Blog posts matching ‘Moore Theatre, WA’ (2024)

Fundraising

From KMVT.com: Charmy LeaVell and her husband bough the Schubert Theatre in Gooding in 2008.
“We heard it was going to be turned into a racquetball court so we made an offer on the building,” LeaVell said.

They held it until 2014, when they formed a nonprofit called Gooding Restoration for Entertainment, Arts and Theatre, or GREAT, Inc. and donated to the organization.

They plan to restore the almost 100-year-old theatre which entered the National Register of Historic Places in 2004.

The theatre has seen better days and its age is certainly showing. Frozen water sits in corners, sunlight finds it’s way through cracks and holes and wires hang from the ceiling. This week the basem*nt even flooded.

Then there’s the damage that came from previous owners. When they tried to make the theatre into a place to watch feature films, previous management spray painted over much of the original decorations with black paint.

“A lot of the beauty was covered and we do have to undo a lot of that, we have to undo a lot of damage,” said Diana Rowe, a volunteer with GREAT, Inc.

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Breaking

From The Pueblo Chieftain: The windows are darkened, the box office is closed and the marquee is still advertising a production from Dec. 8, 9 and 10. The curtain has officially fallen on the Damon Runyon Theater Company, prompting sadness from local performing arts advocates and questions about the fate of its historic headquarters.

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Renovations

From the Cape Cod Times: The historic Cape Cinema is planning some restorations, and the job will start with what most affects audience comfort: the seats.

Cinema managers and the Cape Cod Center for the Arts Inc., which owns the building, recently launched a campaign to raise more than $165,000 to restore the 277 original art deco chairs that were built back in 1930 specifically for the movie theater space – and specifically to match its massive, celestially themed ceiling mural.

While a small portion of the chairs have been previously patched, covered, reupholstered or replaced, this will be the first time in the intervening 86 years that the seats have been rebuilt to the original vision.

Synthomas Upholstery in Hyannis is due to take each chair apart and, by hand, rebuild and reupholster it in tangerine suede to match the original plan, according to Eric Hart, who operates the theater. While the covers will be fire-proof and stain- and rub-resistant, there will also be padding and support added. Contemporary patrons will likely welcome those additions, Hart notes, especially for the multi-hour simulcasts of live opera, theater and ballet the cinema has offered in recent years.

About half of the money (so close to $80,000) needs to be raised by the end of the year for the project to go forward, says general manager Hugh Hart. Once repairs begin, 15 chairs are scheduled to be restored by hand per week, with the project taking more than five months while the cinema remains open.

The moviehouse will likely shut down for a couple of weeks in spring, Eric Hart says, to finish up the work and make other changes (including new carpeting, sealing the floors and rebuilding the lobby concession stand in an art deco style) before the 2017 summer season begins.

Although all donations are welcome, the campaign urges patrons to donate $600 for the cost of restoring one chair (which includes the floor work). Those who do will have their name engraved on a plaque on the chair, get free admission to movies there for a year and, according to a fundraising letter from Hart and center president Leslie A. Gardner, “become a part of the ongoing legacy of this historic building.”

Pretty much every part of the cinema has an art-related history – including those chairs. Raymond Moore, founder of the 90-year-old Cape Playhouse next door, opened the summer movie theater in 1930, with New York architect Alfred Easton Poor designing the facade using Centerville’s Congregational Church as a model.

The auditorium was created in art deco style and the arm chairs designed by Vienna-born Paul T. Frankl – considered one of the most influential artists of the American art deco period, according to cinema lore – through his New York City gallery. The chairs were produced by the Johnson Furniture Company with black lacquer frames and tangerine suede, meant to complement the cinema’s 6,400-square-foot ceiling mural of the heavens designed by American painter, printer and illustrator Rockwell Kent.

The chairs, according to Eric Hart, were individually cut for a specific space in the theater, with legs different sizes because of the sloped seating. The three dozen or so chairs in the balcony were replaced sometime in the 1970s – before Hart was involved – with flip-down movie-theater chairs and those are not part of the current restoration plan. But the extra originals from that balcony replacement have, over the years, been used to fill in for broken chairs downstairs. Chair legs have had to be trimmed, though, so the replacement chairs would fit specific spaces, Hart notes.

