just been lost to the sands of time. And then I stumbled across a clipping – someone who was doing research on the history of the theater had put together a 3-ring binder. And I was going through and just happened to notice there was an ad for the opening of the theater. It was a movie called ‹The Patriot›. It starred an actor named William S. Hart, who at the time was very popular in the silent era. He did a lot of Westerns. And this was kind of a Western about a guy who, his land gets stolen or his claim to a gold mine gets stolen by a larger corporation. It’s actually one of the silent films that doesn’t exist anymore. There are no copies of it. Only 30% of all movies made before a certain era, the silent era, still exist. And ‹The Patriot› is one of those films that just is lost to time.

How many movies do you watch every week?

I used to keep track of it. And then, at a certain point I stopped because as the numbers went up, I was just like „I should really find something else to do with myself“. If I travel to a film festival, when I go to Toronto or to Sundance for work, I could be seeing five or six movies a day. I think my all-time record at a film festival was seeing seven movies in one day, which was starting at probably about 8:30 in the morning and going all the way through a midnight screening. Just normal, when I’m not away at a festival – I don’t know, around eight or nine a week? There are times when there might be a random Saturday where I actually have nothing else to do and I may sit down and watch two or three films. Or a lot of times when I have the opportunity to go to another theater, I’ll coordinate it to do a double feature. So I’ll just maximize my time while I’m out.
Where else have you lived?

I was born in Colorado. As a little kid, when I was 3 or 4, we moved to South Dakota for a while and then over to Minneapolis. So I went to high school in a suburb of Minneapolis. Went to college there for most of the time. And in 1994, along with a group of friends of mine, we moved out to San Francisco. The story I always tell is, one morning in Minnesota, my clock radio goes off. And the DJ comes on, and he’s giving the weather report. He says, it’s something like thirty degrees below zero, there’s a wind chill of sixty degrees below zero. And the DJ says, „If you don’t have to go outside, don’t. If you do have to go outside, don’t expose any skin“. That’s when I decided to move to California. I lived there for about ten years or so. Then moved down to Los Angeles. Lived in Los Angeles for another ten years. And then just about three years ago, moved here to Massachusetts. My wife is originally from Boston, so we had been thinking about moving East to be a little bit closer to her family. And when we found the opportunity in Williamstown, we thought, that’s kind of perfect, because it’s close to her family, but it’s not „too“ close to her family. You can get there for birthdays and anniversaries, but no one’s going to just surprise you on your doorstep one Saturday afternoon.

Tell us about your wife – how did you guys meet? What’s your life together like?

I’ve worked at movie theaters ever since, my first job was at a movie theater when I was 14. I lied about my age, told them I was 15, and got a job selling candy and popcorn. And since then, I’ve pretty much always worked in movie theaters or at film festivals, or in video stores. I met my wife when we were both working at the Mill Valley Film Festival in California, in Marin County. I was the programmer, she was the volunteer coordinator. And at the time, she did not have a car. So I kindly offered to – we lived pretty close to each other in San Francisco, so I said, we can just carpool. „I can pick you up and we can just go back and forth“. So a lot of our relationship was born out of drives back and forth on the Golden Gate Bridge, to and from work. We just recently celebrated our fifteenth wedding anniversary, though we’ve been together longer than that. And it’s great. We are very sympatico in a lot of our interests. We both enjoy going to thrift stores and we both get a kick out of vintage things – weird little things that we find that, at least to us, it feels like „everyone else has overlooked this treasure but look at how awesome this is“. We actually just today – we put in an offer and it seems like it’s going to be accepted – after years and years and years of renting, we just today, lined up buying a house.

What is your vision for this house?

