Connect with us

Business

One Fix for Ailing Movie Theaters? Becoming Nonprofits.

Published

on

One Fix for Ailing Movie Theaters? Becoming Nonprofits.

Nicki Wilson was shocked when her local newspaper reported in March 2023 that the Triplex Theater, an independent four-screen movie house in Great Barrington, Mass., was shutting down after almost three decades in business.

The Triplex, the only theater in town, was a much-loved fixture, attracting moviegoers from all around the Berkshires, even on winter nights when not much else was open, Ms. Wilson said.

“I couldn’t imagine living in a town without a movie theater,” she said.

Ms. Wilson wasn’t the only one who felt this way, and after a communitywide campaign the Triplex reopened in November 2023 in a much different form. No longer is it dependent on ticket and popcorn sales. The Triplex has become a nonprofit organization relying on donations, grants and plenty of volunteer labor. And instead of leaning on the next Hollywood blockbuster, the Triplex focuses on what the community wants to see.

“In an independent theater, you can show what you want,” said Gail Lansky, vice president of the Triplex’s board. “You can show retrospectives. You can show foreign films. You can do film festivals. Free Saturdays for kids”

Advertisement

Certainly not all nonprofit theaters are doing well, but the model has worked, at least so far, in places like the Berkshires, where a devoted and well-heeled clientele is willing and able to support the arts. Two nearby nonprofit movie theaters in New York, the Moviehouse in Millerton and the Crandell Theater in Chatham, have attracted sizable fan bases. Across the country, more than 250 movie theaters are nonprofits, said Bryan Braunlich, executive director of the Cinema Foundation, a movie-industry group that provides research for cinemas.

“We are definitely seeing a trend of communities rallying around their local theaters,” he said.

And movie theaters have needed saving. Since 2019, the number of screens operating in the United States has declined 12 percent, to 36,369 as of 2023, said David Hancock, chief analyst in media and entertainment at the research firm Omdia. The popularity of at-home streaming over the past decade was a factor. Before the pandemic, audience numbers were already waning, but Covid nearly dealt the industry a death blow, as consumers got used to staying home and became pickier about what movies they went to a theater to see.

“People certainly came back, but much more slowly,” said the Triplex’s former owner, Richard Stanley. “Ultimately, I saw the handwriting on the wall and decided I had to close.”

When a theater shuts down in town, it’s not just a problem for film buffs. Because of their unique architecture, with sloped floors and few windows, they are hard to convert to other purposes and often leave prominent spaces empty.

Advertisement

Becoming a nonprofit allows theaters to draw on different revenue sources, like film festivals, and the hope is that a theater catering to the people of a town will build a loyal and supportive base.

This doesn’t happen overnight. That was the case with the Belcourt Theater in Nashville. A community group had raised millions of dollars to operate and renovate the 1925 movie palace, which briefly served as the main stage of the Grand Ole Opry.

“All of us who work in the theater remember the days when we’d show ‘Badlands’ to four people, and now we show ‘Badlands’ to 150 to 200 people,” said the Belcourt’s executive director, Stephanie Silverman, referring to the director Terrence Malick’s debut feature from 1973.

Those who rallied around the Triplex are hoping for the same. When the theater opened in 1995 on the site of a burned-down lumberyard, nearby shopping centers had sucked the life out of Main Street and Great Barrington was struggling economically, said Mr. Stanley, Triplex’s former owner.

Main Street is a very different place today, largely because of an influx of tourists and weekenders, and the Triplex “was a very pivotal, really core thing that brought people to town,” said Betsy Andrus, executive director of the Southern Berkshire Chamber of Commerce.

Advertisement

By 2023, two other multiplexes in the Berkshires, in Lanesborough and North Adams, had already shut down. But Ms. Wilson believed there was hope for the Triplex. She called Mr. Stanley to ask if there was some way to reopen the theater.

“I asked what we could do, and he said, ‘Well, pay me $1 million and you can buy the theater,’” she said.

Ms. Wilson didn’t have $1 million to spare, but she did have plenty of friends. In April 2023, she invited her neighbors to her living room to discuss saving the theater. The group, which called itself Save the Triplex, created a GoFundMe page and a website to raise money. The response was overwhelming, said Hannah Wilken, who had spent many weekends at the Triplex with her friends as a teenager and was involved with the fund-raising.

Even people who hadn’t been to the theater since before Covid felt a visceral connection to the place. “We just started getting inundated with people saying: ‘I want to help. I want to donate. Sign me up,’” Ms. Wilken said.

