For more than a hundred years—through both world wars, the Great Depression, and countless agricultural busts and booms—the residents of Clifton have been able to watch a movie at the Cliftex. The single-screen theater has stood here in the cattle country of Bosque County since 1916, surviving droughts, floods, and the rise of streaming video, under a line of caretakers whose names are inscribed on a long stretch of wooden plaques hanging in the lobby. Generations have been weaned on the theater’s Saturday matinees, coming here for their first movies and first dates before eventually returning with their grandchildren in tow. The Cliftex, located a few dozen miles northwest of Waco, bills itself as the oldest continuously operating cinema in Texas, which would rank it among the oldest in the world. But in its century-plus of existence, the Cliftex has rarely seen a packed house like the one it had on November 20, 2022.
Inside, it was standing room only, as about one hundred locals turned out for something else the Cliftex had never seen before: a showcase of movies made by regional filmmakers, culled from the winners of the Billy the Kid Film Festival, in nearby Hico. This was exactly what Brett Voss, president of the Bosque Film Society, had had in mind when he founded the group two years earlier. He wanted to “stretch people with films that would make them think” and introduce the kinds of festivals he’d attended as a part-time filmmaker to this land of hay bales and cowboy churches. Still, Voss knew the crowd hadn’t turned out on a Sunday afternoon just to see a movie. “Everybody in freakin’ Clifton wanted to see Ty Murray,” he says.
Murray, the famed rodeo champion, had dropped into the Cliftex to present Un-Tyed: Building Rosie, a documentary about his efforts to train a Clydesdale. It was hardly the sort of cerebral fare Voss had envisioned. The audience was at least four times bigger than the one that had turned out a week earlier for a screening of François Truffaut’s 1973 feature, Day for Night. Nevertheless, it was a pivotal moment for the Bosque Film Society. Those locals, many of whom had never encountered a film festival before, stuck around for the whole showcase. They got acclimated to the concept. And when the Billy the Kid Festival returned in 2023, they filled the theater again, even without Murray’s presence.
For Voss, who is 64, it was a lesson in meeting the audience where it lives, even when you’re trying to broaden its horizons. The people of Bosque County are largely conservative and churchgoing; their tastes run decidedly traditional. Throughout the Cliftex’s history, the theater has mostly shied away from showing R-rated films. Today it’s had more luck with faith-based movies or old-fashioned westerns such as Kevin Costner’s recent Horizon, a bomb nearly everywhere else but a modest success here. This past September, the Cliftex hosted the Dennis Quaid–starring biopic Reagan for a two-week run that was sponsored, in part, by the Bosque County Republican Party—a remarkably long engagement in a town where even first-run blockbusters vanish quickly.
The Cliftex aside, Clifton has never been known for movies, unless you count the alleyways where Chuck Norris’s son Mike filmed parts of his 2016 far right fantasy AmeriGeddon. But it does have a reputation as a quiet cultural oasis. Many of the area’s ranches are owned by well-heeled retirees who made their fortunes in the big cities, where they grew accustomed to having ready access to the arts. Because they don’t want to drive to Waco to be entertained, Voss says, they pour their money into supporting local culture. Yet the kind of art they enjoy tends toward the conventional—such as the Bosque Seven, a group of painters specializing in romantic Western landscapes, whose work hangs in Clifton’s Bosque Arts Center and Bosque Museum.
Programming for that audience requires a delicate balance the film society works hard to strike. In its earliest days, Voss says, the group held Arthouse Nights as a way of “warning people that it’s probably not your average thing you would go see.” Among the first movies Voss scheduled was Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, which is notorious for having one of the most graphic sex scenes ever committed to nonpornographic film—a pretty big swing for the Cliftex. Predictably, attendance at Arthouse Nights was fairly dismal.
In the end, the society voted to scrap Don’t Look Now. Instead, it put together a festival of family-friendly Halloween movies; in 2022 it followed that with the first-ever Wild Western Weekend, a showcase of classic cowboy films. It’s a formula—give a little, push a little—that the Bosque Film Society continues to follow at its monthly members-only screenings (now redubbed Film Appreciation Nights), where artsier titles including Seven Samurai trade off with more broadly popular stuff such as The Big Lebowski and Die Hard—movies that, like Ty Murray, can get people in the seats, with the hope that at least some of them will return.