We had been looking for a little while. We had found a few places that we liked, and a few places that we were like [half-hearted voice] „Yeeeaaah, that could work“. But when we found this place, we both felt a connection to the house. There were things about it that immediately excited us. For example, the bathroom still features some very common bathroom features that were installed in the late 60s, maybe. Little things like a holder in the tile, in the wall, so you could put your tissue box inside there, and then there’s sort of a chrome plate just above it. A revolving door for your toothbrushes. A little pull-down hutch for your scale. So we just got a good feeling about the house itself. But it did take a little bit of imagination. Because it was like „Whose bedroom is this? Who’s going to live here? What will we do with it?“ I have a lot of books and records and videos, and Paula, my wife, also has a lot of linens and various things that she collects and gets a lot of joy out of. So even as we’re looking at these houses, and thinking about where we ourselves are going to live and how we’ll fit into the space, we are also very thoughtful about „how is all our stuff going to fit into this space?“ And it’s sort of exciting. When you rent, there are things you do to apartments that you’re renting – you know, you screw in a new towel rack, maybe you do some painting, there are little things you can do. But there’s always the sense that this is just temporary. As you’re putting something in, you’re thinking, „Am I going to leave this when I move out of this place, or am I going to take this with me?“ And now that we actually have, in front of us, a house that we’re going to own, you definitely think a lot more about „Oh, I’m not going to put just any paper towel rack on this wall. It’s going to have to be the right one“. So you definitely get a lot more thoughtful about odd little minutia of the home, and your daily life.

Do you know when you’re going to get to move in?

Probably in a couple of months. January 30th is supposed to be the date where we do all the tradeoffs: here are your keys, here’s your check, and there you go, best of luck.

Now that you have accomplished this milestone, do you have more goals or big plans for the future?

The house was a big one. Another thing that we’ve talked about, and it would be nice to figure out, is still finding the right balance of home life and work life. And the right balance between Paula’s work and my work, and just coordinating time when we can be like, „Let’s take a vacation! Let’s take a weekend away.“ So often it’s, we can’t do anything this weekend because I’ve got to do this or that. Or you’ve got to do this other thing. Or Wylie, our son, he’s got something else going on. We spend a lot of time together, which is great, and we all get along really well. But it is difficult to coordinate time that’s completely clear from any other obligations for all of us. And then on top of that, when we do have that, say on a holiday – Thanksgiving or Christmas or something – then there’s the balance of, we want to go do something and see the larger family. But it would be very nice to have something of ourselves – some time just for the core group of us, the three of us.

What did you do for Thanksgiving?

I did very little. Paula and Wylie went to Boston, to spend time with her brother’s family. Because Paula’s mom was actually out of the country, she wasn’t going to be a part of Thanksgiving. So that it a bit more comfortable saying, „you know what, I think this one I’m going to stay home and do some things“. I ended up working because of an unexpected computer glitch – so I actually ended up coming into the theater and working. But my Thanksgiving was mostly spent watching ‹The Punisher› on Netflix, and then in between episodes, systematically doing another load of laundry, or doing some more dishes, or doing a little bit of housework. So just kind of going back and forth. Sometimes with that stuff, it’s easier to do when you’re the only one in the house.

Tell us about your family when you were growing up.

My family is back in Minnesota. It was very much the classic mom-and-dad, son-and-daughter – I have a sister. We had a series of dogs, we had Dachshunds growing up. And it was living in the Midwest. So in some ways it was very stereotypical. There was the usual family drama growing up, but never anything all that dramatic. A lot of sort of sitcom situations that were like „This is a problem that can be wrapped up in a half hour“. I snuck out of the house at night and got caught – that’s going to be a half-hour conversation and then we’ll be back to normal. My parents stayed together right up until my dad passed away. I still talk to my mom occasionally. I don’t talk to my sister all that often. She’s three years younger and so it was just enough that we never went to the same school at the same time. We were very different people growing up, and we remained that. There’s no bad blood, there was no big drama, we just don’t necessarily talk to one another all that often.

It’s cool to me that you wanted to work in the movie screening business from the time you were too young to work. And you’re still doing it. How do you feel about that? Does it feel like a big victory, or like something that just happened?

