Executive Insider: Joe Dull

Although downtown regained a large multiplex with the Nov. 22 launch of College Station Theaters, the new leader of a longtime independent cinema in the Queen City wants to make sure movie audiences spread their attention to his venue that’s about a three-minute walk away.

Joe Dull is the new executive director of the Moxie Cinema, a nonprofit arthouse theater at 305 S. Campbell Ave. that is on the verge of its 20th anniversary. Dull, whose career has comprised filmmaker, educator and social media director, succeeded Mike Stevens in May.

Stevens had led the cinema best known for showing independent films since 2010 – the same year nonprofit Downtown Springfield Community Cinema Inc. was formed to purchase the theater from founders Dan and Nicole Chilton. The couple opened the Moxie in 2005.

Dull has owned and operated Daringly Dull Productions, which offers video services for nonprofits and small businesses, since 2020, and he previously served as director of media for The Young Americans College of the Performing Arts in Corona, California. He says his wife, Katiina, was interim CEO at the same college when they decided to pursue other professional opportunities.

Dull says it was his wife who spurred a move to Springfield from California, adding they were unfamiliar with the city prior to her job search in 2021 that landed her the executive director role at the Child Advocacy Center Inc.

“She came here, and she met the staff and kind of fell in love,” he says. “She had a number of offers, actually, and this was the one when she met the people that just made sense.”

While his wife dug in at her new job, Dull says he pursued video projects with Daringly Dull Productions, which included toy store Bricks & Minifigs and Music Therapy of the Ozarks.

“My niche is short form, social media-friendly pieces that tell the story of an organization,” he says. “One of my favorite things in doing that work is just getting to interview people and pulling their stories out of them.”

Again, Dull credits his wife for spurring his next move, as she earlier this year put the Moxie executive director opening on his radar.

“The more I thought about it, the more it just seemed fun,” he says. “Of course, there are also the responsibilities of the gig, but just that my day job is I get to show movies to people is pretty fantastic.”

Stephanie Stenger, president of the Moxie Cinema Board of Directors, says there were a lot of qualified candidates to consider.

“We felt like we were really lucky to get so many people interested,” she says. “Mike had done such a great job, and I was worried that we wouldn’t be able to find someone who could replace him.”

Stenger says Dull’s personality “clicked with everyone and our culture at the Moxie.”

“When we met him, he has a really easygoing nature and is very genial. You could tell right away that he was able to get along with all sorts of people and obviously, in a retail environment when we’re dealing with customers and patrons, that’s really important,” Stenger says.

The organization in 2023 reported over $413,000 in revenue and net assets of roughly $306,000, according to its most recent 990 form on file with the IRS. Annual memberships to the Moxie, which range from $50 for a student rate to $1,000 for the director level, experienced a roughly 13% dip in 2023, finishing at 439 members, according to past Springfield Business Journal reporting. Members get perks such as free and discounted tickets throughout the year.

However, Dull says current membership is at 462, an over 5% increase from 2023’s total.

At the two-screen Moxie, Dull leads a staff of 11, noting he and theater manager Shay Rainey are the only full-time employees. While Rainey oversees most of the Moxie social media accounts, Dull says they collaborate on a lot of the work, which includes programming for the cinema.

“I’m also kind of a head handyman around the space,” he says, adding one of his first tasks was to make the lobby space a bit more inviting by painting and adding more decor.

Upgrading the lobby space has been nearly a six-month process as Dull devotes a little bit of time each week to tackling small projects.

“The thing I learned is I often can see a big goal and then just breaking that down into what are the small pieces that are actually achievable,” he says. “That’s been something I’ve been learning my whole life.”

It certainly has overlapped his time as an educator and filmmaker. In 1997, Dull received a bachelor’s in film and television production from Chapman University in Orange, California, followed in 2004 with a master’s in screenwriting from Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.

Chapman also is where he began his teaching career, which originated with a phone call from the university asking him to cover instruction for a class one day.

“I’m pretty sure I wasn’t the first call they’d made, but I was the first yes,” he says, adding that led him to a 17-year teaching career that included stops at Broome Community College in Binghamton, New York, and University of Central Arkansas in Conway.

At UCA, Dull says he taught courses including directing, scriptwriting and editing, noting the latter is closest to his heart.

“A lot of it is I just like looking at stuff and figuring it out like a puzzle. And that’s what editing really is,” he says. “Someone shot all this stuff and now it’s my job to figure out how to make it make sense. So that’s super fun to me still to this day.”

Those teaching skillsets were put to the test in 2009 and 2014 when Dull made a pair of full-length feature films he wrote and directed: “Table at Luigi’s” and “Sympathy Pains.” He says the latter was about a standup comedian who finds out his wife is pregnant and doesn’t handle it well. Inspired a bit by his life at the time, Dull says his wife told him she thought she was pregnant – something he replied was likely a response to something they ate the night before.

“So, I kind of turned that little moment of stupidity into a future film,” he says, noting the couple have two daughters, Emma, 14, and Molly, 11.

He counts Steven Soderbergh as his greatest filmmaking influence, noting he was particularly inspired by the 1989 film, “Sex, Lies, and Videotape.”

“That he turned that into a completed film with very little experience prior to that was really inspirational to me that this kind of thing can be done,” Dull says.

Dull also credits Scott Meador, a professor at UCA, as another professional influence. The two worked together for a decade at the university, and Meador also was among a handful of faculty members who aided him with his movies. Meador’s work included production designer and visual effects supervisor.

“I often reflect back on how do I handle the situation with what would Scott do?” Dull says.

Meador says he sees Dull as a passionate, good-natured person who brought his movie production experiences into the classroom to better help students learn all about the filmmaking process.

“One of the great things about being around Joe is he has a great attitude and even if he is bothered by something, he doesn’t let that drag him down or show,” he says. “That makes it a lot easier to work together.”

For nearly 15 years, the Springfield community associated Stevens with the Moxie, Stenger says. She says Dull – like Stevens and the Chiltons before him – has the personality people can connect with when they think of the downtown cinema.

“He’s now the face of the Moxie, and I think he’s able to get people excited about coming to support us and see great movies,” she says. “Our mission is very simply three things: engage, educate and inspire. No. 1 is engage. And if we can’t get them in the door, we can’t do the rest.”

It’s a challenge Dull says he’s prepared to tackle. He’s mixing in smaller independent movies with multiple film series, including one dubbed Big Screen Classics, which includes more well-known titles such as “Planes, Trains & Automobiles,” and “The Shawshank Redemption.”

“A lot of it is now just getting people back in,” Dull says. “That’s a lot of what the Big Screen Classics has been. It’s just getting people to go, ‘Oh yeah, this is fun.’ I really love this space, and I love what we get to show.”