Ashley Fells Essay #1: Keeping Our Small Town Cinemas Alive to Benefit Our Communities

Keeping Our Small Town Cinemas Alive to Benefit Our Communities

      This week at the Columbian Theater here in Astoria, Oregon, we are finally installing our new digital projector. It has been years in the making and has cost us, and our generous community of donors, fifty thousand dollars thus far. All over the country, small, community-oriented, and often historic theaters are being forced to shut their doors due to lack of funds for the necessary digital conversion. It is important to support local theaters and keep these businesses alive and thriving, despite the fact that there may be a corporate multi-plex up the street. Small cinemas, like the Columbian, foster a sense of community with which the larger theaters don’t even concern themselves. Theaters like ours preserve history, provide event space, and offer a more unique moving going experience.

      Through and industry-wide mandate, theaters are being forced to switch from the old medium of 35 millimeter film to digital. These digital projectors range in cost from fifty- to ninety-thousand dollars each. It is cheaper for the movie studios and film distributors to do it digitally. The prohibitive cost, however, lies on the shoulders of the theaters themselves.
Single screen establishments that only show one movie a week simply don’t have the revenue to throw down that kind of money and are being forced to close. Most theaters are making attempts to raise the money through crowd funding and benefits. Many aren’t succeeding. We, at the Columbian, are some of the lucky ones.

      Our historic, independent theaters have existed as meeting spaces for almost a hundred years. In these buildings, our communities have gathered to watch news reels and see plays, people have gotten married, and kids have grown up and gone through the jobs of the theater, from candy kid to projectionist. We have live music upon our stage and host a range of events from drag shows to benefits for a local child with cancer. I am hard pressed to think of a single place in Astoria that is as versatile as the Columbian Theater as an event space, and I am sure that goes for small theaters across the country. You cannot simply allow such a venue to close due to the medium of film changing.

      Often times, people will question the importance of a small theater such as ours when a multi-plex exists right up the street. For starters, the cost of going to the larger theaters can be downright prohibitive, especially if you are bringing children. For a child under 12 to go to the multi-plex, it is over six dollars. Adults are charged nine. Once you add in the costs of refreshments, you’re looking at a pretty expensive night out for a family. Couple this with the fact that you’re supporting an out of town corporate entity and it just seems pointless. The Columbian and most other independent theaters charge significantly less for ticket prices alone: two children and an adult can get tickets for less than the price of a single adult admission. Our concessions also run about half the price. Our theater makes just enough money to stay in business, and that’s okay by the owners. It doesn’t exist to make money. It exists because they, and we, love it.

      A common complaint about smaller theaters is that you have to wait for the movie to be shown, oftentimes weeks after it’s been released. To this I counter, going to the movies should be more than standing in line and being crammed into a huge theater to see something released on its first day. It should be about going out for a night, it should be about the experience. I, for one, would much rather wait for a few weeks and go to the Columbian with a bunch of friends. We can all afford it. We can relax on big sofas and order beer and pizza. Small theaters offer an ambiance and a feeling of community that doesn’t exist elsewhere. If I don’t see something immediately, so be it. This way is going to be entirely more fun.    

      In an attempt to help keep our downtowns alive, we must support local businesses. We can’t buy everything from Wal-Mart and we can’t see all of our movies at AMC. There needs to be something to bring people together. In many small towns, one of the cornerstones is the theater. It’s a meeting place and a cheap date night. It’s a way to put money back into our communities and keep it there. It helps to keep history alive and it provides a place for community related events. It is imperative to help your local theaters stay open by donating what you can to their digital conversion funds. The average donation we received for the Columbian through our digital conversion campaign was fifty-four dollars and we raised almost 50,000. You can make a difference in your town as well, and help your downtown thrive, by supporting your local independent theater. Every little bit helps.