It always felt like – what else would I do? Very early on, I was the kid who was going to see movies every weekend. I was the kid at school who other kids would ask about the movies. I was the movie kid. I was seven years old when ‹Star Wars› came out. That was a huge influence on my childhood. I was a small kid, so I would always play R2D2 on the playground because that was the smallest character. It was a combination of seeing ‹Star Wars›, seeing ‹Raiders of the Lost Ark›, when I was just the perfect age for those movies – seeing those movies in theaters, then getting up on Saturday mornings to watch cartoons, but then on Sunday mornings I’d get up to watch ‹Academy Award Theater› on CBS. I gravitated to those things at a young age. And my work has always been going from one film-related job to another. There was a period when I worked on film crews, in the production of movies in Minneapolis. That included some bigger things, like ‹The Mighty Ducks›, which was made in Minneapolis, and then very scrappy indie things that other filmmakers were making, and then eventually things that my friends and myself were making. There have been a few jobs that weren’t directly related to movies – I worked in a bookstore for a while – but even then I was in charge of the movie and TV book section. It has been such a big part of my life for so long that I can’t even imagine what else I would do with myself.

Do you have a favorite movie?

It varies a lot. I have a short list of movies that I consider to be perfect films. Even movies that I love – like ‹Star Wars›, which was so instrumental to me growing up – I could watch that and be like, „That is not the best acting in the world, necessarily“ or „That’s a little clunky“. There are some films where I could not tell you anything that’s wrong with it. Every element is working together and just coming together perfectly. Terence Malick’s ‹Badlands›, Guillermo del Toro’s ‹Pan’s Labyrinth›. There’s a British filmmaking team, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger – they made ‹The Red Shoes›, ‹Black Narcissus›, ‹The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp› – theirs are films that I come back to time and time again. I just marvel at how they worked together and what they could accomplish. They have one film called ‹A Matter of Life and Death› with David Nevin and Kim Hunter that is a film I go back to so many times. When I moved here to Williamsburg and took over Images Cinema, we wanted to do an event that would introduce me to the community, and I chose to show that film as my introduction to this new hometown.

If there was going to be a movie about you, who would play you?

(Laughs.) Oh my gosh, I’m trying to remember – back when I was working at the San Francisco Film Festival, we used to have this game where we would cast – if there was going to be a movie about a film festival, who would play who. I remember the people who would play my colleagues, but I’m trying to remember who we would have play me. That’s one of those questions – it’s sort of like asking a parent who their kid looks like. Do they look more like mom or dad? Other people have a better perspective on it than I do. I could cast someone and people could say, „Really? That’s who you see yourself as?“ I’m sure my wife would be able to tell you who should play me in a movie. She’s got some perspective because she’s got a little distance from it.

Do you end up watching movies a bunch of times?

At the theater? There will be some movies that I make a point to go back to the theater and sit down and watch again a couple times. What happens more often is that I’ll find myself going into the theater while the movie’s playing and watching certain scenes or certain bits again. When we were screening ‹Baby Driver› over the summer, I would go in – I probably saw the opening scene of that movie a dozen times or so.

What is the biggest thing you’ve ever won?

I’m one of those people, I feel I don’t win things that often. One of the most exciting things that I’ve recently won is, my son and I go to New York Comic-Con. And there was a book signing for this woman Rebecca Sugar, who is the person who created a TV show called ‹Steven Universe›. There was an event with her, and then there was a drawing – you could get your book, and then you could go get it autographed from her. Everyone had these little tickets that they handed out, and the show is very popular, especially among Comic-Con folks. So there were a lot of people, and my son and I were there, and we’re watching them pulling one ticket after the other out of a fishbowl. They were filling up, only twenty five people could do it. And there was one, and then the other, and we kept not being the person who was picked. And we’re like, alright, those are the odds, this is how these things happen, you don’t always get picked. And then the very last slot that they were drawing for, they pulled the ticket out of the bowl, and it was the ticket that I had in my hand. At that point I had totally written it off. I was like „This totally isn’t going to happen, that’s too bad, it would have been cool“. And then the very last chance, it came through. That was very exciting because it was also something that I got to win along with my son. That was very very exciting to him as well. Like before that, I won a TV at sort of a work conference. And that’s great, but I actually haven’t taken that TV out of the box yet. It was super nice to win that, but winning this along with Wylie, that was very exciting, because it was part of a larger thing he and I were doing as a father-son weekend. That made it more special.

