From first kisses in the back row during the Depression to a final kiss goodbye last January, the history of the Franklin Cinema has been entwined with the lives of Williamson County residents. Now, after 70 years as the hub of Franklin’s Main Street, the ultimate fate of the town’s imperiled downtown theater may be decided in just 30 days.
That’s how long a Nashville real estate tycoon has agreed to give a Franklin historic association and concerned citizens to save the cinema—a landmark that closed for business last winter and has sat vacant ever since.
“I would say I’ve had more calls and emails on this issue than any other,” says Mary Pearce, executive director of Franklin’s Heritage Foundation (historicfranklin.com), the nonprofit organization leading efforts to reopen the historic theater. “It has an intangible appeal to all generations.”
For Pearce, the cinema was the place where she’d walk uptown with her grandson and take in a free kids’ matinee, before strolling across the street for some fish and chips and a peek inside the Main Street Toy Co. For veteran talent agent and media personality Tandy Rice, it was the place where he courted his first girl. In the early 1970s, resident Scott Martin remembers hooking up with his buddies to catch whatever Burt Reynolds muscle-car epic was playing. If only love were necessary to keep a theater afloat, the Franklin Cinema would be airborne.
But love doesn’t buy popcorn. Although the theater was bringing an estimated 1,500 people a week to downtown Franklin, its most recent operators, Joe Bankemper and David Temple, were barely breaking even competing on first-run movies with Carmike’s Thoroughbred 20 in Cool Springs. Last year, when the building’s new owners said they were raising the theater’s rent to something more in keeping with the rest of the street—from $3,800 to $11,000 a month—the operators decided to switch off the projectors.
Ironically, according to Nancy Williams, Main Street director for the Downtown Franklin Association, the theater may have been a victim of the success it helped build.
“The property values went up,” says Williams, who also serves on the Heritage Foundation. “Their rent was going to double, and they were still going to be charged less than other businesses on the street.”
Since last fall, calls, emails, postcards and petitions have deluged anyone in a position to help the now-shuttered theater, from the office of Franklin Mayor Tom Miller—who says the cinema “has a lot of support within city government”—to Mark Bloom, the Nashville development mogul who heads the partnership that owns the property. But the situation took on new urgency last week, when the Tennessee Preservation Trust named the Franklin Cinema one of the 10 most endangered historic sites in the state.
Now, under an oral agreement with Bloom, the Heritage Foundation has until early September to find the necessary cash—estimated at upwards of $2 million, with at least $500,000 in overdue renovations—to purchase the theater from its owners, Bloom’s Nashville-based Corner Partnership. That’s serious money, even in upwardly mobile Williamson County. But the foundation has a crucial weapon on its side: an entire community’s hopes.
The cinema is neither the loveliest nor the most architecturally significant of the many downtown movie theaters that once dotted the town squares of Tennessee’s county seats. Walk down Franklin’s picturesque Main Street, where empty storefronts stand out among the small boutiques and restaurants, and the theater building is a pale, unremarkable two-story box.
But its historic value is on the inside. The current home of the Franklin Cinema opened on July 15, 1937, on the site of the Hunter Motor Co. Patrons that night would have seen Robert Montgomery and Rosalind Russell in Night Must Fall; black audience members would have been directed to the segregated balcony, which seated 130. According to theater historian Rick Warwick, the cinema was the first building in the county with air conditioning, and for a quarter, adults could buy a ticket and luxuriate in the controlled climate.
The theater’s fortunes ebbed and flowed over the years. The building was eventually divided into two auditoriums, then had many of its seats removed to permit tables for pizza and beer. In the 1990s, it took on a new burst of energy under former manager Rusty Gordon, who delighted in booking controversial movies such as Priest and David Cronenberg’s Crash that the gutless chains wouldn’t touch. It was under Gordon that the theater started its weekend screenings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, a tradition that lasted for 11 years.