As it enters its fifth year, with 230 members and growing, the society has turned the Cliftex into more than just a place where you can see a movie. It has transformed the theater into a sanctuary for those who want to study and be challenged by films, and an outpost where Voss’s group wages a friendly war of attrition against the more rigid cultural attitudes of its surroundings. Voss is also fighting a more personal battle—one that has made his mission feel all the more urgent.
When I arrived at the Cliftex one July afternoon, the society’s board members were dressing the theater for opening night of the third annual Wild Western Weekend. Cardboard standees of John Wayne and Clint Eastwood loomed in front of a banner-size photo of a red carpet hung on the wall at selfie level, near a small stage draped with saddles and serapes. Voss’s wife, Simone, who is 64, laid out the evening’s refreshments on a card table with the help of the film society’s historian, Bryan Davis, age 66, who’d baked a batch of ranger cookies— crisp pucks of cornflakes and coconut to go with the cowboy theme. Before a row of wooden seats that have been here since the silent era stood a podium, where Voss would introduce that night’s showing of the Humphrey Bogart classic The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.
Whatever image you may have of a film-society president—tweedy, socially awkward, pale—it’s surely belied by Voss, a gregarious guy whose face rarely goes unframed by a weathered replica of Indiana Jones’s famous fedora. Voss has worn plenty of other hats throughout his career: journalist, teacher, and baseball, football, and track coach. But his true passion has always been film. He’s loved it ever since he was a kid growing up in McAllen, where his uncle, the Western artist and historian Joe Gish, would take him to the Palace Theatre to watch cowboy pictures, pointing out the gulf between Hollywood myth and frontier reality.
Clifton, at a Glance
When Voss was eight, his father, a third-generation Texas oilman, moved the family overseas—first to Iran, then to Nigeria, where Voss spent his time studying the movies his dad rented to entertain the offshore riggers. As a teen, Voss would work summers in his dad’s oil fields, then hop on his motorcycle to visit the local cinema with Simone, another movie-loving expat, from the Netherlands. They lost touch after he went off to the University of Texas at Austin, and decades passed while Voss bounced among his various teaching and sportswriting gigs, running a video production company on the side. He got married and raised a family, then got divorced. After Voss settled in Meridian, in 2008, he tracked Simone down. They married in 2012 and started making movies together.
In 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic shuttered the Cliftex—along with nearly every other theater in the world—and it was put up for sale, the Vosses convened a group of fellow local creatives to form a prospective management firm and made an offer to buy it. They were outbid by Richard Major, a realtor whose office sits just across the street, and his wife, Megan, a painter and Clifton native who owns the nearby 219 Artisan Market. By their own admission, the Majors didn’t know much about movies. They just wanted the Cliftex to remain locally owned and family friendly. The management group Voss had formed became the cornerstone of the Bosque Film Society, which soon made the Cliftex its home. And it brought Voss to the others in town who loved movies as much as he did.
There’s an us-against-the-world spirit to the society, the kind you often find when misfits band together. Davis, a gentle giant who speaks with a molasses-sweet Southern lilt, served as postmaster for two neighboring towns for 34 years, but he’s also an actor of some local renown. He tells me he grew up a “weird kid” who spent his days “writing letters to Katharine Hepburn instead of playing football,” which didn’t earn him many friends around town.
Will Godby, who is 76, also grew up here—and by “here” Godby means the Cliftex, he says, pointing out one of the framed vintage show calendars in the lobby like the ones he used to deliver around town in exchange for free passes. Godby worked in Los Angeles for many years as an editor on projects including Ralph Bakshi’s animated Lord of the Rings and promotional videos for Michael Jackson and Metallica before returning home. But until the Bosque Film Society, he and Davis had never really interacted.
