posted 09-14-2004 09:45 PM                       

quote: Joseph Pandolfi

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I was the last projectionist to close the dowser for good at 11:52PM here in Milford. CT.

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Hope you still have a paycheck elsewhere.

posted 09-24-2004 08:38 PM                    

quote:

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Continent's theater sets second run
2004-08-02 Doug Buchanan, Business First of Columbus

The owner of the defunct Cinema Grill at the Continent tried to break away from the peloton of movie theaters that rode into Columbus with a restaurant theater setup that invited patrons to combine their dinner-and-a-movie night out into a one-stop proposition.

It took less than a month for the pack to leave the Cinema Grill in its wake, forcing the owner to bail out and close the theater until someone could come up with a better idea to compete.

Now the operator of the renamed Continent Cinema tells Business First it'll be content to hang back from the field and settle for second-run movies when the theater reopens as early as Halloween.

Larry Gardner, a 25-year veteran of AMC Entertainment Inc. who's been tapped to manage the Continent Cinema, said operating a second-run, or sub-run, theater marked the "best place in the market to position" the eight-screen complex.

"It'll give us an opportunity to do a number of things, such as playing some art product, a film festival or anything else we determine we want to do," Gardner said.

One of the options under consideration is to tap into the growing popularity of showing satellite-fed sporting events on the big screens.

Focusing on second-run movies also reduces the cost of film rental, which Gardner said is a significant percentage of gross receipts at first-run theaters in the weeks after a movie's debut.

Florida-based National Entertainment Developers opened the Cinema Grill on April 8 under a management agreement with Cinema Grill Systems Inc. of Atlanta, but agreed May 6 to hand over the operations after persistent operational problems. Realty Finance Management, landlord of the Continent development in north Columbus, closed the property May 11 for renovations.

Gardner said the reworked theater will continue to serve food, but the latest plan calls for eliminating waiter-served tables.

Instead, the theater will include slightly wider seats in rows set wider apart to accommodate tray-toting guests. A revised menu remains under development, but will include pizzas as well as beer and wine.

The failure of the theater prompted the landlord in June to sue Cinema Grill Systems for $1.54 million in Franklin County Common Pleas Court on breach of contract, unjust enrichment and fraud accusations. Cinema Grill and its chief executive, James Duffy, have denied the allegations

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posted 09-26-2004 08:10 PM                    

quote: Roger Katz

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The Cinema City 4 art house in Hartford, CT closed down on Thursday. It will be missed as it showed movies that could not be seen elsewhere.

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posted 09-27-2004 03:38 AM                       

quote: Eric Hooper

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The Atmospheric STATE THEATRE in Monterey is closing on Wednesday.

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posted 09-27-2004 05:32 PM                    

quote: William Hooper

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Oh, heck. That organ is a great opus of Tom DeLay's, too. What's expected to become of the theatre?

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posted 10-17-2004 04:38 PM                       

quote:

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Movie house owners hope films reflect community's values

By TOM KIZZIA
Anchorage Daily News

(Published: October 10, 2004)

HOMER -- By the time a real estate sign was posted on the side of the Homer Theatre two years ago, staff members were getting worried.

Homer's only movie theater had been up for sale a year already, with no buyer in sight. Granted, the place was half a century old and getting a little rundown. Would someone grab the location on the corner of Main and Pioneer, closing the theater that had been a venue not only for Friday night movie dates but also high school graduations and Winter Carnival Queen contests? Was Homer about to join other Alaska coastal communities like Valdez and Cordova as small towns without a picture show?

Then a buyer turned up, and at first it seemed even worse.

"I was born and raised here. I don't like change," said assistant manager Abi Mann, 23. "I thought, 'What right does a lawyer from California have to buy our theater?' "

Today, Mann and most of Homer are counting their blessings.

Jamie Sutton, a San Francisco-area criminal lawyer with deep pockets, and his wife, Lynette, an interior designer who built a cabin in Homer during her formative hippie-artist days, turned out to be movie buffs who had long fantasized about running a small-town theater.

For their part, Homer's theatergoers had long fantasized about sitting in plush comfortable seats, watching offbeat surprises along with first-run hit movies, in a theater that didn't smell like a freshly disinfected locker room.

Jamie Sutton has rebuilt the Homer Theatre's lobby and replaced the sprung, duct-taped, plywood-backed seats. He fixed the faulty drainage that left standing storm water on the floor beneath the stage. He threw open the doors to community groups, sharing the gate for nonprofit fund-raisers.