The most recent operators took over the cinema in 2001 on a whim. “I was downtown one Saturday and heard it was in trouble,” says Bankemper, “and by Friday me and my partner had it. My wife said, ‘You haven’t seen five movies in the time we’ve been married.’ ”
The five years they ran the theater, Bankemper says, were more a public service than a money-making proposition. The economics of the movie industry are slanted against indie operators. They can’t compete for top films with chains that book hundreds of screens simultaneously, and if they get stuck with a dud, there’s nothing else to offset it.
That won’t change if the Heritage Foundation raises the funds to save the theater. Instead, the foundation hopes to do what grassroots community effort has done for the Belcourt in Hillsboro Village: transform the cinema into a nonprofit, multiuse facility that can support music bookings and party rentals too.
“You can’t compete with first-run features,” says Franklin resident Rod Daniel, a Nashville native who went on to become one of Hollywood’s top TV comedy directors of the 1980s and ’90s. As a film director, he makes exactly the kind of mainstream movies—his debut was 1985’s Michael J. Fox vehicle Teen Wolf—he recommends the theater not show.
The theater would also hope to attract more events along the lines of the red-carpet Elizabethtown and Charlotte’s Web premieres. There’s even an upcoming film that would fit the bill: a documentary based on the memoirs of Coach Jimmy Gentry, the hometown hero who helped liberate the death camp Dachau in World War II. Gentry, a lifelong Williamson County resident except for his years in the service, does not relish his return to the camp’s site in September for the film. But he does hope the resulting feature will make its debut at a newly reopened Franklin Cinema.
“It’s part of Franklin,” Gentry says. “It would be like taking the monument away from the Square.”
“The main thing is to find out what the community can support and will support,” says Tom Wills, who was instrumental in the Belcourt’s successful community effort. “You have to let the audience know this is something special, and it needs support beyond buying tickets.”
To get to this stage, though, the foundation must first secure the building. In 2004, Bloom and Corner Partnership purchased the cinema and the buildings on either side, the former Elmore’s Fine Furniture and the Franklin Arcade, for $3 million. According to an estimate solicited last fall by the foundation, the cinema alone is now worth $1.4 million—a figure that Bloom says sounds low, citing a nearby building that sold recently for $300 per square foot. By that price, the 7,500-square-foot Franklin Cinema would go for $2.25 million.
Bloom says he is “thrilled” to work with the foundation and any citizens’ group willing to keep the Franklin Cinema an entertainment venue, as part of the mix of downtown businesses. “Our partnership is partial to historic buildings,” says Bloom, whose properties range from the newly renovated Union Station to some nondescript lots near the Sommet Center once touted for retail development. He admits, though, that he is less than thrilled about selling the cinema property smack in the middle of his downtown Franklin holdings.
Perhaps that’s why one out-of-town consultant familiar with the situation bemoans “an investor who only sees dollar signs when he hears ‘historic investment.’ ” Asked if the price had gone up since talks started, Mary Pearce declines comment.
If a middle ground can be reached on the sale, it would be a victory across the board. Bloom would make a profit and look like a community hero—no small consideration, given the stink that followed Nashville developer Tony Giarratana for decades after he razed the historic Tennessee Theater. (Chastened, Giarratana won back some respect by preserving much of the old Belle Meade Theatre in a development under way.) The downtown would fill in a missing gap in its mix of businesses and attractions. And Franklin would preserve a unique part of its character.
“If the buyer is anyone other than a community theater,” Miller says, “it would be a great loss for the city of Franklin.”
The key to the whole deal, as Bloom acknowledges, may be the tenacity of Mary Pearce, a dynamo who answers a phone these days as if she were in the middle of juggling oranges. “I believe she’ll get it done,” Bloom says, and Rod Daniel agrees.
“Mary Pearce is an artillery shell,” Daniel says. “If I wanted to get us out of Iraq, I’d get her over there. We’d be out in two weeks.”