Regular patrons know the current chairs have white seat-covers, which Hugh Hart believes may have been originally used to protect the seats when the summer-only theater was shuttered. More recently, the covers have obscured rips and wear as the year-round use of the theater over the past decade has accelerated deterioration. Some of the chairs were also damaged decades ago, Eric Hart says, when the sprinkler system was tripped during the winter and poured 2 feet of water into the theater.

Restoring the seats has been under discussion for a decade and multiple companies were consulted and explored. Acknowledging such a large fundraiser is “a risk,” Eric Hart says he hopes the major community effort needed to restore the seats will also be the start of a wider push to raise money to restore the Rockwell Kent mural, too.

There could be “a whole movement to restore the theater rather than just maintain it,” he says. “We could make it as beautiful as it was when it opened in 1930.”

But, the Harts hope, with the comfort level desired by 21st-century patrons.

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Fundraising

From wbbjtv.com: The sound of applause will sound ring out again at the historic downtown Bells Theatre. “It’s been closed for 20 years, but the wallpaper, the lights, the seating, the velvet curtains — it’s all right there,” said Mildred Brimm, who says she grew up in the theatre.

Brimm’s grandfather had a store beside the theatre. Now there’s an effort to make Bells Theatre the main attraction again, and it all started over a conversation at lunch.

“We started looking at different places in our cities that maybe we’d forgotten but could be a great tourist attraction or something hidden, we need to bring attention to,” Charlie Moore with the Crockett County Chamber of Commerce said.

That same day, they got the key and unlocked the door to the theatre and saw the work that needed to be done, but Brimm said it brought back so many memories.

“When I walked in, it looked just like it did when I was a child growing up in this town. I could almost smell the popcorn,” Brimm said.

Friday morning, state officials presented a round of grants to the city to make these efforts possible. A $380,000 grant from Tennessee Parks and Recreation, a clean energies grant for $350,000, and a $50,000 check from the Tennessee Department of Agriculture’s Department of Rural Development.

“The mayor referred to us as some bulldogs, and he’s right,” Sarah Conley with Crockett County’s Arts Council said. “We got a hold of this project and we’re not going to let it go until it is completed.”

“They’re determined to do it, and I think they will,” Bells Mayor Joe Williams said.

There is no word yet on when the $1.2 million project will reopen for its second act.

“We’ve got to do it now. If we don’t, small-town America and the feeling of growing up in a small town is going to be lost,” Brimm said.

The project still needs $185,000. If you would like to donate, visit the Facebook Page for the project, Save the Bells Theatre.

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Openings

From The Connecticut Post: The Bijou Theatre has not seen its final curtain call after all.

In July, Christine Brown, president of the nonprofit that operated the theater, said it would close its doors on Aug. 7 because it didn’t work financially.

“We’re really, really proud of what we’ve accomplished, but the economics have made it impossible for us to keep going,” Brown said at the time.

But, according to developer Phil Kuchma, whose company owns the building, no one has taken any final bows. “It’s just under a new tenant,” he said.

Kuchma said he never planned to close the theater, but potential visitors might have had a hard time learning this. Though the Bijou has a new website and Facebook page, the original site, the thebijoutheatre.com, still comes up in web searches and as of Monday featured a farewell message.

“The Bijou Theatre thanks the people of Bridgeport, the local theater community and all of its past patrons for the privilege of serving them,” the message states.

The theater’s former Facebook page comes up as unavailable.

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Industry

From The Hollywood Reporter: The sequelitis virus infected a number of big-budget franchise installments, except for a precious few (think ‘Captain America: Civil War’ and ‘Finding Dory’), while horror also helped save the day and Disney dominated.

Even though there’s still a week to go before the summer season ends on Labor Day, the verdict is in: Box-office revenue in North America should clock in at $4.5 billion, predicts comScore. That’s the second-best showing ever, behind only 2013’s $4.8 billion and up one percent over last year.

So why is Hollywood on red alert? Blame it on the sequelitis virus, which hit the U.S. particularly hard.

