The coast's oldest cinema changes hands, and keeps the projectionist
Ninety-one years, one screen, and a booth that still runs reel-to-reel on Wednesdays. The new owners bought it for exactly that.
The sale closed Friday and the marquee changed Saturday, in the only way the new owners intend to change it: the letters now read UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT · SAME MOVIES, SAME POPCORN, SAME WALTER.
Walter is the projectionist, sixty-eight, employed in the booth since 1979, and the explicit subject of clause eleven of the purchase agreement — the clause the sellers insisted on and the buyers, a couple who moved north from Vancouver "for the weather, unironically," say they would have written themselves. He runs digital six nights a week and, on Wednesdays, the reel-to-reel his predecessors trained him on, for a repertory night that sells out on rain weeks.
Single-screen cinemas survive on coasts like this one for reasons economics has trouble seeing: the ferry schedule strands travellers overnight, the winter is long and horizontal, and a town of twelve thousand will reliably fill a hundred and forty seats for anything with the good sense to start at seven.
The couple's renovation plans run to a new water heater and reupholstering row F, "which knows what it did." Everything else stays, including the intermission — the coast's last, Walter believes — during which the audience stands, stretches, and discusses the first half like a town council that happens to like each other.