Friends of the Library held an adult spelling bee on the theater's stage before the opening of the documentary "Spellbound." Long lines of costumed partyers were turned away from a sold-out midnight show of "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" last Halloween. The Glacierview Baptist Church held its own Sunday showing of Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ," which Sutton first screened in a special preview for local ministers.

"You wouldn't have seen this in a million years," Mann said, recalling the old days, as she sold popcorn during a weeklong documentary film festival in September. The documentary festival, with repeat showings of films on surfing, '60s rock, fast food and the Iraq war, was a huge financial success.

This being politically contentious Homer, not everyone was happy. One letter writer to the local papers called for a "total boycott" of the Homer Theatre after the documentary festival, objecting to the decision to show a film called "The Control Room," about the Arabic TV network Al-Jazeera's efforts to cover Iraq. The letter writer, who had not seen the movie, called its appearance an "effort to publicly discredit our country and the efforts of our military in Iraq for the purposes of electing John Kerry."

But the call for a boycott went unheeded, judging from the turnout the first night after the festival, which happened to be a benefit showing of "Benji: Off the Leash" for the new animal shelter.

"Thinking may be hard work, but it's worth the effort," said one of a half-dozen letter writers who sprang to the movie theater's defense the following week. Wrote another: "Thank you, Jamie, for taking a chance on something different."

SOME MISTAKES

Jamie and Lynette Sutton used to come to Homer in summer with their three children, now in their teens, to stay at her cabin. They met two weeks after she moved from Homer to San Francisco. "I married the cabin too," Jamie Sutton says.

While maintaining a legal practice that takes him around the country, Sutton, 61, is getting to Homer more often these days, donning jeans and a ball cap to check on construction or, last month, to see how the documentary festival went over.

A boyish smile breaks across his face when he talks about an innovation that worked -- say, Anchor Point night, with discounts for Anchor Point residents. Or the spelling bee fund-raiser.

"The cool thing was if you didn't like the word they gave you, you could buy another word for 50 bucks," he said.

The smile doesn't even disappear when asked about his biggest mistakes. Smirking at his own folly, he recalls playing "The Hulk" for a week as a single bill, twice a night, to empty theaters.

"The mistakes we make are playing really lousy movies, even if they're hyped up. The point is, they're not worthy. Now take 'Princess Diaries 2,' which we just showed. It's not my kind of movie, but it's a nice movie, a worthy movie for its audience."

Back home in Marin County, the family holds animated discussions around the dinner table over what movies to bring to Homer. As theater owners, Sutton said, he and his family get to sit in huge leather seats when they attend private screenings for newly released films at the corporate offices of Century Theaters near their home.

"How great is that?" he said.

Sutton is choosy about the movies he shows. He likes the big hits, and he throws in an "art-house-university-crowd" film only once a month or so (the theater usually runs two movies a week, with separate admissions). Sex and violence may be used to make a point, but racy teen movies that "insult the audience" leave a sour taste.

He consults closely with his staff, but refused to show "Jackass: the Movie" despite predictions that it would draw a big Homer crowd. Forced to make a tough choice for last week's film, he opted for the Cole Porter biopic "De-Lovely," which he had previewed, over the backwoods pratfalls of "Without a Paddle."

"If it's a toss-up, let's go for the higher ground," he said. Friday night's Cole Porter opening was a fund-raiser for the Kenai Peninsula Orchestra, he said.

"He definitely has his opinion," said Mann, his assistant manager. "He feels that what plays here reflects Homer."

Sutton is smart to go for diversity because it widens the audience for a small-town theater, says Bruce Goodnow of Northwest Diversified Entertainment, a Seattle-based booking agency that ships films to the Homer Theatre. A theater that just shows the teen films with the hot trailers on TV winds up getting ignored by much of the town, he says.

"Most successful small-town single-owner theaters take a lot of input from the owner's personality," says Goodnow.

GOT ITS START IN 1956

In the age of the multiplex, Homer's theater is one of the oldest continuously running movie houses in Alaska.

The theater opened the day after Christmas in 1956 with a Western that ran for two nights and the community attending for free, recalls Ray Kranich, whose parents built and ran the theater.

Until a new high school with a theater was built in the late 1980s, the movie theater with its stage below the screen was the only venue in town for big shows -- from amateur theatricals and talent shows to the Mr. Homer Contest. Kranich, who as a teenager was "everything from projectionist to janitor," says it was sometimes hard to start the movie.

"I'd look down and there'd be groups of people sitting and visiting all over the theater. It was a real center for social contact," Kranich says.

The next owners, the Belnaps, weren't quite as rigid about family fare as the Kranichs. But they are remembered for trying to edit out the worst sex scenes for the benefit of Homer's moviegoers, either with a splice machine or by momentarily placing a cap over the lens.