The actress Karen Allen, who owns a fiber-arts store in town, turned over memorabilia from “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” which she starred in, for an auction. A major boost came when the photographer Gregory Crewdson donated $225,000, after selling copies of a signed limited edition of his work.

Advertisement

Within a few months, the group had raised $246,000 — enough to pay the first year’s mortgage. Mr. Stanley liked the idea of keeping the Triplex alive as a nonprofit run by the town’s residents and gave Ms. Wilson’s group a five-year mortgage to buy the theater.

The campaign has benefited from the large and devoted Berkshires arts community, which regularly draws celebrities to town. Bill Murray showed up at the Triplex to discuss “The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou,” the Wes Anderson film in which Mr. Murray played the title character, and Joan Baez was there for a showing of a documentary on her life. Arlo Guthrie discussed the 1969 movie “Alice’s Restaurant,” which had been filmed nearby. Not all the events have made money, but enough have done well to keep the Triplex going.

Movie theaters remain a dicey business, and for the Triplex to survive long term it will need a lot more money. The four screening rooms need major renovations. And although an active board oversees the theater’s operations, it had just two full-time paid employees until this month. (A third full-time employee starts later this month, and the theater also has part-time help including the people who sell tickets and popcorn.) Ms. Wilson, the board’s president, hopes to hire more people, but for now the theater still depends largely on volunteers.

“The challenges are real,” said Ms. Lansky, the board’s vice president. “Everybody knows that an independent theater cannot rely on tickets and concessions alone.”

Nonprofit theaters also tend to be a low priority for film distributors, Mr. Hancock of Omdia said. That means they can’t always show the latest Hollywood blockbuster and must find other ways to keep up audience enthusiasm and a continuing commitment from the community members to donate money and volunteer their time, he said.

Advertisement

“The model can work, but only if the cinema is valued by the local community,” Mr. Hancock added.

Still, those behind the Triplex’s revival believe an audience is out there. Sitting at home and watching movies on Netflix just isn’t the same thing, said Ben Elliott, the creative director at the theater and one of its few paid staff members.

Mr. Elliott grew up in Great Barrington and regularly visited the Triplex as a child. One of the things he missed during Covid was the sound of conversations in the lobby after a movie ended.

“Being together in a physical space is something that’s becoming rarer and rarer, and holding on to that, I think, is important for communities across the country,” he said. “It’s also, for us, the most viable way to keep a theater open.”

Advertisement
Continue Reading
Click to comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Business

Devin Nunes Departs Trump Media After 4 Years as C.E.O.

Published

on

Devin Nunes Departs Trump Media After 4 Years as C.E.O.

President Trump’s social media company, which has consistently lost money and struggled with a flagging share price, announced Tuesday that it was replacing Devin Nunes as its chief executive officer.

The announcement offered no reason for the sudden departure of Mr. Nunes, a former Republican congressman from California. Mr. Trump had tapped him to run the company, Trump Media & Technology, in late 2021.

The announcement was made in a news release by the president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., who is a company board member and oversees a trust that controls his father’s 115-million-share stake in Trump Media. President Trump is not an officer or director of the company.

Mr. Nunes said in a statement on Truth Social, which is Trump Media’s flagship product, that it was an “appropriate time” for a new leader with experience in media and mergers to “steer Trump Media through its current transition phase.”

Trump Media has incurred hundreds of millions in losses, and its shares have performed poorly since the company went public by completing a merger with a cash-rich special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, in March 2024. The stock, which ended its first day of trading around $58 a share, closed Tuesday at $9.82.

Advertisement

Shares of Trump Media trade under the symbol DJT, which are President Trump’s initials. Truth Social has emerged as the main social media platform for Mr. Trump to communicate his policy decisions and opinions to the world.

Last year, Trump Media took in $3.7 million in revenue and recorded a $712 million net loss.

In December, Trump Media announced a plan to merge with TAE Technologies, a fusion power company. The all-stock deal, which was valued at $6 billion at the time, would create one of the first publicly traded nuclear fusion companies.

Trump Media said in February that it was considering spinning off its Truth Social platform in a merger with another cash-rich SPAC, Texas Ventures Acquisition III Corp.

Mr. Nunes is being replaced on an interim basis by Kevin McGurn, who has been an adviser to Trump Media since the end of 2024. Mr. McGurn, a former executive at Hulu, the streaming service, was listed in a recent regulatory filing as the chief executive of Texas Ventures.

