The venerable Hiway Theatre in Jenkintown needs to come up with a hundred thousand dollars, fast.
No money, no Hiway.
Sound dramatic? It is. The Hiway like scores of small theaters across the country, has been pinched between present and future as big movie studios rapidly shift to digital production and distribution, abandoning traditional film.
For theaters, the cost to buy digital-projection equipment runs about $100,000 per screen. That sum may be painful to big chains, but to smaller independent and nonprofit theaters, it's life-threatening.
"We're not trying to scare people," said Hiway executive director Fred Kaplan-Mayer, but "if we don't have a digital projector, we will not be able to participate in the movie industry".
The good news: So far, the Hiway has raised $50,000 in donations through its Screen Saver campaign, which began at Thanksgiving. Kaplan-Mayer is cautiously optimistic that the theater will reach its goal, sticking around to celebrate its hundredth birthday this year.
It's a paramount moment for the industry. The National Association of Theater Owners calls the transition to digital the most important change since the invention of talkies. That late-1920s revolution, coupled with the Great Depression, killed theaters for much the same reason that digital threatens: cost.
"Most people are going to figure out a way to do it," said Russ Collins, director of the Michigan-based Art House Convergence, an organization of independent community theaters. "And there are probably going to be some very tragic stories. Change causes those things."
It's causing one here: Cinema 16:9, the quirky three-screen theater in Lansdowne, plans to close on 28 February, overwhelmed by the economics of digital compliance. "We're going to lose a lot of theaters; a lot," owner David Titus said as he prepared to end his four-year-old creation, housed in the Lansdowne Theater. Titus said his sixty-, forty-, and ten-seat auditoriums use early digital projectors, not the new ones that are becoming standard. To pay for that equipment, the cinema would need to show more popular mainstream and indie films, like Silver Linings Playbook. But a sixty-seat theater can't generate the income to pay a distributor to provide those sorts of movies.
Collins, who works as CEO of the Michigan Theater in Ann Arbor, said the ability of theaters to convert depends on their individual economic health and business environment, and often on their ability to secure bank loans.
Rico says he wonders if the old Varsity Theatre in Palo Alto will make it; some Silicon Valley millionaire will doubtless donate the necessary...
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