THE ECONOMICS

Homer is lucky to have held onto its movie house, given the economics of the business, says Marie Fletcher, who, with her husband, Skip, has spent 50 years running the Liberty Theater in Seward. Opened in 1943, the Liberty is probably Alaska's oldest continuously used movie theater. The Fletchers still run it as a mom and pop operation, at ages 68 and 75, selling tickets and popcorn and sweeping up themselves.

"It's not what you call a real profitable business," Fletcher says. Freight to Alaska for a movie can cost $200, and then the owner has to give the film distributors a share of the ticket sales -- on new releases, more than half the proceeds.

But Goodnow, the booking agent, says the economics are actually improving for towns of a certain size. The home-video revolution clearly pulled away viewers but is widely felt to have helped as well by expanding the movie-going audience. And in an industry where a four-screen multiplex is no longer considered a good investment, a small-town theater isn't likely to get new competition until the town is big enough to support a 10-plex, Goodnow said.

Sutton says ticket sales in Homer are comfortably covering wages and paying off the purchase, even buying a new $6,000 corn popper -- everything except the big capital improvements. One of his first moves was to erect a false front of honey-colored rough-cut timber outside the green metal building, adding a roof to keep rain off theatergoers' heads. His early efforts were rewarded last year with a civic beautification award from the Homer Chamber of Commerce for "most improved" building.

The crowds have grown, drawn both by the improved comfort and the variety. Even some churchgoers, who rigorously avoided all movies in the past, choose to go to an occasional film, says Glacierview Baptist pastor Rick Wise. Learning to choose wisely can strengthen people's faith, he said.

"They were very gracious," he said of the theater owners for allowing his congregation to sell tickets to a special showing of "The Passion of the Christ." They pretty much packed the theater, which seats 220, for a show held right after a Sunday service.

"There were people I'd never seen before coming to that movie," said Mann. "Every movie brings a different crowd."

As assistant manager, she sorts the crowds partly by their refreshments. The worst candy-and-soda messes turn up after the little kid movies, she said, followed by the teen movies.

For the wildlife documentary "Winged Migration," on the other hand, all they sold was "sesame sticks and bottled water," she said.

In an enduring small-town way, the pre-sorted crowds still stand around and socialize after the lights come up.

"It's this big family in there," says manager Colleen Carroll. "Sometimes it's hard to get people out for the next show."

That may not be a top priority for Sutton.

"It's a community resource because it's the only theater in town, and it ought to be a cultural resource because we're dealing with one of the most exciting elements of our culture today," Sutton says. "And we ought to do things in an inspiring way if we can find a way to do it. After all, it's the movies! Isn't that great?"

Reporter Tom Kizzia can be reached at tkizzia@adn.com or in Homer at 907-235-4244.

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Homer resident Chris Kulcheski settles down to watch "Festival Express," a documentary on the 1970 train that journeyed across Canada with the greatest rock bands of the era, including Janis Joplin, The Band and The Grateful Dead. (Photo by Jim Lavrakas / Anchorage Daily News)


Lynette and Jamie Sutton have owned the Homer Theatre for almost two years. Besides physical improvements to the outside and inside of the building, they are beginning to offer special festivals for moviegoers -- such as the four documentaries that ran last month. (Photo by Jim Lavrakas / Anchorage Daily News)


Projectionist Dustin Sharbono threads a movie for an afternoon showing. The poster from the movie "K-Pax" hangs over the Ballantyne projector to protect it from the sprinkler system and dust. (Photo by Jim Lavrakas / Anchorage Daily News)


Patrons watch a showing of "Control Room," a documentary on the Arab news network Al-Jazeera. The movie generated a controversy in Homer with one newspaper letter writer saying the theater should be boycotted. (Photo by Jim Lavrakas / Anchorage Daily News)


Working at the Homer Theatre means multitasking, as Dustin Sharbono clearly demonstrates. He's a projectionist, works concessions and acts as the theater's janitor. (Photo by Jim Lavrakas / Anchorage Daily News)


The lobby of the Homer Theatre becomes a meeting place for local friends as theater assistant manager Abi Mann helps other customers at the concession stand. (Photo by Jim Lavrakas / Anchorage Daily News)

posted 10-17-2004 04:43 PM                    

quote: Thomas Procyk

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Unfortunately, it's being turned into a club of some sort.

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They did the same thing to an old 6 screen theater here. UA 6, which closed a few years ago. Todd Parr used to work there. 6 clubs in one place, called Graham Central Station. What a waste.