I sit next to my mother at an old movie house in Great Barrington. This night only, the Mahaiwe Theatre on Castle Street is showing “Singin’ in the Rain.” My feet are cold, three rows back from the screen as I eat buttery dollar popcorn, watching Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds stay up all night singing and dancing. Behind us, the AV teacher from my high school or another local projectionist is lacing up the film one reel at a time. Paint chips swell from time and curl up to scratch my thigh. The front sign outside of the theatre is rusting and a good 40 percent of the bulbs are burned out.
My hope is that I’m not part of the last generation of filmgoers who can experience a movie like this, before local theaters rely on big-ticket movies instead of artsy or black and white classics, go digital, or, even worse, are gutted.
The Mahaiwe Theatre opened in 1905 as a performing arts theatre during the age of Vaudeville.
It became a movie house in 1930. In recent years the Mahaiwe was strictly an opera house, which disappointed me as a young local, but has since become a year-round movie, music, and performing arts house again. Because of the “Save America’s Treasures” foundation, the Mahaiwe underwent a $9 million, certifiably historic restoration. Paint chips firmly supplanted, the new front sign smooth and unnervingly blue, not a single bulb flickers on and off.
This is no longer the same theatre in which I saw “Signin’ in the Rain” that day years ago, but the Mahaiwe is still alive as an art-house. Other Western Mass. movie houses have not been so lucky.
Not every theatre has been granted $9 million for restoration, and not every town sees a movie theatre as an integral part of the community. Sure, a lot of what the Mahaiwe does now is in line with the Tanglewood mentality. Only vacationing New Yorkers and wealthy locals can enjoy the Metropolitan live simulcasts, but the Mahaiwe also shows old movies at $6 a ticket. Amherst Cinema has a healthy balance of National Theatre Live performances that draw die-hard Chekov fans, affordable new art house and independent movies, and classic series like this past summer’s Humphrey Bogart festival, which eventually weeds out those only looking for explosives and the cheap digital thrills of blockbuster hits.
It’s not that I don’t enjoy a good cheap thrill once and a while, but to think that there is support for Cinemark and not an old movie house is crushing.
At one time there were 20 theatres in Hampshire County alone. Of that, six have survived, and of that six, only four play regularly-scheduled movies year round. The Calvin theatre in Northampton, one of the surviving six, has lasted only by becoming part of the Iron Horse Entertainment Group, showing live music instead of movies.
This does not even come close to accounting for all of the theatres past of the Pioneer Valley. Hampden County, which includes cities like Springfield, Holyoke, Agawam and Chicopee, has been home to 82 theatres, half of which have been demolished. Today only seven theatres in Hampden County are still running.
To be revived or kept alive, theaters cannot rely on ticket or popcorn sales alone. The Paramount Theater in Springfield opened in 1929 and became the Hippodrome in 1999, losing one floor of its seats but otherwise maintaining most of its original architecture, until it was closed in 2010. While the Hippodrome will never be the movie house it once was between the 30s and up until the 60s, the theatre will reopen thanks to the New England Farm Worker’s Association, which bought the theater for $1.725 million and is paying an additional $86,458 in property taxes.
When the Pleasant Street Theatre was in danger of closing in 2007, 450 people came together to scrape up $130,000. Other than a few upgrades, the theater is still the same as it was in the 1970s. The Victory Theater in Holyoke, which opened in the 1920s and has been closed since the late 1970s, was acquired almost three years ago by the Massachusetts International Festival of the Arts. That organization is currently looking at a $625,000 business plan to realize its goal of restoring the historical landmark.
Needless to say, sustaining an old movie theater or art house takes a lot of time and money. It also requires someone to care about the community. The New England Farm Worker’s Association plans to renovate the Hippodrome as part of a larger project to renew and restore downtown Springfield, an effort to revitalize the city’s faded culture. Plans to renovate the Victory in Holyoke include redoing some of the surrounding buildings, such as the Holyoke House, and could help characterize Holyoke by its thriving businesses rather than its abandoned ones.
Movie houses are representative of another time, but it is clear that those times are not lost. As we move into a digital age of convenience and rapid scene changes, I have to wonder why people still gravitate toward Hitchcock and Bogart. Theaters have the power of tying together a community, of subscribing to an art that asks people to gather under balconies and Corinthian columns to be transported to another time and place. When I watch a film, I’d like to be given the opportunity to see one that represents a time when people cared about film as an art, and not just a way to make money, in a place that is indicative of the time that movie was first screened, on the quality of 35 millimeter film that realizes the intentions of the filmmaker. And in this desire, I know that I am not alone.
Rachael Roth is a collegian columnist. She can be reached at [email protected].
