12:30pm | by Sarah Parvini
The lights in the auditorium dim, and a blue velvet curtain rises as the audience quiets down, ensconced in small, classic theater seats with wooden arms that most cinemas replaced long ago. It is Saturday night at the Art Theatre in Long Beach, and locals have gathered for their last chance to see the 1920s period piece “The Artist” before its sweep at Sunday’s Oscar ceremony.
While most can only dream of the Roaring Twenties, the Art Theatre lived it. Built as a silent theater in 1924, the Art, as locals affectionately call it, has been around for almost a century and is the longest running single-screen theater in Southern California.
Like the area surrounding it, the Art fought for survival over the decades. But after a million-dollar renovation, it is making a come back during a time when many movie theaters are struggling with dwindling ticket sales.
“It’s very special to us in the neighborhood,” said Long Beach native Elvia Delgadillo, who has been going to the Art for the last 25 years.
In the past five years, movie theaters have seen a general decline in ticket sales. 2011 saw a drop of 4.2 percent in attendance, bringing national ticket sales to a 16-year low.
Last year, the Art made a modest profit for the first time in four years, owners Mark Vidor and Jan Van Dijs said.
The Art has carved out a unique niche, as many indie theaters do, showing films that corporate cinemas won’t, like the Oscar-winning Iranian film “A Separation” and “Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow,” a foreign documentary that showed at the Cannes Film Festival.
The original theater opened during the silent movie era, complete with a pipe organ and an orchestra pit. After the Long Beach earthquake in the 1930s, the theater was remodeled in an art deco style, adding zigzag tiles and its now-iconic tower. But it fell on hard times in the 1980s, when the multiplex cinema became more popular, Vidor said.
Around that time, the theater became increasingly run-down, housing stray cats and rats for its feline residents to chase. At times it would get so cold that they would give out blankets to attendees, because the theater had no heating, Van Dijs said. In 2008, it was renovated one last time, using blueprints from the 1934 design to restore it.
Locals say the theater serves as a centerpiece of the revitalization of retro row on Fourth Street, which is now filled with coffee shops and quirky boutiques. “When I go out, this is the place to come,” Delgadillo said. “It’s a treasure in the neighborhood.”
Vidor grew up in Long Beach and didn’t want to see the theater he went to as a child close down. “We wanted to reuse this building to preserve our city’s heritage,” he said. “For us this is about history.”
The theater had solid attendance for the first six months, but after its first year under the tutelage of Vidor and Van Dijs it a saw a loss of $11,000, the owners said.
Industry experts like Mitchell Block, an Oscar-winning producer, say successful independent theaters have sought their own market; they do not compete with corporate chains to show blockbusters that quickly go to Netflix or on-demand streaming.
“The [independent] theater experience is very different than watching on Netflix, or your iPad or your television set. What they’re selling is a very different product,” Block said. “People can buy espresso machines, but it doesn’t mean Starbucks is going to go out of business.”
A consumer survey done by PA Consulting Group and the Motion Picture Association of America links the decline in theater attendance to “dissatisfaction with the movie-going experience and increasing competition for the consumer’s share of time and money.”
Vidor and Van Dijs said art house theaters address this by offering something different. Every Saturday night, the Art hosts an interactive screening of “The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” where large groups dress up like their favorite characters and sing along with the movie. This month, the theater held a neighborhood viewing party for the Oscars.
One of the biggest film events that sells the most tickets is the “Fly Fishing Film Tour,” Vidor said. People from all over Long Beach gather to watch three hours worth of stories about the sport with fellow aficionados.
Van Dijs and Vidor said they will continue to work actively with community organizations to bring Long Beach residents the events and films they want to see. The owners are optimistic about the Art’s future.
“People are going to want to go out and sit in a dark theater, regardless of their big screen TV,” Vidor said. “And I think the people in our community reflect that.”