This weekend, you can do something you couldn’t have done in Nashville last year at this time. You can go to the city’s last historic neighborhood theater, buy a ticket, and see a movie. Not just any movie, but a movie that would never have played here otherwise. And in coming weeks, you’ll be able to see original plays, hear touring bands, and even watch a silent film with live accompaniment. What’s more, you can drink beer and eat hot dogs or DaVinci’s pizza at the same time. For the second time in five years, the Belcourt Theatre has been given a new lease on life.
The 75-year-old Hillsboro Village moviehouse has been closed since January 1999, when the theater ceased operations after months of steady losses. It has been largely vacant ever since. Now, after more than a year of grassroots organizing by the Belcourt YES! group and a concerted effort by concerned citizens, the Belcourt Theatre will reopen this weekend as a nonprofit, multi-use performance space concentrating on film, theater, and live music. This Saturday, to celebrate, the Belcourt’s new operators are throwing a gala grand opening, with enticements ranging from a 2 p.m. children’s matinee of The Muppet Movie to 25-cent admission all day long for the theater’s first two films.
Last Saturday, with the festivities just a week away, members of Belcourt YES! were frantically readying the Belcourt for its reopening. Managing director Daniel Brabson was extracting ancient staples from the theater’s display cases, while board member F. Clark Williams followed behind with a bucket of paint. Cofounder Tom Wills lugged bags of Home Depot supplies into the lobby, where volunteer Mel Freeman has been working on construction. In the back of the parking lot, Julia Sutherland and Libby Fairhead balanced on tiptoe wrestling armloads of brush and debris into a Dumpster. Sutherland is the executive director and cofounder of Belcourt YES!; Fairhead is its operations manager.
”No matter when we opened, it would be a crunch,“ says Sutherland, a Nashville native who started the fight to save the Belcourt just after it closed. ”But...we told people we’d be opened six months after we signed our lease, and we’re keeping our promise.“
In January, Belcourt YES! successfully negotiated a 10-year lease from the theater’s owners, developer Charles Hawkins and his fellow investors in the Belcourt LLC partnership. Using money accrued from grants, private donations, and a year of fund raising, the group paid the first year’s rent of $85,000 up front. An additional $50,000 has been spent on plumbing, renovation, asbestos removal, and upkeep of the theater’s ancient projectors.
To longtime Belcourt patrons, cosmetic changes are slight. The concession stand has been moved next to the lobby’s open staircase, and new carpet has been laid. The lobby has also been outfitted with sturdy wooden pews on loan from the Downtown Presbyterian Church. Downstairs, though, beneath the main auditorium’s proscenium stage, the changes are dramatic. Dressing rooms have been built to accommodate theater groups, while bathrooms have been installed with vanities and showers. Eventually, the theater will launch a $3 million capital campaign for sweeping renovations, among them converting the second auditorium, added in 1968, into two smaller screening rooms with stadium seating.
Saturday’s grand opening kicks off a month of programming that encapsulates the new Belcourt’s vision. The first two films—Croupier, a lean, riveting thriller from British director Mike Hodges, and Winter Sleepers, a stylish drama by Run Lola Run director Tom Tykwer—signal the kind of movies the Belcourt hopes to book: accessible, high-profile art films that have nevertheless escaped the notice of Nashville’s megaplexes.
Veteran art-film booker Dick Morris, who runs his own theater in Sarasota, Fla., and has aided other groups, will help the Belcourt secure films. Upcoming selections include Private Confessions, a drama about adultery written by Ingmar Bergman and directed by Liv Ullmann; the Indian drama The Terrorist; the new Spike & Mike animation festival; and a special Bastille Day booking of one of the all-time great films, Jean Renoir’s Grand Illusion. To promote return attendance, the Belcourt will sell yearly memberships giving bearers discount admission and other perks.
At the same time, the Belcourt will alternate film bookings with live theater and music. On June 12-17, the Belcourt’s main auditorium will host the Mockingbird Public Theatre’s New Southern Theater Festival (NeST 2000), an annual showcase of staged readings of original works. When negotiations are settled, the Mockingbird is likely to make a permanent nest of the Belcourt—a coup for both the theater and the theater company.
As for music, promoter Rick Whetsel has lined up some first-rate touring acts for the theater, including Jimmie Dale Gilmore June 23 and a screening of Charlie Chaplin’s classic The Gold Rush with live accompaniment by the Asylum Street Spankers June 21. Whetsel, one of Nashville’s sharpest club bookers, has been successfully booking bands into the Belcourt since March, when a Yo La Tengo/Lambchop package show drew a sellout crowd of more than 400 people.
”We’re trying to hold ourselves to a higher level of quality,“ Sutherland says. ”We’re a business, and we have to run ourselves like a business. Everybody’s looking at us and wondering, ‘Why are you going to succeed when everything else failed?’ “
Indeed. Hawkins and his partners were motivated by the best of intentions when they took over the Belcourt from Carmike Cinemas in 1997. But lack of focus and management structure kept the theater from developing clear-cut goals. More disappointing was the theater’s scarcity of actual community support. One year, the Belcourt was voted Nashville’s favorite theater in the Scene Best of Nashville readers’ poll—the same month it had trouble meeting its utility bills. How will the Belcourt turn community goodwill into the 30-patrons-per-show average it needs to survive? And how will it compete with Regal’s erratic but formidable Green Hills megaplex, which has cornered the art-movie market through lack of competition?
”It’ll be tough,“ says Dick Morris, who, many years ago, helped Carmike Cinemas rescue the Belcourt from becoming a second-run dollar theater. ”By default Regal has all the films, and we’ll have to prove the Belcourt can do some really strong business.“ Once people experience the Belcourt, though, he’s confident they’ll come back. ”There’s no comparison between seeing a film at the Belcourt and seeing it at a megaplex,“ Morris says.
For their part, Sutherland, Fairhead, and Brabson say they have spent the past few months in a crash course learning how to operate a theater. Sutherland even took a job briefly at Regal Green Hills, where she took notes on concessions and audience flow. And she says the theater will count on business guidance from a 20-member board that includes chairman Chase Cole, Cindy Steine, the Sunset Grill’s Randy Rayburn, Ron Samuels of Union Planters Bank, and Frank Garrison of Insignia Financial Corp.
But there’s another reason Julia Sutherland thinks the Belcourt Theatre will succeed this time: accountability. Like most of her partners in Belcourt YES!, Sutherland grew up here; when she was working to save the theater, she kept running into family friends wherever she turned. Those same friends will be watching to make sure the Belcourt is run correctly. ”Everybody knows who’s running this theater,“ Sutherland says with a laugh. ”Believe me, if things start to go wrong, I’ll hear about it in advance.“
