A Little Help Keeping the Movies Playing

I don’t particularly enjoy asking for help.

Actually, I really don’t enjoy it.

That’s not to say I haven’t had help. I have had an incredible amount of it. One of the unexpected things about owning Fort Kent Cinema is that I’ve made a lot of friends in this town because of it.

Rick Douglas was one of the first people to offer his help, writing movie reviews for us. I hear from so many people that they look forward to Rick's Reviews

A local plumber came in and offered his services. He has spent countless hours volunteering to do work that I couldn’t afford to hire out and couldn’t do myself. He’s also helped organize community events hosted by the Police Department.

The PTO and Lions Club have sponsored movies for the community, giving families something to do and giving us a much-needed boost during slow times.

There are a handful of people who come through the doors nearly every week, whether the movie is good, bad, or somewhere in between.

Even the teenagers I throw out for talking during a movie will come back the next week and try again, I’m always happy to see them.

So I’ve had help. A lot of it!

But right now I have to do something that makes me deeply uncomfortable: I have to ask for more

You may have noticed the work trucks in our parking lot over the last week. The fire houses coming out of the building, or the flooded parking lot.

Our sprinkler system needed extensive flushing to stay operational. This comes with an unexpected and unplanned price tag of $54,000.

For most businesses, that’s a significant unexpected expense.

For Fort Kent Cinema, it’s devastating.

The cinema breaks even some weeks, but it loses money plenty of others. Often times it's one or two big movies in the summer and one or two big movies in the winter that help us get through the slow times. That didn't really happen this year.

The three apartments above the theater are actually what make the economics of the building possible. Their income helps cover the mortgage, leaving theater revenue to cover insurance, heating oil, supplies and other expenses.

The theater barely sustains it, because studios take a huge portion of every ticket we sell. What’s left has to pay for everything else.

Obviously, I could charge more, my margins <em>ARE AWFUL</em>, and I did raise prices in the past.

But there’s a point where solving the problem by raising prices creates another problem: the people I want this theater to be here for can no longer afford to use it.

So I’m stuck in a strange place between what a ticket probably should cost to operate the business and what I think a movie ticket in Fort Kent should cost for the people who live here.

Then you drop a $54,000 sprinkler bill into the middle of that equation.

My first reaction was panic.

I considered selling. I cold-called a few people I thought might be interested in the space. I was willing to sell it for roughly what I owed and walk away.

I also considered changing my name and moving to a small banana republic, spending my remaining days drinking rum while playing cards in some open air tavern.

That option remains under review.

But I don’t want to sell!

Because I knew what was likely to happen. The building would probably become apartments.

And once a movie theater is converted into apartments, nobody is coming along five years later and saying, “You know what this building needs? Two auditoriums and some projectors.”

It’s gone.

And I realized I wasn’t ready to be the person who let that happen.

This started as a joke! I never bought Fort Kent Cinema because I thought I’d discovered a brilliant investment opportunity.

After COVID, we started running movies for small groups, under the ownership of Mr. Paradis (my girlfriend’s grandfather.) Eventually he was ready to part with the building.

We worried about what would happen to it. And somehow what started almost as a joke turned into: What if I bought the movie theater?

So I took on a passion project.

There were repairs needed right from the beginning. We actually did a small GoFundMe then and raised a couple thousand dollars, with my generous aunt contributing much of it, and then we got to work.

It has pretty much been one step forward and two steps back ever since.

Movie theaters aren’t what they were before COVID, The industry we bought into was already changing.

COVID accelerated a change in the way people watch movies. We became accustomed to watching things at home. Streaming became a much bigger part of our lives. The time between a theatrical release and watching that same movie from your couch became shorter.

Going to the movies stopped being a regular habit for a lot of people. The price of home theater systems are now affordable for most, and the comforts of home sometimes far outweigh the need for putting pants on and leaving the house.

Independent theaters have struggled with that reality. Small-town theaters have disappeared all over the country, and we’re trying to figure out how not to become one of them.

The answer, I think, is that Fort Kent Cinema has to be more than a building that shows whatever Hollywood releases that weekend.

We’ve tried a lot of things.

Some worked.

Most havent.

I ran Classic Movie Night for almost a year. Occasionally we’d get a decent crowd. Many nights I’d watch a film with one or two new friends.

I’ve tried nostalgia screenings. The Land Before Time. Older Pixar movies. Movies I was convinced people would love seeing again on a big screen. They flopped. I've lost money on them.

Bring Your Own Bowl Thursday, on the other hand, occasionally brings out a crowd.

Apparently the secret to saving cinema may turn out to be allowing people to bring ridiculously large containers into the building and filling them with popcorn.

We’re still gathering data.

Then there’s Open Mic. It doesn’t make the theater money. It was never planned to be a revenue stream. As the theater is my passion project, Open Mic is Ana's. She’s determined to turn it into something! She paid for the small PA system and is currently spending her own money building a small platform for the performers to use. I’ve tried to help, but she has banned me from the construction.

We’ve had some genuinely talented people walk into the auditorium and perform, but can never seem to get them all there on the same night. Maybe someday we’ll have a packed house. I always picture a group of performers just riffing to some old blues rhythm.

Right now, we’re giving people somewhere to stand up and perform on a weeknight in Fort Kent, and there’s value in that too.

I’ve been told that I should establish a minimum attendance. If fewer than a certain number of tickets sell, don’t run the movie. Financially, that makes perfect sense.

I can’t do it.

There have been plenty of nights when I’ve opened the theater, heated the building, turned on the projector and run an entire movie for one, two or three people.