That they all found one another—in this small town, in the august years of their lives—has given them a renewed creative spark. The members of the Bosque Film Society have collaborated on a number of films—among them the horror short Gal Manns Skrik: Mad Man’s Scream and a pair of documentaries, one on the legendary folklorist John Lomax, who grew up in nearby Meridian and archived thousands of traditional cowboy songs, and another on the late granite-faced character actor Fred Ward, who came of age in nearby Valley Mills. (For the past three years, the society has held an annual Fred Ward tribute at the Cliftex, featuring his turns in films including Tremors and The Right Stuff.)
What drew them to Lomax and Ward is the same thing that brought them together: They were different from everyone else here. Like Voss and Davis—like me—Godby went to UT Austin. As we chat inside the Cliftex, Davis remarks that this is likely the biggest collection of Longhorns ever assembled here in the thick of Aggie country, where just wearing burnt orange can earn you sideways looks. “They see us as liberal crazies or whatever,” Voss laughs. And although the society does its best to cater to a more conservative crowd, even the Wild Western Weekend eschews the usual hero-cowboy epics in favor of dark, moody tales such as High Noon and Dances With Wolves, whose moral ambiguities the board members take turns highlighting in their preshow talks. Voss’s monologue before The Treasure of the Sierra Madre centered on the film’s themes of corrupting greed; last year, Voss introduced John Ford’s Stagecoach by discussing its savage depiction of Native Americans. “My point was we should watch this stuff and learn from it,” Voss says, though this confrontational approach doesn’t always go over so well.
When I attended a screening of Driving Miss Daisy a few weeks later, Davis introduced the film by linking its themes of racism to the Cliftex’s balcony—a relic of the segregation era that Black audiences were once forced to access by a separate entrance. A woman a few rows ahead of me exhaled sharply and muttered under her breath. In the lobby later, I overheard a man talking loudly about the shame of seeing Confederate monuments torn down around the state. “It’s not very Bosque County,” Voss says, “to be culturally equitable.” But the society is already planning a Black heritage night for 2025. “We pretty much do what we want,” Davis says. “And if people don’t want to come, they don’t have to.”
Voss’s audacity and restlessness can perhaps be explained by this: A few years back, a fist-size tumor was discovered in his chest. He had surgery to remove it and went through several rounds of radiation and chemotherapy. Last summer, he says, his doctor concluded that treatment had not been as effective as they had hoped. Voss doesn’t like to dwell on it, and he asks me not to either. But he concedes that it has altered his perspective. “I feel like there are things I had all the time in the world to do,” Voss says. “And I don’t know if I will now.”
He plans to release the Fred Ward documentary later this year and hopes the John Lomax film will be done sometime in 2025. The society recently started making videos for local musicians and producing commercials for area businesses. This fall, Voss launched Clifton High School’s first-ever University Interscholastic League film competition program. “There’s always a new project popping up,” he says.
Simone keeps telling him he needs to delegate more. As it is, Voss handles almost everything for the Bosque Film Society: securing sponsors, updating the website, planning for a new summer film series. But Voss has also been readying Nathan Diebenow—the “young pup” of the group, at the tender age of 45—to take over should the worst come to pass. Voss just wants this thing he started to outlive him. “If I’m going to be remembered for anything, I would hope that it would be the film society,” he says.
Richard and Megan Major plan to run the Cliftex for “a long time,” they say, though the theater doesn’t turn a profit. Bosque County is just too small, and the kids, especially, don’t care about movies the way they used to. Even the college students working the concessions stand tell me they don’t really watch them. In the meantime, the Majors keep the Cliftex afloat by renting it out for birthday parties and Sunday church services, and even to those who want to play video games on its screen.
Still, should movies eventually go the way of the cowboy song, the Bosque Film Society has done its part in preserving them for one small corner of Texas. In the end, after all, most of us end up being forgotten, even the famous: just a dimly recalled face in a little-seen film, a name on a dusty plaque. It’s the roles we play in the larger story that endure. And here at the Cliftex, that movie’s just getting started.
This article originally appeared in the November 2024 issue of Texas Monthly with the headline “Arthouse on the Range.” Subscribe today.