Advertisement

The Trump Media release announcing the management change provided no update on the merger with TAE Technologies or the proposed SPAC deal for Truth Social.

Continue Reading

Business

Netflix plans to buy historic Radford Studio Center

Published

on

Netflix plans to buy historic Radford Studio Center

Streaming entertainment giant Netflix is in negotiations to buy the historic Radford Studio Center lot in Studio City.

Netflix plans to purchase the Los Angeles studio that has been home to generations of landmark television shows, including “Gunsmoke” and “Seinfeld,” according to two people with knowledge of the pending deal who were not authorized to speak about it publicly.

The studio’s previous operator, Hackman Capital Partners, defaulted on a $1.1-billion mortgage in January. Investment bank Goldman Sachs took over the property and is in talks with Netflix to sell it for between $330 million and $400 million.

Representatives for Hackman and Netflix declined to comment on the planned sale.

Advertisement

Culver City-based Hackman Capital Partners and Square Mile Capital Management teamed up to buy the Radford Avenue property from ViacomCBS in 2021 with a winning bid of $1.85 billion, after a competitive battle for the 55-acre studio beloved by the television industry.

At the time, the staggering price tag underscored the value — and scarcity — of TV soundstages in Los Angeles as content producers scrambled for space to shoot TV shows and movies to stock their streaming services. It was one of the largest-ever real estate transactions for a TV studio complex in Los Angeles.

Since then, production has substantially declined in Southern California. L.A. continues to battle the loss of production to other states and countries, as well as the lingering effects on the industry of the pandemic and the 2023 dual writers’ and actors’ strikes. Cutbacks in spending at the major studios after a surge in streaming-fueled TV production have further damped film activity in the region.

Founded by silent film comedy legend Mack Sennett in 1928, the lot became known as “Hit City” in the decades after World War II as popular TV shows such as “Leave It to Beaver,” “Gilligan’s Island,” “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” “The Bob Newhart Show” and “Will & Grace” were made there. The storied lot gave the Studio City neighborhood its name,

Netflix, which has a market cap of about $455 billion — more than double that of Walt Disney Co. — has maintained its dominance in the global streaming business with more than 325 million subscribers.

Advertisement

The Los Gatos-based company has production offices worldwide, including facilities in Albuquerque, Brooklyn, London, Madrid and Toronto.

Netflix had secured an $82.7-billion deal to buy Warner Bros. studios and streaming services in December, but withdrew from the bidding war in late February after Paramount Skydance offered $31 a share. As part of the switch, Netflix was paid a $2.8-billion termination fee.

Continue Reading

Business

Kevin Warsh, Trump’s Pick to Lead Fed, Faces Senate at Tricky Moment

Published

on

Kevin Warsh, Trump’s Pick to Lead Fed, Faces Senate at Tricky Moment

Kevin M. Warsh, President Trump’s pick to lead the Federal Reserve, has spent years refining his pitch for why he should get one of the most powerful economic jobs in the world.

At his confirmation hearing on Tuesday, he will have to convince Senate lawmakers that he is ready to step into the role, which has become politically explosive amid Mr. Trump’s relentless attacks on the institution and its current chair, Jerome H. Powell.

Mr. Warsh, who is scheduled to testify before the Banking Committee at 10 a.m., plans to commit to being “strictly independent” on decisions related to interest rates, according to his prepared remarks. He also plans to tell lawmakers that he is unbothered by Mr. Trump’s incessant calls for substantially lower borrowing costs. And he will use his opening statement to underscore his focus on disrupting the “status quo” at an institution he said just last year was in need of “regime change.”

“In a time that will rank among the most consequential in our nation’s history, I believe a reform-oriented Federal Reserve can make a real difference to the American people,” he plans to tell lawmakers, adding: “The stakes could scarcely be higher.”

Mr. Warsh, 56, faces significant hurdles to winning confirmation. He has broad support among Republicans, who control the Senate and can confirm him along party lines. Yet his candidacy has stalled because of an ongoing investigation by the Justice Department into Mr. Powell and his handling of the Fed’s headquarters renovations.

Advertisement

Mr. Powell’s term as chair ends May 15, but Mr. Warsh looks increasingly unlikely to be in place by then. That’s because Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina — a Republican on the Banking Committee who has expressed support for Mr. Warsh — has vowed to block any attempt to confirm a new Fed chair until the legal threats into Mr. Powell are resolved. For Mr. Tillis, the investigation is a blatant attempt to coerce Mr. Powell into lowering rates, undermining the Fed’s independence and confirming the politicization of the Justice Department.

