Enormous Room Teams Up With Brattle on Sunday Nights

In a multimedia synthesis of drink, eat, listen and watch, Central Square’s bar and lounge the Enormous Room offers up its Sunday nights to the cinematic crowd in a recent collaboration with Harvard Square’s Brattle Street Theater. For those seeking an alternative to the generic club scene and standard restaurants, the cinematic Sunday nights, dubbed “M.O.S (Mit Out Sound),” feature a DJ spinning to themed films projected off the Room’s lofty brick walls. It’s an apt addition to the eclectic lounge whose décor allows customers to sit on couches or carpets, and whose menu reads, “Creative license is involved in the platters. Most things, but not always everything will appear. Trust us.”

January 25 marked the official installment of M.O.S as a fixture in the Enormous Room’s venue, heralding the tradition with “Classic Kung Fu” theme night. 1960’s movies such the Shaw brothers’ Superninja played with the sound muted, while resident music director Nick Follett and DJ PJ Gray spun various upbeat tunes ranging from Bob Marley to the Kill Bill soundtrack.

“I know PJ, I selected him myself, and it’s great to have complete musical control,” says Follett. “We just try to create this atmosphere for people wanting to escape the frats, and to do something different. There’s not a lot of that in Boston.”

The room was packed by 9:45, as the intimiate and boisterous crowds carved out their niches in the room. In the audience were Brattle Street Theater directors Ned Hinkle and Ivy Moylan who were lounging comfortably beside the movie projector.

After taking over the non-profit theatre three years ago, the duo have been busy preserving the Brattle’s independence through a bill that primarily appeals to cult audiences, featuring film series with themes such as Humphrey Bogart, Czech Fantasy and Horror and the Bugs Bunny Film Festival.

Often neglected because of its low visibility behind Algiers on Brattle St., the Brattle is trying to gain greater visibility in the community with the collaboration with the Enormous Room.

The theatre’s directors say they hope to infuse some visual fun into the normally aural atmosphere of the lounge.

“We’ve done this before and people have loved it,” Moylan says, describing the two previous events in which they paid homage to Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt and the film noir genre.

“The first time, we just projected the movie like we’re doing now, and the second time, we set up monitors around the room where people could pick which film to view. They loved it.”

“It also just happened that each DJ we picked happened to have a huge collection of music related to the films. PJ has this huge disco collection, we thought it was very fitting,” Moylan says.

The collaboration between the Brattle Street Theater and the Enormous Room promises future venues of Spaghetti Westerns, Orson Welles and Japanese Spy Movies spun to music, found only on M.O.S. night at 567 Mass. Ave. in Central Square.