At night, empty, Pleasant Street Theater is a profoundly dark place. The wan light of the streetlights doesn't reach the recessed lobby doors, and from within, it seems as if Northampton were a stage play, brightly lit and busy. College students heading toward the strip of bars further along Pleasant Street pause to see what's coming next week; a native stops to describe seeing a film in the infamous "Little Theater"—the cramped, 41-seat room so often compared to an airplane—to a visiting friend. When it rains, strangers cluster together under the awning to talk about the weather until they realize the awning is torn and full of holes, and decide to move on to a drier place.
I managed the theater for the last three years, and those few moments in the dark at the end of each night were always a welcome coda to a shift that might have included anything from a film breaking to bouncing the drunks who thought eight dollars was a cheap price to pay for a warm place to drink (and then explaining to an outraged customer that we didn't let them in drunk). Even on a slow night the theater was a place where long lulls were punctuated by bursts of activity, and that time just before locking up became a way for me to put the day to rest. On busy weekends, when the staff barely had time to eat, it was a moment when all the tension of the day could be let go.
Running a theater like Pleasant Street has never been simple, and has always relied on a small but dedicated group to make it possible. When I first came to Pleasant Street in 1998, Richard Pini was still the owner. With his glasses, beard and shock of white hair, Richard looked every bit the intellectual he was. Once a professor at Amherst College, he had, with partners, started the theater two decades earlier as a way to bring smaller films to the area. A Frenchman, he had his country's high regard for cinema, and by the time I arrived in Northampton he had long established Pleasant Street as the destination theater for independent and foreign film.
At that time the theater was almost comically mom-and-pop. Richard's wife Karen did the layout work for our ads in a small, unheated office in the basement; for years, they were left for pickup on the theater's back porch, attached to a binder clip (long since retired, the clip is still there). Most of the staff had been there for years already, and everyone had a bemused appreciation of Richard's absent-minded-professor style of management.
In many ways, the theater could not have had a better person at the helm. But Richard's dedication to cinema also meant we were showing many films that people knew little about; indeed, Richard even created a film series devoted to them with the darkly comic moniker Forgotten Films at Five. To his credit, he continued to book films he thought deserved to be seen, even when that meant reaching into his own savings to pay the bills. Most other theaters would likely have closed their doors after a few years of the kind of box office receipts Pleasant Street was used to seeing.
Then came Life Is Beautiful.
Roberto Benigni's audacious film turned heads everywhere in 1998. The story of a man trying to shelter his son from their horrific situation—they are prisoners in a concentration camp, but Benigni's character reinvents it as a huge game for his boy—it marked a real turning point in the acceptance of foreign film in the States. For Pleasant Street, it meant months of new faces as hundreds of people who had never come to the theater suddenly found themselves standing on line to see the "Holocaust comedy," as it was often described. Suddenly the theater was doing well, as other foreign films—the bread and butter of art cinemas—benefited from the publicity surrounding Life Is Beautiful.
Eventually, that sense of excitement dissipated, but Pleasant Street had been transformed; the empty nights became much less frequent. The next year people came in droves to see Cider House Rules, much of which was filmed in the old Northampton State Hospital and the surrounding area. And as "independent" film began to be embraced by major studios, the audience for Pleasant Street continued to grow.
But other things were changing as well. Cinemark had opened in the Hampshire Mall, providing competition for popular titles. Richard's wife grew ill and passed away, and he began to consider retiring to move back to France. Within a few years he had decided to sell the business, eventually settling on Bob Lawton as the man who would take on the mantle. The sale was made official on Valentine's Day of 2003.
Bob's background was in entertainment—long an agent for a string of popular bands like Yo La Tengo and Sonic Youth, he brought a younger sensibility to the theater. There were cosmetic changes: the lobby, long a sedate shade of mauve, became electric blue; the iconic plastic flowers from Northampton's old Ann August building were rescued from storage to become wall hangings, and film-related art from Bob's collection began to migrate to the theater.
He also quickly resolved one of Pleasant Street's nagging problems by installing an electronic ticketing system. For years, the system at the theater had been a nightmare. An ancient assemblage of paper ticket rolls, the setup didn't allow selling tickets for anything except the very next show. For people trying to arrange a Saturday night dinner and movie date, that had often meant dashing out to the box office between appetizer and entree, a situation that led to angry confrontations almost every weekend. Other technical upgrades soon followed: new lenses were ordered and a new sound system was installed to replace the original system, which was little more than a single speaker behind the screen.
It was around this time that I became manager, and came to understand the real challenges Pleasant Street Theater was facing. Netflix was on the rise, and the profit margins for DVDs meant that many studios put the bulk of their advertising budget toward the home-theater market. The Advocate hadn't had a local film reviewer for years, which meant that it ran reviews for films we wouldn't play for weeks, or worse, films we'd already screened. Rent and other expenses had risen dramatically, forcing a rise in ticket prices.
Then there was Amherst Cinema. The project to reopen the Amity Street theater had begun moving forward, and it was clear that Pleasant Street would soon face more competition from across the river. Complicating matters was the fact that our film booker, Connie White, had signed on to book films for Amherst. The move was a point of contention for Bob and Connie. In her view, having one booker for both theaters meant less competition, as it would be in her interest to keep both businesses drawing crowds. Bob had serious doubts about the arrangement, but was willing to see if it would work.