On the one hand, moviegoers in the U.S. and across the oceans turned out in force for Marvel Studio’s franchise installment Captain America: Civil War and Pixar’s sequel Finding Dory — they delivered Disney the summer’s two top-grossing films worldwide with $1.52 billion and $929.1 million, respectively. But the same moviegoers largely rejected a number of other big-budget sequels, reboots and remakes. One genre that’s been immune to the disease is horror, helping to deliver a number of solid doubles and triples that boosted the bottom line.

In terms of attendance, 518 million people went to the movies this summer in North America, according to early projections. That’s down roughly 3 percent from last year, but up from a dismal showing in 2014, when 497 million consumers bought tickets. However, the 518 million is behind summer 2013 (585 million) and summer 2012 (539 million).

Heading into summer, no studio executive could have imagined that STX Entertainment’s $20 million Bad Moms, an R-rated comedy that has grossed $95 million to date in North America, or Universal’s $5 million horror sequel The Purge: Anarchy ($79 million) would domestically out-gross the $170 million sequel Alice Through the Looking Glass starring Johnny Depp, which earned just $77 million in North America.

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Renovations

From the Roanoke Times:
The old stage had to go.

Workers inside the Historic Masonic Theatre on Main Street in Clifton Forge pried up dry-rotted boards. At least 10 feet above them, pallets dangled from new rigging. The boxes on those pallets contained the new stage curtains, held in suspense until crews finished the unplanned replacement of the stage floor.

Renovations tend to come with surprises. This one, though inconvenient, wasn’t going to keep the 110-year-old theater from being ready for its July 1 grand reopening.

Seven years ago, a determined group of residents set up the Masonic Theatre Preservation Foundation to restore the crumbling theater to life. This month, the $6.5 million construction project is nearly done.

“It’s not an end. It’s just a beginning,” said John Hillert, the retiree from the insurance industry who started the push to save the theater.

The grand reopening will include big-band music by the Sway Katz and Americana rock from the Scott Miller Trio, a screening of “The Wizard of Oz,” and tours of the theater, which promoters dub an “architectural treasure.”

“It’s a remarkable project,” said theater executive director Jeff Stern. “You can feel the love, the desire from the community, in the building when you walk into it. It’s a meaningful part of Clifton Forge and the history of this region.”

The reopening of the theater launches the most ambitious piece of a concerted effort to recast the 3,884-population town, once home to a major maintenance shop for the Chesapeake & Ohio Railway, as a hub for creativity and a picturesque destination for tourists. The theater is intended to serve as the crowning jewel of a small downtown with shops, restaurants and galleries all in walking distance.

“We’re very proud of what’s happening up here,” said Clifton Forge town manager Darlene Burcham.

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Breaking

From Los Angeles Business Journal: Apple Inc. is in the in the process of securing a lease for retail space at the historic Tower Theater downtown, according to sources familiar with the transaction. When complete, the lease for an Apple store at the building, at 800 S. Broadway, could spark dramatic changes along a corridor that has long been in flux.

“If you have a retailer like Apple that comes to Broadway, everyone else will follow,” said Jones Lang LaSalle agent Lorena Tomb. “It’s going to push rents up, and it’s going to change the entire street.”

Terms of the deal could not be determined. Apple said it has not made any announcements about a store at that location. The brokerage reportedly representing Apple, Robert K. Futterman & Associates, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The stretch of Broadway between First Street and Olympic Boulevard has roughly 250,000 square feet of vacant retail space, despite being populated recently by retailers such as Urban Outfitters, Gap Outlet, Acne Studios, and Oak. The presence of an Apple store could be the spark that reshapes the area.

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Theaters

MOORE, OK — The Moore Warren and IMAX, which is one of the top grossing theatres in the country as well as consistently the highest attended was heavily damaged in the tornado in Moore Monday. The area by the IMAX building has turned into a triage area.

Read more in the Huffington Post.

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Theaters

TRAVERSE CITY, MICHIGAN — The Traverse City Film Festival, which owns the State Theatre, has topped its $500,000 goal according to the festival’s founder Michael Moore. The money was needed to balance its budget and to make improvements and repairs to the theater which dates back to 1916.

Additional details are available from the Detroit Free Press.

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