Joe Scott: Entrepreneur, Film Programmer, and Comic Book Connoisseur

 Joe Scott is an entrepreneur, film programmer, and comic book connoisseur. His dream of owning a movie theatre has given birth to a passion for cinema magic, and his love of coffee has helped it to succeed. Joe sat down with WFDD radio camper Laura Philion to talk about his passion for geek culture.

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Joe Scott is the founder of Geeksboro Coffeehouse Cinema, a venue for movies and great coffee. In our interview, he stressed the importance of art in Greensboro, and its personal importance to him.

Art had a dramatic effect on me. I grew up in a very small town, and the one thing that helped me accept people that were different than me was comic books. A lot of people in my town were racism, a lot of people were homophobic, and I would like to say that I grew up realizing that was wrong because I read X-Man. As crazy as that sounds, the X-Men is the story of acceptance... about people that are different, and about how it's wrong to treat them as lesser people.

 Joe also talked about Geeksboro's TARDIS. The TARDIS is an iconic symbol of the British science fiction show Doctor Who. (Enter Dr. Who theme song) It's a time machine disguised as a 1950s Police Call Box. Since Joe added it to the coffeehouse, Geeksboro's image was forever changed.

I built this place and what happened immediately was something I would describe being similar Jim Morrison's gravesite: people just starte leaving things. People were bringing action figures and just leaving them. And one of the things that someone wanted to leave was a TARDIS. He was getting ready to move to Austin. He called me one day and said, "I [will] live in an apartment. There is no room for the TARDIS. Would you like me to put this TARDIS in your space?" I immediately said yes, not realizing that once this TARDIS was in that space, it pretty much single-handedly defined what our business became for so many people. We became a coffee shop with a TARDIS.

An event coming up in late November has caused particular excitement in the Geeksboro community--the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who. There will be a series of events at Geeksboro leading up to the special episode airing on November 23rd. For more information, visit the Geeksboro website at www.geeksboro.com.

For WFDD radio camp, I'm Laura Philion.