My columns tend to require the reader to dig through layers of fluff, verbosity and nonsense (such as this) to get to the core idea. This week’s column, however, is no rant. It is a plea for help. Not for me but for a downtown institution fighting for survival. I want to tell you about its history, why it has to be saved, and how you can help its campaign to stay in business.
The Eveningstar Cinema, located at the back of the Tontine Mall on Maine Street, has been at the heart of Brunswick since it opened on Friday, November 2, 1979. The first film it screened was “Heaven Can Wait,” a comedy about a football player who dies and then is sent back down from heaven to live in the body of a millionaire. The theater been a part of Brunswick life for more than three decades and its name refers to the earliest years of this town’s existence.
When fisherman settled what they called Pejepscot in the 17th century, they received considerable assistance from the Native Americans who inhabited this area, such that the names of the local chief and his wife can be found in early town records. The wife’s name—according to a history of the theatre written by Greg Melick, its builder and designer—translates to mean “Eveningstar.” The cinema is much more than a recent arrival in this town; indeed, its name speaks to Brunswick’s long history.
To be clear, the downtown cinema isn’t in trouble because of the films that it screens. Though we are told that people go to multiplexes in their droves because, as far as they are concerned, art-house and independent movie theaters show movies that are too foreign, too subtitled, too confusing and too different from Hollywood, this is a mistaken belief. As the Eveningstar shows, small and independent cinemas are just as willing as their larger competition to screen popular, independent, films.
What’s more, you get to watch a movie in a pleasant, cozy and fun environment. I can think of no other movie theater in which patrons can spread on well-worn couches to enjoy a great film. And the Eveningstar screens many excellent films. In the last six months, they’ve shown films as varied as “The Bling Ring,” “Argo,” “Before Midnight” and “Amour,” the winner of the 2013 Oscar for Best Foreign Language film.
Instead, it is the distributors—the organizations that provide cinemas with films to screen—that have put the Eveningstar into its current predicament. The theater still screens movies out of a projection room off 35mm tape roles. But the movie industry is, like the rest of the world, moving away from analogue technologies and by 2013, the vast majority of movies you see in theaters are projected digitally.
We are in the twilight of 35mm projection. Switching over is no problem for multiplexes like the Regal Cinema at Cook’s Corner but the cost for a place like the Eveningstar is tremendous. But if our local movie theater doesn’t switch over then it will be forced to close for good. It is for this very reason that Barry Norman, the cinema’s owner, has launched a crowd funding campaign on “Seed&Spark,” a website that specializes in giving support to projects relating to cinema and the movie industry.
I have nothing against multiplex cinemas. But the experience of going to movies at a multiplex is pretty formulaic: arrive, pay, sit down, watch a movie and then drive home. Not very exciting, you’ll have to admit.
“Going to the movies” seems to be a phrase that has been robbed of any meaning when talking about multiplexes. We live in an era in which films can be accessed (legally or not) at a moment’s notice through the Internet, yet most multiplex and chain cinemas have done next to nothing to make us really want to go to the movies. They continue operating on the same model they have done since the idea of a multiplex (as we understand it today) really took off in the 1970s and 1980s: an inexpensively built, charmless and sterile setting designed to sell little more than expensive tickets and overpriced snacks.
Sterile and charmless, the Eveningstar is not. But its cozy atmosphere and delicious popcorn won’t help it. It is fighting for its existence and now, more than ever, it needs help from the community. We would certainly be worse off without this cinema and the people of Brunswick (and the wider Midcoast region) would be deprived of an institution that makes movie-watching fun, like it should be.
If would like to support Brunswick’s oldest independent cinema, visit: http://www.seedandspark. com/studio/eveningstar-cinema.