It's the Village, Idiot!

Photo By Todd V. Wolfson

I saw Trainspotting there. Ditto for Belle Epoque. Watching David Thewlis in Naked creeped me out so much I almost suffered a panic attack while my feet stuck to the floor, rooted as much by the previous audience's spillage as the film I was seeing. The Piano -- Harvey Keitel naked! Again! And Caro and Jeunet's masterful Delicatessen, with the impishly bizarre Dominique Pinon, made me squirm in cineastic glee.

No more, though. As of last Sunday, Feb. 4, the Village Cinema Art movie theatre -- all four screens and 982 seats -- closed its doors for good. The floors were often coated over with a soda pop glaze, yes, and the whole of the theatre sometimes seemed overlaid with the musty odor of too-little ventilation and too much stale popcorn (my parents, in town visiting one time, took in a show at the Village and curtly pronounced the experience "stinky"), but regardless of the venue's somewhat funky image, it remains nostalgically tethered to the heartstrings of much of Austin's filmgoing community.

When the Village was built by the Presidio theatre chain in the early 1970s, it was used as a first-run movie house. Gradually, it became a second-run theatre for mainstream fare and, eventually, began catering to smaller (and, it goes without saying, frequently better) independent films, leaving Hollywood's heavier hitters to duke it out at the increasingly impersonal multi- and megaplexes that have blossomed like mushrooms beneath cowflop on the outskirts of Austin's sprawl. Along with the late, lamented Varsity Theater on the Drag, which shuttered its doors in 1990 (and then became a Tower Records -- oh! The ignominy!), and the Dobie Theatre, which is now owned by the Landmark Theatres arthouse chain, the Village was a steadfast ally in the war against Hollywood's ongoing blockbuster mentality. For the past four years, the Village has been part of the Knoxville, Tennessee-based Regal Cinemas chain. When the company bought the Act III chain (which then owned the Village) in 1997, it moved their slate of first-run arthouse fare to the more palatable Arbor 7 on Hwy. 183 and retained the Village for second-run arthouse screenings. Although that turn of events made for predictably reduced box office at the Village, the theatre remained, until Sunday, one of Austin's more popular nights out, squeaky seats and all.

It certainly didn't hurt matters that the theatre was located in a strip mall that also housed a stellar sushi bar, Korea House, where you could nosh on fried ebi head before taking in a film. And there was certainly no problem with the proximity of a top-flight java joint, Texpresso, where audience members would frequently gather to dissect an evening's film while knocking back mochaccinos and cheesecake. Even in its final days, the Village retained its grimy panache.

Photo By Todd V. Wolfson

The closing of the Village Cinema Art, sad though it may be, comes as considerably less than a shock to those following the recent and ongoing series of financial upheavals that have befallen the theatre industry. The Village is just one of five local chain-owned venues to close in the past year. General Cinema's Highland 10 and Great Hills 8 went dark last summer, while Regal Cinemas took fire amidships with the closing of the Village, the Riverside 8, and the soon-to-close Lake Creek Festival Theater. So what's going on? The most common explanation is that old-school-style theatres such as the Village (i.e., no stadium seating, no flashy interior design, and certainly no gargantuan nude eunuchs crowning the rooftop) have been sidelined by their own big brothers, the larger, infinitely flashier bastard offspring of the Mall of America mindset and a rush to construct new, family-friendly outlets. While it's true that these erupting megaplexes offer dynamic Dolby Digital Sound-scapes, perfect line-of-sight viewing, and enough legroom to make a game of midget Twister a distinct possibility, the gritty ambience and personality that makes venues like the Village such a fond memory is absent.

Not that that matters too much to the Big Three exhibition chains -- Regal Cinemas, Loews Cineplex Entertainment, and AMC. Their rampant, countrywide overexpansion has resulted in a per-capita glut that almost certainly spells the end for their smaller houses. Two weeks ago AMC formally announced what most insiders had already suspected: Of its 2,802 screens now operating, the chain plans to cut up to 548. Loews, with 2,965 screens, quickly followed suit and announced two days later that it would cut 675 screens. Regal Cinemas, the industry's top dog with 4,361 screens in 396 theatres, has yet to announce either a Chapter 11 filing or a specific number of screens to be cut, but the general assumption is that they'll follow Loews and AMC's screen-slashing lead in the near future. Regal's situation, in particular, is alarming, due in part to the fact that during its 12-year history, the chain spurred its phenomenal growth by voraciously buying out -- or merging with -- lesser exhibitors such as Act III. It's estimated that Regal alone now has more than $1 billion in debt. One local Regal staffer, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said, "The thing with Regal is that they grew by buying out a lot of chains. They bought out the little mom-and-pop operations here and there, they bought the local chains. And so in the process they got stuck with a lot of older, smaller theatres that were doing well at the time but now, with megaplexes just down the road in many cases, they're just dying. That's exactly what the problem is."

The phrase "another day, another theatre closing" isn't one I'd been hoping to cultivate, but with an exhausting mountain of debt outside their doors, the major theatre chains are suddenly folding like jackstraws (and it is sudden -- not much more than a year ago, new theatre construction was going like gangbusters) and desperately trying to stave off debt via the wholesale disenfranchisement of their smaller cinematic holdings. The Village is just one of many examples across the country.

Sunday evening's final crowds were less than enough to pack the house, though there was a palpable sense of something going on, a historic turnover, a changing of the guard. Loitering on the walk outside, I overheard one young indie film couple in de rigueur Doc Martens and baseball caps debate the merits of catching either A Hard Day's Night or Best in Show. They finally opted for the Beatles on the (smart) assumption that not only would it probably be the only time they'd be able to see it on the big screen but also the only time they'd be able to see it at the Village. Ever. I got the feeling that they'd met there or something -- why not? -- and had dropped back by for a last look at the theatre's stained screens. News crews came and went, chatting up both customers and the theatre's skeleton staff, but by the time the final film -- Billy Elliot -- began unspooling at 7:35pm, the moribund feel in the air was all I could take, and I hightailed it home to cull through past reviews of films I saw there long ago. It was, in a word, depressing.

Austin is about as movie-mad a town as you'll find outside the perimeter of either coast, and while Smart Growth and dot-com wealth (what remains of it) continues to mold both the skyline and the collective psyche, the closing of the Village Cinema Art feels something like a mortal blow.

"It's always sad when something like this happens, you know?" says Charlie Raines, the longtime Village manager who has since been transferred by Regal to their Lakeline Mall theatre. "But it's business, pure and simple. That's the bottom line."