For first-time visitors, the weekly screening schedule at Huntington’s Cinema Arts Centre can be a bit overwhelming — a surprising mishmash of fringe and favorites, the obscure and the obvious. In the next week, for example, one can debate the new Iraq documentary “No End In Sight,” enroll in a two-day filmmaking course, catch the latest installment in a series of modern Czech cinema (the film “Heave Ho!”), and behold the silent hysterics of Buster Keaton’s “The Cameraman,” presented with a live piano accompaniment. And that doesn’t even include this weekend’s big event: On Saturday night, for the third year in a row, the theater will host an all-night marathon of exploitation films. Or, as they dub it, the “midnight till dawn pay-to-get-out horror festival,” which offers a discounted admission price to those brave souls who can arrive at 11 p.m. and stay awake until the early morning hours, weathering the likes of “Night Warning,” “Scanners,” “Shogun Assassin,” “Infra-Man,” and a surprise fifth title, on their way to a complimentary breakfast.

Some would call it chaotic, but for Vic and Dylan Skolnick, who, along with Charlotte Sky, run the Long Island facility, it’s become a way of life. As scores of art houses across the region have come and gone in the past quarter-century, Cinema Arts Centre has quietly become one of the nation’s most established, respected, and looked-to independent movie venues. A year shy of its 35th anniversary, it is routinely contacted by other aspiring venues for business and programming advice, and is a routine stop for filmmakers and special film programs touring the country. The secret to the theater’s success, as both Skolnicks will tell you, is simple: Balance.

“You don’t have a single audience, and that’s essential,” said Vic Skolnick, recalling the Cinema Arts Centre’s ups and downs since its founding in 1973, nearly a decade before the founding of the Sundance Film Festival. “If you understand film, then you understand that you’re programming to numerous audiences, to different people interested in different things. Right now you have ‘Becoming Jane’ and Anne Hathaway, and that brings in a certain group, and then you bring in an Iraq documentary and get other people who are politically active in the movement. Then you have horror films and silent films and our special series. With each you carve out a deeper and deeper audience.”

While many art houses struggle to pay the bills, competing with multiplexes to gain access to certain titles and coping with the chaos of irregular cash flows dependent on everything from rainy weather to extended school holidays, the Cinema Arts Centre has entrenched itself in the Long Island arts scene by courting various film-going constituencies within the local population — everyone from New York City transplants now raising families, to seniors and teenagers. The results are impressive: a membership base of about 8,000 people who, through their membership fees alone, supply 20% of the venue’s annual operating budget.

“There are a lot of great film organizations across the country, many of them run by friends of mine, places that show more cult movies than we do, or show more independent films, first-run art films, documentaries, political programs, silent films,” Dylan said, pointing to the venue’s longevity and popularity within the community. “The one thing with us is that it’s all under one roof. You get everything here, from the kind of programming one would expect from MoMA and the Museum of the Moving Image to what you would see at Anthology Film Archives and a regular movie theater.”

It’s a strategy that, as the Skolnicks see it, evolved naturally from the center’s raw and populist beginnings. As longtime fans of the 1960s film scene who hopped from one independent theater to another throughout Manhattan, Vic and Ms. Sky realized in the early 1970s that few alternative film venues existed on Long Island. They soon began organizing haphazard screenings of their own in a private dance studio, bringing in a projector, some folding chairs, a white sheet, and breaking into abrupt intermissions during lengthy reel changes. Suddenly, they had an underground film club.

It’s only in recent years that Vic’s vision has grown into what is today the Cinema Arts Centre: a $2 million annual operation, with about 84 hours of media a week being screened in three different theaters. Much as the venue’s programming is balanced between genres and popularity, its physical space, geared at maintaining steady revenues and enhancing a sense of community, strikes a similar balance.

Beyond the three screening rooms, the Arts Centre recently expanded with a 2,500-square-foot “sky room,” which serves as a café, meeting place, and private rental space. With the help of volunteers, the theater has added an outdoor sculpture garden. Unlike some single-screen theaters, which may only see a few hours of activity each day, Dylan said the Centre has found a way to stagger business throughout the day, from early morning school groups who use the facilities for educational purposes to mid-day café customers, evening audiences eager to see movies or participate in discussions, and weekend audiences more interested in special events.

“It’s all about learning the community and coming to know your audience,” Dylan said. “Running a place like this can be hard, when you’re not downtown and just down the street from NYU. But we manage to do some pretty adventurous and bold things. The key is to mix it up, to balance ‘Satan’s Tango,’ a seven-hour Hungarian black-and-white film, which will draw a much smaller crowd, with something like Judi Dench in ‘Notes on a Scandal,’ which will sell out. That’s how you balance the ups and downs, and leave yourself flexible enough to bring in those small films that really deserve a chance … Actually, Judi better start working again. She’s like our Angelina Jolie.”

DIRECTIONS

Via car: Take 495 east to Exit 49N or Northern State east to Exit 40 to Rte. 110 North. Follow 110 to Rte. 25A, Main Street. Make a right turn. The third traffic light will be Park Ave. Make a right turn. CAC is the first driveway on the right hand side, 100 yards south of 25A.

Via train: Take the LIRR, Port Jefferson Branch. Get off at Huntington. Train schedule is available at Penn Station, or call 516-231-LIRR. From the station , the easiest way to get to the Cinema is to take a cab.

For more information call: 631-423-3456, or visit www.cinemaartscentre.org.