Tell us about Wylie, what does he like, how old is he?

He is 13. He’s about to turn 14, and he’s great. He gets really mad when I tell him that he’s my best friend. He says „You can’t be my best friend, you’re my dad“. And I’m like, „Sorry dude, that’s what it is“. It’s interesting because when you have kids, as much as you think, „Oh, I’m gonna put this in front of them, I’m going to steer them this way or that way“ – you really have no control. They grow up and at a certain point, it’s less like having a kid than just having another roommate. Because they become such their own person. But I’m very fortunate in that he has grown up sharing a lot of my own interests in, you know, comic books and certain movies and TV shows, so there’s a lot of things that we can share together. If he reads something that he thinks would be cool for me, he’ll give it to me, and I’ll do the same right back at him. But then there are other areas where he’s sort of defined himself. He’s been a vegetarian since he was four or five years old, and that was something he came to completely on his own. My wife and I, his mom and I, are definite meat-eaters. Give me a pepperoni pizza and I’m set. But this is something of his own volition, he put the various pieces together and one day was like, „I don’t think I really want to eat meat anymore“. And Paula and I looked at each other and we said „Ok! That’s your own decision and we can respect that“.

What is the most important thing that you’ve ever lost?

That’s a much more difficult question… I lost my father few years ago. He passed away. Somewhat unexpectedly. Shortly before Wylie was born. After that time, thirteen, fourteen years ago, it was a very interesting transition I guess. We were already pregnant when my father passed away. So we knew we were having a kid, but there was certainly some sort of continuation. It’s not like there was something between my father pas≠sing away and then a few months later having a kid. So in some way, I don’t think of that necessarily as a loss so much, as just sort of something that changed, or shifted. I couldn’t explain exactly what that connection was, or what it is, but it’s just sort of like, it’s a connection in your mind, you sometimes put two things on the same mental shelf. Whether that actually makes sense, or whether it’s just two random things that you just think of in tandem.

Do you consider yourself an optimist or a pessimist?

(Laughs.) I don’t think either word is necessarily completely applicable to me. I’d say I lean a little bit more towards optimistic, because I do believe that things work out. Problems arise, things pop up that you have to deal with, but I do believe that you generally know how to work it out to get through to the other side, even if it’s not always your absolute 100% best outcome in the world, I think that there is always an outcome. And I also really believe that there is always going to be something else. There’s always something coming down the road. There’s always going to be another challenge put in front of you, even if you’ve just gone through another challenge. I like to take sort of the long view of things. The day may have sucked for one reason or another, but there’s always going to be a tomorrow, and then there’s going to be six other days in this week, and maybe they’ll be okay. One day out of seven, it’s not a bad ratio.

And what about a larger scale, what do you think the future of the world looks like?

That’s a tough one too! I think a lot of times, on a big macroscale, and even on some microscales, things are very cyclical. I think things and situations come back around. The details can change, things can take on different meanings, and you kind of have to look in a more expansive way. But I do think there’s a certain level of, things happen, and then you move on, and you move on, and eventually all that moving on kind of brings you back in some way to a very similar situation as you once had way back when. I think that can be true for people, I think that can be true for larger cultural ideas, larger social ideas. That there are certain variations on a theme, and you’re always working through the variations.

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