Business

One Fix for Ailing Movie Theaters? Becoming Nonprofits.

Published

1 year ago

February 17, 2025

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”

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.”

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Business

A new delivery bot is coming to L.A., built stronger to survive in these streets

Published

10 hours ago

February 28, 2026

Press Room

A new delivery bot is coming to L.A., built stronger to survive in these streets

The rolling robots that deliver groceries and hot meals across Los Angeles are getting an upgrade.

Coco Robotics, a UCLA-born startup that’s deployed more than 1,000 bots across the country, unveiled its next-generation machines on Thursday.

The new robots are bigger, tougher and better equipped for autonomy than their predecessors. The company will use them to expand into new markets and increase its presence in Los Angeles, where it makes deliveries through a partnership with DoorDash.

Dubbed Coco 2, the next-gen bots have upgraded cameras and front-facing lidar, a laser-based sensor used in self-driving cars. They will use hardware built by Nvidia, the Santa Clara-based artificial intelligence chip giant.

Coco co-founder and chief executive Zach Rash said Coco 2 will be able to make deliveries even in conditions unsafe for human drivers. The robot is fully submersible in case of flooding and is compatible with special snow tires.

Zach Rash, co-founder and CEO of Coco, opens the top of the new Coco 2 (Next-Gen) at the Coco Robotics headquarters in Venice.

(Kayla Bartkowski/Los Angeles Times)

Early this month, a cute Coco was recorded struggling through flooded roads in L.A.

“She’s doing her best!” said the person recording the video. “She is doing her best, you guys.”

Instagram followers cheered the bot on, with one posting, “Go coco, go,” and others calling for someone to help the robot.

“We want it to have a lot more reliability in the most extreme conditions where it’s either unsafe or uncomfortable for human drivers to be on the road,” Rash said. “Those are the exact times where everyone wants to order.”

The company will ramp up mass production of Coco 2 this summer, Rash said, aiming to produce 1,000 bots each month.

The design is sleek and simple, with a pink-and-white ombré paint job, the company’s name printed in lowercase, and a keypad for loading and unloading the cargo area. The robots have four wheels and a bigger internal compartment for carrying food and goods .

Many of the bots will be used for expansion into new markets across Europe and Asia, but they will also hit the streets in Los Angeles and operate alongside the older Coco bots.

Coco has about 300 bots in Los Angeles already, serving customers from Santa Monica and Venice to Westwood, Mid-City, West Hollywood, Hollywood, Echo Park, Silver Lake, downtown, Koreatown and the USC area.

The new Coco 2 (Next-Gen) drives along the sidewalk at the Coco Robotics headquarters in Venice.

The company is in discussion with officials in Culver City, Long Beach and Pasadena about bringing autonomous delivery to those communities.

There’s also been demand for the bots in Studio City, Burbank and the San Fernando Valley, according to Rash.

“A lot of the markets that we go into have been telling us they can’t hire enough people to do the deliveries and to continue to grow at the pace that customers want,” Rash said. “There’s quite a lot of area in Los Angeles that we can still cover.”

The bots already operate in Chicago, Miami and Helsinki, Finland. Last month, they arrived in Jersey City, N.J.

Late last year, Coco announced a partnership with DashMart, DoorDash’s delivery-only online store. The partnership allows Coco bots to deliver fresh groceries, electronics and household essentials as well as hot prepared meals.

With the release of Coco 2, the company is eyeing faster deliveries using bike lanes and road shoulders as opposed to just sidewalks, in cities where it’s safe to do so. Coco 2 can adapt more quickly to new environments and physical obstacles, the company said.

Coco 2 is designed to operate autonomously, but there will still be human oversight in case the robot runs into trouble, Rash said. Damaged sidewalks or unexpected construction can stop a bot in its tracks.

The need for human supervision has created a new field of jobs for Angelenos.

Though there have been reports of pedestrians bullying the robots by knocking them over or blocking their path, Rash said the community response has been overall positive. The bots are meant to inspire affection.

“One of the design principles on the color and the name and a lot of the branding was to feel warm and friendly to people,” Rash said.

Coco plans to add thousands of bots to its fleet this year. The delivery service got its start as a dorm room project in 2020, when Rash was a student at UCLA. He co-founded the company with fellow student Brad Squicciarini.

The Santa Monica-based company has completed more than 500,000 zero-emission deliveries and its bots have collectively traveled around 1 million miles.

Coco chooses neighborhoods to deploy its bots based on density, prioritizing areas with restaurants clustered together and short delivery distances as well as places where parking is difficult.