The Amherst group broke ground in the spring of 2006, and the renovated theater opened that fall. Loath to split audiences by sharing big titles with Amherst, Bob often chose to play lesser-known films in their stead, even if splitting a title with Amherst might have meant a slightly bigger box office take. He held to his position even as the theater was losing money. What may have been a viable arrangement with Connie—if both theaters had been willing to accept some compromises—became a constant source of friction; it became untenable for Bob when he felt he was unfairly forced to delay the opening of the French hit La Vie En Rose. That was, he said in a recent interview, "the beginning of the end" of their working together. Before long she and Bob agreed to go their separate ways.
Connie continued with Amherst; Bob, drawing on his experience in the music business, began booking Pleasant Street himself, expanding the programming to include more special events and live music. Today, White says she continues to believe there is room in the Valley for five art screens if theaters operate in a "cooperative environment." "That was my hope originally and is still my hope," she says, but adds that she doesn't believe the for-profit model can continue much longer for small art theaters.
Over the spring of 2007, it became apparent that something needed to change if Pleasant Street was to keep its doors open. Despite cost-cutting measures, the main problem—a lack of customers—continued to bedevil the theater. For many, it's a given that a town like Northampton will have an art cinema. However, the economics of the business, in which most of the ticket price goes directly to the film distributor, makes running a small, two-screen theater as a for-profit nearly impossible without a deeply dedicated audience. As the middle of the year approached, Bob and I began talking about the future of the theater.
For a theater like Pleasant Street, success in today's world almost requires non-profit status or an owner-operator who can be there every night. Early in our discussions, we considered my taking over the business. After almost a decade, I knew more about running the theater than anyone, and it had become a second home of sorts. But I finally decided I couldn't dedicate the time the job would require. With that decided, Bob planned to put the theater and the building at 27 Pleasant up for sale; in late July, he appeared on Bill Dwight's WHMP morning radio show to make the announcement.
And then, nothing. For a surprising amount of time, it was business as usual at the theater. Though the Academy of Music had shut its doors only six months earlier, public response seemed curiously muted. There was interest from several area theater operators, including Kathleen Kamping, who ran the Main Street Motion Media program at the Academy, but none of the offers satisfied Bob, who wanted to ensure the theater's long-term health under new ownership. After a brief flurry of interest, there were no new offers.
The building proved more enticing, and a sale to Joe Blumenthal, owner of Downtown Sounds right next door, was soon in the works. Not long after, I got a call from Bob; in a last effort to find someone who would save the theater, he planned to donate everything a new owner would need to screen films at Pleasant Street, provided they had enough capital to run the business for at least a year. It was a startling proposal: he valued the equipment at $40,000. That jump-started the process of finding a new operator. Unfortunately, most of the new proposals that came in still weren't adequately funded.
Then came the pledge drive. The drive grew out of a conversation between area residents Silas Kopf and Bruce Bleiman. Concerned that the theater space would be lost to a retail concern if the business went dark, the two composed an email soliciting tax-deductible pledges to be used to entice a nonprofit into taking over the theater. With the help of their wives, their mail reached hundreds of people; against all odds, the pledges starting rolling in. It's worth noting that without this private push, it's extremely likely Pleasant Street Theater would now be gone; without the pledged funds, the nonprofits in the area didn't have the resources to take over the theater.
At this point Amherst Cinema was not looking at the Pleasant Street space. In an interview with Bill Peters published on masslive.com, Silas Kopf describes how Amherst got involved: "Bruce approached Carol [Johnson, executive director of Amherst Cinema]. And we started to get pledges in, and I vaguely remember the numbers. And Bruce arranged a meeting with Carol and some of their board members. And we were able to go with them and say, 'Look, we've got $30,000 in pledges in four days.'"
Encouraged by the outpouring of support, the Amherst group was willing to take up the reins at Pleasant Street once the pledges reached the $100,000 mark, the amount they determined would cover some upgrades for the theater. They began to work with Blumenthal on a lease agreement, and press releases went out announcing the return of Pleasant Street Theater under the Amherst umbrella. To date, the drive has raised $95,525 from 395 donors, an amount Johnson calls "phenomenal."
There was a problem, though. No one had contacted Lawton to ask about the equipment, and he had no intention of donating it to the group he felt put his theater out of business. Piqued by the assumption he would willingly hand over his business to a competitor, he spoke out on the WWLP nightly news. His blunt response to the new situation? "I'm doing everything in my power to make sure they never get near this place."
Meanwhile, many in Northampton saw it as the only possible solution that would allow the town to preserve its theater, and support grew for the transition. A deal was worked out, but only after a protracted series of negotiations, with Blumenthal acting as an intermediary in purchasing the equipment.
With the equipment in place, Amherst began looking for ways to improve the moviegoing experience at Pleassant Street. "We have new bulbs," Johnson said in a recent interview, "and we're working on new lenses and we'll have an upgraded sound system for the little theater. We're also changing the projection portal, which allows for a more luminous picture."
Johnson says the group also plans to increase the size of the screen in the downstairs theater. She promises a facelift for the lobby that will turn it into "a little jewel, especially in the night." Amherst plans to reopen the theater this Friday, Jan. 25, and hopes to have the upgrades completed soon after.
My last night at the theater came long after we'd stopped screening films. There to clean out our offices and remove some personal effects, I stood one last time in the dark lobby. Outside, a family together for the holidays was reading the out-of-business notice posted in the front window, and sharing their memories of films they'd seen at Pleasant Street over the years. They sounded like happy memories.
