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Author
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Topic: Keeping the curtain up on the last picture shows
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Jeffry L. Johnson
Jedi Master Film Handler
Posts: 809
From: Cleveland, Ohio, USA
Registered: Apr 2000
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posted 04-04-2004 11:52 AM
The Denver Post
Keeping the curtain up on the last picture shows
Thanks to devoted owners, movie magic still rolling at Wray's Cliff Theatre
By Michael Booth
Denver Post Entertainment Writer
Sunday, February 22, 2004 -
WRAY - This prairie town that serves as a brief pause in a relentless march of corn rows lost 30 people in the last census estimate. Hunched over the candy counter of his Cliff Theatre, scanning a Friday evening's receipts from "Peter Pan," Bruce Palmrose feels the loss of each and every one.
His total take on the hottest movie night of the week: 32 adults, 12 kids, 306 empty seats, $196 total box office, and $100 from popcorn and Coke.
But the health of the lone screen in Wray (population 2,160) is charted by decades, not a single-day gross. So Palmrose, 56, allows himself only a small sigh before picking up a broom and joining his wife, Connie, in the warm cave of the movie house to sweep up kernels and Skittles.
When the crowds, big or small, leave, Bruce and Connie are left with what they love best: Colored footlights projecting a rainbow on the curtain covering the screen. A working popcorn machine that dates to the Cliff's construction in 1950. A lobby big enough to honor local war heroes and a childhood friend, Steve Eastin, who broke out to Hollywood. And Glenn Miller's "Moonlight Serenade" playing over the house speakers as the Palmroses spin and swoop through the aisles, performing something less than a dance but something more than a cleaning.
Moments later, after they turn off the lobby lights and lock the front door of the Cliff, the sound of Bruce's pickup truck cranking over on a frigid night will be the only sound on Main Street. Having entertained a dozen or a hundred, the Palmroses drive home knowing they've offered up one more dream for the town to sleep on.
Since 1984, the Palmroses have kept the Cliff's lights on one bulb at a time, propping up pop culture for the Eastern Plains as part of the proud, dwindling and money-losing proposition that is any small-town theater in America. "Mona Lisa Smiles" on Yuma, the "Rings" lord it over Salida, and Craig waits for a "Miracle" because of hobbyists like the Palmroses, who are willing to dissipate their life savings, ticket by subsidized ticket, so long as they can keep waving the village's magic movie wand.
"We could take our investment and make more money joining the Peace Corps," said Bruce Palmrose, who doesn't mind sweeping up kids' debris if they refrain from sling-shotting nails at his screen. "But we thought it would be a good thing for the community to preserve the theater. It's a labor of love. Plus it's a lot of fun, and it suits my personality."
The only show in town
Born in Wray two years before the Cliff opened, Bruce's first movie memory is the confusion of watching Dick Powell movies like "The Bad and the Beautiful" in a theater run by a Kenny Powell.
"As a kid, I thought, 'Wray must really be on the map if a Hollywood star comes to own a theater here,"' Palmrose said, and to this day that kind of happy reverie insulates him from the reality of his receipts.
There are only 25 to 30 single-screen theaters left in small Colorado towns, some lit only on weekends, others using John Wayne imitations for their message machines. Even a tiny second screen can bump a small-town theater into a safer category, allowing it to run a bankable children's movie alongside riskier choices like "Paycheck" or "Cold Mountain."
The Cliff constantly battles both $15 DVDs and 15-screen megaplexes. While cheap home theaters erode moviegoing everywhere, the nation lost nearly 1,500 movie houses in the past seven years, many of them small ones like the Cliff.
Multiplexes don't necessarily steal Wray customers, isolated as they are 3 1/2 hours east of Denver's suburbs. But the 'plexes steal the movies Palmrose could make a profit on. The top seven theater conglomerates now control 51 percent of U.S. screens.
When Disney makes only 2,600 prints of a middle America hit like "Miracle," Wray won't find a copy for six weeks. And if a print finally arrives - Palmrose has driven back to Brush to retrieve lost reels delivered by Greyhound bus - the studio that mythologized Main Street couldn't care less about economics on Wray's Main Street.
"You know old soft cuddly Disney? They're the real jerks; they want 50 percent of the box office," Palmrose snorts. Disney did not return phone calls seeking comment. Other studios settle for much less, and some make more prints - Sony's Columbia unit made enough of "50 First Dates" to have it in many small Colorado towns by opening week.
Being the only show in town - along with occasional plays from the Cliff Dwellers community theater - is little comfort for a movie house these days. Competing for kids' attention this Friday night were two high school basketball games back in Keenesburg, the usual "parking" and flirting at the last stoplight east of town, and a warm television on a 10-degree night.
Holding court in the lobby, Bruce almighty points to a young customer named Sierra buying a Jolly Rancher for her sister. "Her family is some of my biggest competition," Palmrose laughs. "They sell satellite dishes."
Stephanie McIlvanie, 18, showed up for "Peter Pan" with her group of friends "instead of being out on the streets and being dumb," she said. In an ominous sign for Palmrose, however, McIlvanie and friends recently drove 85 miles to the Sterling movie house for the first time, in order to catch "Big Fish" sooner after its big-city break.
