TACOMA – Loyalty of fans. Love of films. Labor of volunteers. These phrases describe how Tacoma’s Grand Cinema was founded and continues to operate. Ten years ago the theater opened as a nonprofit, community-owned art house.
Today, the cinema draws an estimated 100,000 filmgoers a year, said Michel Rocchi, president of the theater’s board of directors.
The theater’s a key fixture in the city’s cultural landscape. David Graybill, president of the Tacoma-Pierce County Chamber of Commerce, calls it a “pioneer in establishing the foundation of the mix of cultural activities” in the downtown area. He said its “well-rounded entertainment offerings” are “a very attractive part of the total mix.”
The Grand has become an anchor for what Graybill calls “a renaissance” of the neighborhood surrounding it. “They were up there in that cinema before the revitalization came up the hill to meet them,” he said, referring to new housing and the upgrading of commercial properties in the area in the last several years.
But the Grand had a previous life under a different name. When that first incarnation faltered, local moviegoers, fiercely loyal to the foreign and independently made American films shown at the theater, stepped in to save the cinema.
Among the labors of love performed by those early fans:
Throughout the summer of 1998, Paul Jacobson, a retired Tacoma Community College instructor, and Joanne Francis, a self-described “freelancer in life,” strapped on sandwich boards touting the theater and strolled through the weekly downtown farmers market handing out fliers and chatting up passers-by.
“We were so excited about it we never stopped talking about it,” said Francis, who wrote a history of the theater’s early years in a self-published booklet titled “The Grand Cinema Story.”
Elodie Vandevert, a former dean’s assistant at Pacific Lutheran University, volunteered her time to make popcorn and clean the theater. She, Jacobson and Francis were all members of the Grand’s board of directors.
But perhaps the most significant labor of love was undertaken in 1997 by Penelope Richards, the board’s first president. Film companies wanted payment guarantees before they would supply movies to the theater, Richards said. If revenues didn’t cover the costs of film rentals, Richards pledged to make up the difference out of her own pocket.
Now the theater is close to a million-dollar-a-year operation. Projected gross income for this year is $933,000, up from $850,000 in 2006, said executive director Phil Cowan, who added that it’s operating comfortably in the black. (The theater has 10 staffers, with an annual payroll around $240,000.)
Budget projections at the beginning of the year estimated the theater would take in $30,000 more than it would spend by the end of 2007. It surpassed that figure in July, said Rocchi, the board president.
Before the Grand Cinema became a nonprofit, the theater was the commercial, for-profit Grand Tacoma Cinema. Before that, it was the Tacoma Odd Fellows hall, built in 1925.
The Odd Fellows had long departed when entrepreneur Paul Doyle rented and renovated the building into a three-screen, 315-seat cinema, which opened in 1995.
But Doyle went into debt renovating in a letter to the Tacoma City Council, he wrote that he had invested nearly $400,000 in the project and didn’t have enough money to cover the costs of renting films, according to reports published in The Tacoma News Tribune at the time.
Soon the money problems led major art-market distributors, such as Miramax and Sony Classics, to stop sending movies, which meant the theater couldn’t show the latest hot art-house titles. By 1997 Doyle said he was going to shut down unless either the city of Tacoma or fans of the Grand saved it. Enter Richards. Enter Francis. Enter Jacobson. Enter Vandevert. Enter a lot of people who regularly attended movies there.
Before Doyle’s cinema, Tacomans who loved art-house films traveled out of town to watch them.
“I had always gone to foreign films in Seattle, and I was delighted when the theater opened,” Richards said. No way did she and other Grand fans want to see those old high-mileage days return.
“We were just passionate about making sure that this type of movie was going to be shown in Tacoma,” said Megan Warfield, an office worker with the state Department of Ecology, who was a Grand fan and later served as board president. “In the early days that was the only thing that held that place together.”
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