A repertory rebirth More opportunities to see old movies on the big screen than in decades
The exterior of the Parkway Theater in Stowe Township
The auditorium of the Parkway Theater in Stowe Township, with the Spaghetti Western “My Name is Nobody” being projected on the screen
The lobby of the Parkway Theater is decorated with movie posters that summon up the history of Hollywood.
The lobby of the Parkway Theater is decorated with movie posters that summon up the history of Hollywood.
Aaron Stubna, a full-time barber, purchased the Parkway Theater in 2011 and has restored it.
Hollywood Theater in Dormont as it looked in 1967
Hollywood Theater in Dormont as it looks today
DORMONT – It’s a Sunday afternoon in mid-October, not long before Halloween, and an audience is filing in to the Hollywood Theater in Dormont to see “Nosferatu,” the legendary silent movie from Germany that is nearing its 100th birthday and is believed to be the first time the “Dracula” tale was committed to film.
Despite its advanced age, “Nosferatu” is easily available for viewing. It’s been released on VHS and DVD in multiple permutations, and because it has long since passed into the public domain, you can even watch it on YouTube. Once upon a time, you had to patiently wait until the cinema society at your local campus saw fit to program it. Now, all it takes is a couple of mouse clicks to watch the actor Max Schreck in all his Teutonic gravity play Count Orlock as he terrorizes the populace.
But even though many in the audience at the Hollywood Theater have likely seen “Nosferatu” before – or at least clips from it – they are still shelling out $6 or $8 apiece to see it again. What’s the draw?
Well, first is the chance to see it on a big screen, and with an audience. Then, it also has a live musical accompaniment, courtesy of Boston’s Andrew Alden Ensemble, a trio that provides a shivery counterpoint to the shadowy netherworld conjured by “Nosferatu.”
In the mid-1980s, such a screening looked like it was rapidly headed for history’s scrap heap. With the rise of home video, which put cinema history at the fingertips of film enthusiasts, “revival houses” that were dedicated to showing classic Hollywood offerings, vintage foreign films or the cream of America’s independent crop, started to go the way of the passenger pigeon.
Despite the sentimentality and romance that surrounded these emporiums, with their Xeroxed monthly calendars and rarefied air of cinema savvy, why did you need to troop to, say, the Pittsburgh Playhouse in Oakland, to see “Citizen Kane” or “The Seventh Seal” when you could just as easily rent them at your local Blockbuster and watch them in your pajamas before bedtime?
Thirty years later, however, repertory cinema, at least in the Pittsburgh region, seems to be staging something of a comeback. Probably not since the pre-home-video epoch have moviegoers had so many opportunities to see old movies on the big screen within an easy drive of Washington and Greene counties. Not unlike the return of vinyl to music stores, something that was believed to be on the cusp of extinction has been given a fresh lease on life.
“Every (multiplex) shows new releases,” said Brian Mendelssohn, a developer and founder of the Row House Cinema in Pittsburgh’s Lawrenceville neighborhood. “But there are a lot of new releases that are really bad.”
Row House Cinema, which opened last summer, has embraced the revival house format the most aggressively. In its short life, it’s offered retrospectives of revered directors like Stanley Kubrick and Steven Spielberg, classics like “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” and “Blade Runner” and quality films of more recent vintage, such as the Oscar nominees “The Grand Budapest Hotel” and “Ida.”
At the same time, Pittsburgh Filmmakers continues to program series of vintage movies on Sunday nights at the Regent Square Theater, built around directors, actors, genres or themes. They also program a classic film once a month at the Melwood Screening Room in a series they call “Essential Cinema.” And the AMC theater chain, which includes the Loews Waterfront multiplex in West Homestead, also maintains a classics series where it screens crowd-pleasing masterworks.
Mendelssohn is too young to remember the heyday of repertory cinema, but the Row House Cinema grew out of passionate dorm room conversations he had with friends while he was majoring in materials sciences and engineering at Carnegie Mellon University about movies and just how they would program a movie theater if they had the opportunity.
“I trusted my friends and they trusted me,” Mendelssohn recalled. “We helped guide each other. If you just dive into Netflix, you don’t know where to start.”
Through a combination of crowdfunding and some money from Pittsburgh’s urban redevelopment authority, Mendelssohn and some partners refashioned a former food store into a movie theater that seats a little over 80 people and allows customers to eat tacos and drink beer along with traditional fare like popcorn and soda.
“We’re making it up as we go along,” he said. “We had no idea how to run a movie theater.”
Even though movie buffs of a certain age frequently talk about old repertory houses with undisguised nostalgia, they were not without undeniable limitations. Some suffered from structural disadvantages compared to multiplexes, such as uncomfortable seating or indifferent heating and cooling. Perhaps more importantly, many repertory cinemas had to rely on whatever 35mm prints they could scare up from distributors, many of which were in less than top-drawer condition. Scratched and spliced prints were not uncommon, and some were so washed out from age and use that they tended to be one shade on the color spectrum – an ugly brown.
However, Row House Cinema screens digital prints, which offer crisp images, full-screen dimensions, and are more durable than the 35mm prints from yesteryear. Mendelssohn has used those in his theater, and he said more and more are being made available for exhibitors. That, in and of itself, could encourage more theaters to program older titles.
Mendelssohn created a theater from a space that was being used for another purpose, but many enterprising movie and arts enthusiasts are trying to revive one-screen, neighborhood theaters that had been shuttered.
Attempts have been ongoing for years to relaunch the Coyle Theater in Charleroi, and Aaron Stubna, a full-time barber, managed to pull it off with the Parkway Theater in Stowe Township. Like Mendelssohn, he is a longtime movie enthusiast who harbored dreams of operating his own theater. He bought the Parkway Theater in 2011, renovated it and now offers an eclectic menu that has included art and music along with screenings of gangster movies, such as all three films in the “Godfather” saga, and spaghetti Westerns from Italy where pasta, meatballs and bread are served.
He also would like to book independent films that are not being offered at other Pittsburgh-area moviehouses.
“This is a theater I used to go to in the 1980s,” Stubna explained. “I felt the need to restore it. All movies, to me, are meant to be seen on the big screen.”
Like Stubna and the Parkway Theater, the Hollywood Theater in Dormont has also served up meals with movies, with its monthly, Sunday morning “Breakfast and a Movie” series, where classics are screened with muffins and more. Chad Hunter, the executive director of the Hollywood Theater, argues that a classic movie on its own isn’t enough to bring moviegoers to the box office – there must be an added attraction, whether it’s physical nourishment in the form of a meal, or intellectual nourishment that comes from a guest speaker who can shed light on what will be unspooling on the screen.
“It’s like a book club,” Hunter said.
Though it doesn’t limit itself exclusively to classic cinema. A few weeks ago, the Hollywood Theater screened Best Picture nominee “Birdman,” for example, and its February calendar has included a Three Stooges film festival, a look back at the silent film actor Bert Williams, a midnight showing of the cult film “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” and Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
“We try to make things a little bit of an event,” Hunter explained. For instance, during the Three Stooges festival, the son of the late Stooge Moe Howard called the theater and talked about his father and his work via speakerphone.
When asked about the apparent rebirth of repertory cinema in the Pittsburgh region, Hunter pointed out that “in a market that should be shrinking, it’s expanding. It has roots and people are interested in coming out.”
For some of the reason why, Mendelssohn points to “2001: A Space Odyssey.” While he admired Kubrick’s work when he was in college, he never warmed to “2001” until he saw it on the big screen. Then, his whole take on it changed.
“Seeing it on a big screen with surround sound, it’s a different movie.”