Quad Cinema

"[1] In the late 1960s, Maurice Kanbar, an inventor and real estate investor, purchased a six-story loft in Manhattan with plans to create an off-Broadway theater.

Kanbar believed a movie theater with multiple small auditoriums rather than a few larger ones could be profitable even with smaller audiences at most screenings.

Facing competition from new theaters opening in Lower Manhattan, the Quad adopted a strategy of exhibiting foreign and independent films.

[6] In a 2010 interview, Elliott Kanbar noted that in its earlier history the theater had benefited from a switch of its distributor relationship to City Cinemas, which had a positive relationship with Walt Disney Pictures and its Touchstone Pictures affiliate, and that it was regularly frequented by Andy Warhol, whose "fans would come in droves" and whose influence was a factor in the theater's "big homosexual audience for certain films.

"[2] In March 2010, the Quad announced it would assist national and foreign filmmakers wishing to self-distribute low-budget films via "four wall distribution", the Quadflix program.