Cindy Millar remains loyal because the Palmroses "keep it clean," and she doesn't just mean the popcorn-free aisles. "It's a godsend," she said, relaxing in the back row to give some space to her 15-year-old daughter, Calie. "I feel like I can drop my kids off and not worry about what's happened inside."
Arbiters of small-town taste
The Palmroses have those sentiments clearly in mind when it comes to choosing the next movie. Their booking agent in Seattle urges them to consider decidedly mature movies like "Cold Mountain" so that "adults don't get used to not going to the movies." But an "R" rating is a true gamble where many customers flinch at a "P" preceding their "G." Any children who see the "wrong" movie will eventually show up in Connie's fifth-grade class at the elementary school.
"We started enforcing the R rating with those 'American Pie' movies," Connie Palmrose chimes in. "We were just appalled!"
One key to survival, said the Cliff's booker, Dorothea Mayes of United Theater Service, is to cringe when the audience cringes. And because the Palmroses grew up and raised their kids in Wray, their instincts are impeccable.
"We're pretty strict, and G-rated are hard to come by," said Patty Zion, who owns Granma's Treasures across the street from the Cliff. When Patty turned 12 in the early 1960s, her ticket price at the Cliff doubled to 50 cents, "and I didn't go as much then."
She used to like anything that had Doris Day in it, except the one Hitchcock used her in that was too weird, and she loved the Cliff's recent Friday-through-Tuesday run of "Cheaper by the Dozen" because "there was not a dirty word in it."
When Palmrose bought the Cliff, owner Sam Amendola told him, "If you just show what you want to see, you'll starve to death."
Bruce says the town's taste runs to "flyover country" movies that coastal elites disdain, like "Bridges of Madison County," "Titanic," "The Patriot" or "Seabiscuit."
"How well we do at the box office really colors what I think of the movie," he added. "'Elf' may not have been so great a movie, but we sure liked it!"
"I tried 'Saving Grace,"' Bruce Palmrose said. "Fun movie. I loved that movie. Nobody came."
Only "Dances with Wolves" joins "Titanic" in the Cliff hall of fame, as the two films that jumped the five-day, one-run barrier for a holdover. "If the movie poster has a horse on it, that's a good thing for us," he said.
The Cliff seeks a little of the stay-at-home money with video rental shelves in the theater lobby - seven movies, seven days, seven bucks. Palmrose opens the lobby three hours before the 7:30 shows, rewinding VCR tapes while the first batch of popcorn heats in the 54-year-old machine. Customers scan the 600 titles and catch up with each other, muttering "Your cookies were delicious" or "'Midnight Run' is really funny" in whispers as if they were in the library two blocks away.
Bruce's attention to customer service sometimes lags his other duties as a radio station DJ, a volunteer fireman and church board member. "I keep a note next to the phone, because when people call to ask what's playing, I'm standing there saying 'Uh, uh, uh ..."'
If Bruce's job were a movie poster, it would read: "One man. Filling seats. Cutting costs. Against all odds." The annual $1 kids movie in December filled 329 of 350 seats, thanks to prizes for the best drawing, said local chamber of commerce director Kateri Reeves.
On the income side, Bruce lost sleep over raising adult prices to $5 last year.
On the expense side, he still debates the $14,000 he spent four years ago trading the old carbon-arc projector for a used xenon-bulb model. "Bringing us into the 20th century just in time for the 21st century," he said.
The upgrade came with a platter system that allows the projectionist to build all six or seven reels of a film into a continuous feed, thus eliminating the switching job of one Chevy Castillo, who thankfully found other work as an oil company mechanic.
"The projectionist used to help me clean up afterward," Palmrose notes. "Then again, the new projector doesn't call in sick, either."
Next to the immaculate projection booth, the nine-seat Cry Room still awaits mothers with wailing babies. On the other side of the balcony, the old Smoke Room is now storage, because "so few people used it but the hoodlum kids."
The Cliff has a love-spite relationship with those hoodlum kids.
They fling those nails at the rubber screen and stick gum on chairs. But they also are the most reliable moviegoers in town, and relentlessly push concession sales toward Bruce's $2-a-head target.
Every few years, the studios poke their noses into the dollars-per-head question. Box-office auditors don't want to see more than 2 percent of tickets given away as freebies. A couple of times in the Palmroses' tenure, the studios sent a top-secret counter - turned out to be a townie, who nudged Bruce before the show and said, "Sorry, Bruce, gotta count tonight." Bruce and Connie tend to give free passes as family birthday presents, so if a few nieces and nephews arrive, "it's easy to get up over 2 percent," he shrugs.
With their own two children grown, Bruce and Connie sometimes set up a card table in the lobby to eat dinner together before the show. Connie brings the red- and-white-checked tablecloth.
So far, none of the town kids have started hanging around the projection booth, looking to succeed Bruce as Main Street movie mogul.
"I can't imagine being able to sell this place as a movie theater," said Bruce, contemplating the pizza that could represent his entire profit for the night. "Anybody who had enough money to buy it would be smart enough to have another place to put it.
"I don't see anybody coming after."
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