The robots can relieve congestion by taking cars and motorbikes off the roads. Rash said there is so much demand for delivery services that the company’s bots are not taking jobs from human drivers.

Instead, Coco can fill gaps in the delivery market while saving merchants money and improving the safety of city streets.

“This vehicle is inherently a lot safer for communities than a car,” Rash said. “We believe our vehicles can operate the highest quality of service and we can do it at the lowest price point.”

Business

Trump orders federal agencies to stop using Anthropic’s AI after clash with Pentagon

Published

22 hours ago

February 27, 2026

Press Room

Trump orders federal agencies to stop using Anthropic’s AI after clash with Pentagon

President Trump on Friday directed federal agencies to stop using technology from San Francisco artificial intelligence company Anthropic, escalating a high-profile clash between the AI startup and the Pentagon over safety.

In a Friday post on the social media site Truth Social, Trump described the company as “radical left” and “woke.”

“We don’t need it, we don’t want it, and will not do business with them again!” Trump said.

The president’s harsh words mark a major escalation in the ongoing battle between some in the Trump administration and several technology companies over the use of artificial intelligence in defense tech.

Anthropic has been sparring with the Pentagon, which had threatened to end its $200-million contract with the company on Friday if it didn’t loosen restrictions on its AI model so it could be used for more military purposes. Anthropic had been asking for more guarantees that its tech wouldn’t be used for surveillance of Americans or autonomous weapons.

The tussle could hobble Anthropic’s business with the government. The Trump administration said the company was added to a sweeping national security blacklist, ordering federal agencies to immediately discontinue use of its products and barring any government contractors from maintaining ties with it.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who met with Anthropic’s Chief Executive Dario Amodei this week, criticized the tech company after Trump’s Truth Social post.

“Anthropic delivered a master class in arrogance and betrayal as well as a textbook case of how not to do business with the United States Government or the Pentagon,” he wrote Friday on social media site X.

Anthropic didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Anthropic announced a two-year agreement with the Department of Defense in July to “prototype frontier AI capabilities that advance U.S. national security.”

The company has an AI chatbot called Claude, but it also built a custom AI system for U.S. national security customers.

On Thursday, Amodei signaled the company wouldn’t cave to the Department of Defense’s demands to loosen safety restrictions on its AI models.

The government has emphasized in negotiations that it wants to use Anthropic’s technology only for legal purposes, and the safeguards Anthropic wants are already covered by the law.

Still, Amodei was worried about Washington’s commitment.

“We have never raised objections to particular military operations nor attempted to limit use of our technology in an ad hoc manner,” he said in a blog post. “However, in a narrow set of cases, we believe AI can undermine, rather than defend, democratic values.”

Tech workers have backed Anthropic’s stance.

Unions and worker groups representing 700,000 employees at Amazon, Google and Microsoft said this week in a joint statement that they’re urging their employers to reject these demands as well if they have additional contracts with the Pentagon.

“Our employers are already complicit in providing their technologies to power mass atrocities and war crimes; capitulating to the Pentagon’s intimidation will only further implicate our labor in violence and repression,” the statement said.

Anthropic’s standoff with the U.S. government could benefit its competitors, such as Elon Musk’s xAI or OpenAI.

Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT and one of Anthropic’s biggest competitors, told CNBC in an interview that he trusts Anthropic.

“I think they really do care about safety, and I’ve been happy that they’ve been supporting our war fighters,” he said. “I’m not sure where this is going to go.”

Anthropic has distinguished itself from its rivals by touting its concern about AI safety.

The company, valued at roughly $380 billion, is legally required to balance making money with advancing the company’s public benefit of “responsible development and maintenance of advanced AI for the long-term benefit of humanity.”

Developers, businesses, government agencies and other organizations use Anthropic’s tools. Its chatbot can generate code, write text and perform other tasks. Anthropic also offers an AI assistant for consumers and makes money from paid subscriptions as well as contracts. Unlike OpenAI, which is testing ads in ChatGPT, Anthropic has pledged not to show ads in its chatbot Claude.

The company has roughly 2,000 employees and has revenue equivalent to about $14 billion a year.

Business

Video: The Web of Companies Owned by Elon Musk

Published

1 day ago

February 27, 2026

Press Room

Video: The Web of Companies Owned by Elon Musk

new video loaded: The Web of Companies Owned by Elon Musk

In mapping out Elon Musk’s wealth, our investigation found that Mr. Musk is behind more than 90 companies in Texas. Kirsten Grind, a New York Times Investigations reporter, explains what her team found.

By Kirsten Grind, Melanie Bencosme, James Surdam and Sean Havey

February 27, 2026