“I’m not going to condone bad decision-making and bad behavior,” Mr. Tillis told reporters on Monday in reference to the Justice Department’s lack of evidence of any wrongdoing.

The department has vowed to continue its investigation, despite numerous legal setbacks.

“I think ultimately, he will be confirmed,” Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana, another Republican on the committee, told reporters on Monday. “I just don’t know what decade.”

Mr. Warsh’s ascent would mark a homecoming for the Wall Street financier, who served as a Fed governor from 2006-11.

Advertisement

Since leaving the Fed, he has amassed assets worth well in excess of $100 million, according to financial disclosures submitted before his hearing. Those have drawn scrutiny because Mr. Warsh repeatedly invoked “pre-existing confidentiality agreements” to avoid disclosing the details behind several of his investments. He has said he would divest a substantial amount of his assets before taking the job.

The global financial crisis dominated Mr. Warsh’s first tenure at the Fed, thrusting him into the middle of discussions about how the central bank should respond to the threat of bank failures, turmoil in financial markets and a painful recession that followed. Mr. Warsh, then the youngest-ever member of the Board of Governors, was initially supportive of the Fed’s efforts to shore up financial markets by buying enormous quantities of government bonds and expanding its balance sheet to ease strains in financial markets and support growth by keeping market-based rates low.

But he soon soured on subsequent efforts to buy more bonds and resigned in protest. That experience has stuck with Mr. Warsh, who has made a smaller balance sheet a pillar of his plans if he takes over as chair.

Mr. Warsh would also be likely to usher in changes to how the Fed communicates its policy views, having expressed misgivings about its strategy of providing so-called forward guidance, or hints about how interest rates may change in the future to guide expectations. He has also suggested that policymakers across the Fed system should speak far less. Mr. Powell held a news conference after each rate decision, or eight a year, and delivered speeches with regularity. Mr. Trump’s pick to join the Fed last year, Stephen I. Miran, often speaks multiple times a week.

“Once policymakers reveal their economic forecast, they can become prisoners of their own words,” Mr. Warsh said in a speech last year. “Fed leaders would be well served to skip opportunities to share their latest musings. The swivel-chair problem, rhetorically waxing and waning with the latest data release, is common and counterproductive.”

Advertisement

What is far less clear is how much Mr. Warsh would heed the president’s demands for lower interest rates. Mr. Trump said he would not pick someone for chair who did not support lower borrowing costs.

Mr. Warsh sought in his opening statement to downplay the costs of a president’s voicing his opinions about rates, saying central bankers must be “strong enough to listen to a diversity of views from all corners, humble enough to be open-minded to new ideas and new economic developments, wise enough to translate imperfect data into meaningful insight and dedicated enough to make judgments faithfully and wisely.”

Earlier this year, many officials at the Fed saw a path to gradually lower rates as the impact of Mr. Trump’s tariffs faded and inflation restarted its slide back toward 2 percent after almost of year of stalling out. The war in Iran — and the energy shock it has unleashed — has upended those forecasts, however, prompting officials to turn wary about lowering rates.

Mr. Warsh will face questions on Tuesday about the economic impact of the war and how it has changed his thinking around the Fed’s ability to lower rates. While at the Fed, he was known as an inflation hawk who often argued against providing policy relief for fear that it could stoke price pressures. He also said the Fed should aspire to engage in rule-based policymaking that stems from formulas that prescribe how officials should set rates based on levels of inflation and employment.

While campaigning to be chair, Mr. Warsh embraced the need for rate cuts, arguing that there was a path for lower borrowing costs because of his plans to shrink the balance sheet, which would lift longer-term rates that then could be offset by lowering short-term ones. He also argued that higher productivity from the boom in artificial intelligence could unleash higher growth without stoking inflation, which could give the Fed more space to lower rates than otherwise would be the case.

Advertisement

In his opening statement, Mr. Warsh made clear, however, that a failure to bring down inflation, which has been stuck above the Fed’s 2 percent target for roughly five years, would strictly be the Fed’s fault, suggesting that he would shoulder the blame if he did not bring it back down during his tenure.

“Inflation is a choice, and the Fed must take responsibility for it,” he will tell lawmakers.

Megan Mineiro contributed reporting.

Continue Reading
Advertisement

Trending