REVIVAL It is odd, but on this first day of the fresh start of the “year” concept – Number 2006 – I should find myself thinking of it as being a time when the idea of community theaters - “movie houses” we called them, has been revived. As with a used year, some people seem to think they can wish, or buy themselves back into what they now remember as being happier times.
One by one, up and down our area, town after town has a project underway to r e reopen a closed movie theater. It is a costly and somewhat deceptive dream in many cases. It is highly unlikely that a community in this area will support a theater of this type, being revered today as having been so inexpensive and, hence, popular with the general run of paying patrons. It can't work that way again.
In nearby Staunton, Va. the 1930's version of the old “Dixie Theater” reopened as a four-box multi-screen shop in an effort to contest the opening of a new movie house in the shopping Mall south of town, after making a false start as a one-screen revival. More recently someone decided to redo the old “Visulite Theater” - so called because it was one of three theaters in the state which used a system which places the projection apparatus in back of the screen. There is not a great deal one might do to modify a rectangular, curb-side box – seating, at best, a hundred and fifty paying customers. It stands to immediate financial stability that augmented concessions are going to be the profit margin of primary concern for such a reconstituted “motion picture house”. Pop Corn is seen as the natural starting point for such a new beginning for something that old. New admission prices of about $4.00 for adults and $1.00 for children allow movie goers to see their favorite film features - all except the newest ones.
There's another type. The “Wayne Theater”, in Waynesboro, Va., is trying to emulate the relative success of the larger “Paramount Theater” in downtown Charlottesville, Va. They are aimed at being art theater centered in addition to being movies houses. That which made fairly good sense in the University of Virginia area does not ,of necessity, apply to Waynesboro.
Home movies hurt the local picture houses years ago and television came of age to deal it pretty much of a death blow. It remained for DVD and other such electronic marvels to spring the trap and drop the movie house into the box of lost and gone forever entertainment methods.
A. L. M January 1, 2006 [c447wds]
