As of Monday afternoon, a once-endangered Nashville institution may have escaped the wrecking ball for good.
After a decade-long roller coaster of closings, reopenings and community rescue efforts, the Belcourt Theatre in Hillsboro Village just got a great prognosis for its long-term health. Thanks to a quiet capital campaign, the nonprofit Belcourt organization signed a contract Monday purchasing the historic theater for $1.4 million.
“The theater is safe,” says Stephanie Silverman, the Belcourt’s managing director, who was among a small but jubilant crowd toasting the sale with champagne Monday at the theater. “We’re now poised to make decisions about its future for the next 10 years.”
The outcome wasn’t exactly a surprise. The landlord, Nashville philanthropist Tom Wills, was among the founders of the Belcourt YES! grassroots group that banded together to save the theater after it closed temporarily in 1999. Four years ago, Wills purchased the building and lot outright for $1.4 million, essentially holding it in trust until the operating organization could buy it from him.
“The main thing I was concerned about,” Wills says, “was that if something disastrous happened, I’d be the one who would have to pull the plug.”
What made Monday’s purchase possible was a gift of more than $800,000 from several private donors, chief among them Scott and Mimi Manzler, Pat and George Bullard and Will and Joan Cheek. According to Silverman, a loan from SunTrust Bank “on generous terms” covers the balance.
“We’ve come so far,” says Mimi Manzler, a co-founder with her husband of Belcourt YES!. “When we envisioned it, we worked for hours on our mission statement about making the theater a community gathering spot. And now we have so many people coming for so many different reasons.”
Once home to both the Grand Ole Opry and the Nashville Children’s Theatre, the 1925 theater had fallen into disrepair by the 1990s under Carmike Cinemas. A benevolent group of investors led by the late real estate mogul Charles Hawkins purchased the theater in 1996, but heavy monthly losses and competition from Regal Cinemas’ Green Hills theater complex forced them to close it in early 1999.
After a rocky start, Belcourt YES! (now Belcourt Theatre Inc.) patched up its relations with distributors, began a solid schedule of concert bookings and firmed up its outreach efforts with theater groups, children’s programming and charity events. The past three years have been the best in the Belcourt’s recent history, driven by the blockbuster success of films such as A Prairie Home Companion and Pan’s Labyrinth.
The winter months look even stronger. In addition to the sold-out Country Jam 2007 and Shelby Lynne shows, the theater snagged some of the season’s highest-profile films, including the Philip Seymour Hoffman-Ethan Hawke thriller Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead (Nov. 16), the all-star Bob Dylan biopic I’m Not There (Nov. 21) and the Nicole Kidman black comedy Margot at the Wedding (Dec. 21).
These, plus this weekend’s return of the Belcourt’s frequently sold-out midnight movies, will balance adventurous programming such as a late-December retrospective of Japanese director Shohei Imamura. “People are becoming more aware of our niche programming,” Belcourt film booker Toby Leonard says. Leonard points to the success of last spring’s Janus Films retrospective, where “people took a lot of chances on foreign films that they didn’t know.”
Silverman says the Belcourt will continue its capital campaign with an eye toward a long-overdue remodeling of the theater. Among the ideas on the table: restoring the 1925 hall’s balcony, dividing the adjacent 1966 add-on hall into two smaller screening rooms and redesigning the theater’s entrance.
“It’s all pretty amorphous right now, but the world is our oyster,” Silverman says. “We’re not going anywhere.”