That’s terrible business, but sometimes somebody walks through that door because they’ve had an awful day.

They don’t want to talk.

They don’t want to think.

They just need two hours in a dark room where the rest of the world goes away for a while.

I understand that person, I've been that person.

And sometimes they don’t need a masterpiece of cutting edge cinema.

Sometimes you just need the lights to go down to get lost in what ever Hollywood has put out that week.

That’s why I won’t send that one customer home. Maybe, on that particular night, they’re the person who needs the theater most.

This isn’t my full-time job Monday through Friday, I work a regular 9-to-5 job. A good majority of that paycheck goes toward keeping the theater going.

At 5:00, I switch jobs and become Cinema Brandon. Usually from about 6:00 to 9:00 in the morning, I’m Cinema Brandon too! Planning Facebook posts, talking to vendors, dealing with studios, working on the website, figuring out programming and handling whatever else needs to happen.

I’ve taught myself how to operate the projection equipment.

I’ve learned to maintain and repair much of it myself.

I paint! I HATE PAINTING.

I remodel.

I cannibalize seats to restore other seats.

I fix what I can.

Little by little, I want to turn this building into a beautiful little classic theater.

I’d love to quit my day job and devote myself completely to making this place work.

There’s just one slight flaw in that plan: My day-job paycheck is one of the few things keeping the theater open.

It’s a Catch-22 I haven’t figured out yet.

Probably the hardest part of writing this, is the fear that I'm failing.

I don’t want people to look at me asking for help and think I failed. I don’t want to be a failure.

I love this place for what it is, and I want to do my best to keep it going, but sometimes doing my best doesn’t feel like it’s enough.

Owning Fort Kent Cinema has been one of the things I’ve been most proud of in my life.

It has also been one of the most frustrating. Every time it seems like we’re making progress, something else happens.

One step forward.

Two steps back.

And this time the step backward has a $54,000 price tag.

But after the initial panic, the cold calls and my brief consideration of international relocation, I realized something:

I don’t actually want out.

Cinema matters to me

Some of my best memories are at the Magic Lantern in Bridgton both the original building, and the new building. Many of my “projects” around the theater take inspiration from my home town theater.

Movie theaters have always been places I go when I’m happy, when I’m bored, when I’m lonely, when I’m traveling, when I’m anxious, or when I just want to disappear into somebody else’s story for two hours.

And now I get to own one of those places.

That’s pretty incredible.

I want kids growing up here to have memories of this theater.

I want someone who’s having a miserable Thursday to be able to walk in, buy a ticket and disappear for a couple of hours.

I want local musicians and performers to have somewhere to perform.

I want to keep improving the building, a little at a time, until it’s the beautiful classic small-town movie theater I can already see in my head.

I want more community programming

More live events. More weird ideas.

Probably a bunch more ideas that lose money.

And hopefully a few that don’t.

Mostly, I want Fort Kent to continue to have a movie theater.

Why not another GoFundMe? A lot of people have told me I should start one. I understand why. As I mentioned, we used GoFundMe when we first opened.

But I don’t feel right doing it again.

There are people on those platforms dealing with cancer, house fires, funerals, sick children and genuine personal tragedies.

I have a broken sprinkler system in a business I chose to own.

Those things don’t feel equivalent to me.

So I’m not starting a GoFundMe. Instead, I’m asking something a little different.

If Fort Kent Cinema is important to you, help us keep it here. Please become a member.

But if you’ve considered becoming a member, now would be an exceptionally good time.

At times when the theater has been broke, family members have bailed me out by paying some of the up front costs for films. Ana covered the cost of The Land Before Time, in exchange for advertising her photography business. My brother covered the cost of The Wild Robot, so I've been advertising his business. Which gave me the idea of sponsorships.

Maybe there’s a movie you love and want to see on the big screen.

Maybe your family wants to dedicate a screening to somebody.

Maybe you’re a local business that wants to give the community a movie for the evening.

Help us put something interesting on the screen, you get advertising and it helps us bring more people to the movie.

Come to a movie This is probably the most important one. You don’t have to donate anything. Come see a movie, make it a habit.

Bring somebody with you.

Buy some popcorn.

Come to an event.

Bring a ludicrously oversized bowl on Thursday.

If there are movies you’d like us to show or events you’d attend, tell us.

The best way to support a movie theater is still simply to use it.

And, yes, you can just help I’m also going to put an option on our website for anyone who simply wants to make a contribution toward the theater.

I’m not asking Fort Kent to pay my $54,000 bill. That’s important to me. It’s my building. Ultimately, the bill is my responsibility.

I’m going to keep working my regular job. I’m going to keep putting money into the theater. I’m going to keep fixing the things I can fix myself. I’m going to keep looking for ways to make the numbers work.

I’m not asking the community to rescue me from something I chose to do.

I’m asking the community to help me keep doing it.

Because I’ve realized that Fort Kent Cinema isn’t important simply because I love movies.

It’s important because communities need these types of places, relics of the past are still worth hanging onto.

Even if it is just a place to sit in the dark for two hours because you’ve had a really lousy day and need to watch that mindless Hollywood remake cash grab.

I bought a movie theater. Somewhere along the way, I became part of this community, and that community has already given me more help than I could reasonably have expected.

I’m incredibly grateful for it.

Now I’m asking for a little more.

Not because I think Fort Kent owes me or the theater anything.

But because I think Fort Kent is better with a movie theater.

And I’m not ready to give up on it, so please become a member, join us for a movie or simply just come to the theater for popcorn.