Up North’s Golden Age of Cinema, Part II

Northern Michigan’s vintage movie houses are rewriting their scripts for a happier ending

By Patrick Sullivan | July 22, 2017

Sara Herberger, one of three paid employees of the Vogue Theatre in Manistee, got involved with the nonprofit in a roundabout way. Her eight-year-old son had asked about the then-dilapidated building after a fundraiser to restore it was announced, and she tried to explain to him what restoring it could mean to the community.

Luke immediately saw the appeal of having a movie theater in town that he could walk to with friends.

“He saw the Vogue, and he said, ‘What is the Vogue, mom?’ I explained it to him. And then, like as a parent, I said, ‘So, what could you do to help the Vogue get here? Wouldn’t that be great to have a movie theater?’” she said. “He goes, ‘I could sell lemonade.’ So I wound up selling lemonade with my son for about a year and a half.”

LEMONADE TO LA-LA-LAND
Luke and his mom trudged through town with a wagon, visited farmer’s markets and festivals, and sold lemonade in front of the shuttered theater whenever they could.

When filmmaker Michael Moore, an early supporter of efforts to restore the Vogue, heard about Luke’s extraordinary fundraising efforts in 2012, he invited him to be a guest of the Traverse City Film Festival.

“It was funny — I mean, my son was like, ‘Yeah, I talked to this lady and this guy,’ and we were like, ‘Well, who are they?’ And he was like, ‘Well, her name was Susan.’” Herberger said. “And then it turns out that was Susan Sarandon that he got to meet, and it was Michael Moore. So it was just a fun thing.”

After a $2.6 million restoration (partly funded through lemonade), the Vogue Theatre reopened in December 2013. Today, it’s one of three nonprofit movie theaters operating in northern Lower Michigan — the others are the State Theatre in Traverse City and the Lyric Theatre in Harbor Springs — and it was one of the five small-town theaters invited to screen movies as part of TCFF’s pre-festival Around the Bay film series. (Also participating are the Lyric, the Garden Theater in Frankfort, the Elk Rapids Cinema, and the Bay Theatre in Suttons Bay.)

In recent years in northern Michigan, movie theaters have come to inhabit a special place in the life of small towns and foster great devotion from residents.

Take the single-screen Garden, a theater that’s been continually in business since it opened in 1924 but was taken off life support in the last decade, thanks to owners who are less concerned with making a profit than revitalizing a town and community members who are willing to invest for the sake of local cinema.

Jennie Schmitt, who with her husband, Rick, is one of the co-owners of the Garden, said it’s been a labor of love to get the theater on its feet again.

“It’s not a moneymaker. We make enough money to keep putting more into it, but we don’t get anything out of it,” she said. “Really, the whole thing was, Rick and I lived in Frankfort, and we really liked the movie theater, and we knew the person who had owned it. It took us several years to be able to buy it from him, and we knew something had to be done, and we just kind of formed a group of people and got lucky.”

A THEATER NOT QUITE CLOSED
When the new owners took over the Garden in 2009, they inherited a distressed building in need of massive restoration.

Schmitt remembers the Garden had been a tough place to see a movie when she moved to Frankfort in 1995.

“When we first moved here that first winter, they were like, ‘Oh, you’re cold, let me give you this blanket,’ and you’re like, ‘I don’t even want to know where that thing’s been,’” Schmitt said.

In addition to the theatre’s inefficient boiler, the women’s restroom had to be completely redone, and all of the seats needed to be replaced — a task that was accomplished through donations from the community. The building needed new carpet and sound proofing, and the concession booth had to be rebuilt. Someone donated a digital projector. 

“I think people recognize the fact that people don’t get into it for the money,” Schmitt said. “There’s a sense that the Garden Theater is kind of everybody’s. You know, we may have just gotten the ball rolling, but it takes a village. I mean, everybody’s involved with it.”

In recent years, Schmitt said she and her husband and another couple that run the theater have gotten the Garden to a sustainable point, and they now hope to turn it into a nonprofit.

What the Schmitts have learned in operating the Garden is that the place is more than a business — it serves as sort of a town center that brings people together. It’s an entertainment outlet for residents, and it boosts business overall on Main Street. It also helps the Schmitts’s other business, the thriving Stormcloud Brewery next door.

“I would say the theater, it gives people a reason to come into town. I would say that the restaurants notice the difference — not just Stormcloud — but all the other restaurants,” she said. “You know, it’s Friday night in February, and you’ve got something to go to.”

FARM-TO-AUDITORIUM TREATS
Members of the Bahle family in Suttons Bay have been operating the Bay theater since they bought it in 1976. Bob Bahle managed it for years, followed by manager Denise Sica. Today, a new generation led by Erik Bahle has taken over.

Long before there was a Traverse City Film Festival or a revived State Theatre in Traverse City, Suttons Bay was virtually the only place in northern Michigan to see independent and foreign films, thanks to the vision of Bob Bahle.

The theater always has been a source of cultural enrichment and an economic driver for the village, but it’s never been very profitable. Today, Erik Bahle said he’s trying to figure out how to make sure the theater lasts another generation.

A day before he talked to the Northern Express about the cinema business, his dad had travelled to Lansing to collect the Bay’s new beer and wine license, which had just been approved. They didn’t want to wait for the Liquor Control Commission to get around to putting it in the mail.

The Bay will now serve hard cider and beer, and Erik Bahle has completely revamped the concessions to offer only Michigan-sourced treats.

He found Michigan-made popcorn at Oryana in Traverse City, and that inspired him to try to go all the way, he said.

“That’s what planted the seed to say that there’s got to be a way to source what we’re getting from right here in our backyard,” Bahle said.

The theater now carries cherry sour gummy candy from Cherry Republic, chocolate bars from Zingerman’s in Ann Arbor, caramel and toffee corn from Slabtown in Traverse City, dried apple chips hand-dipped in dark chocolate by Grocer’s Daughter in Empire, and Northwoods Soda from Williamsburg.

Like some of the other small-town theaters in the region, the Bay is a for-profit business, but Bahle said it basically operates as a nonprofit. It’s kept alive out of love and for what it does for its town.

“This business has been a flat-line business since day one; it has never made money, and it has never really lost money, it has just kind of carried itself right on the edge of success or failure,” Bahle said. “It’s Leelanau County’s only movie theater, and it’s one of the things that really sets Suttons Bay apart from the other towns. I think everyone benefits from it, other businesses benefit from it.” 

A BUSINESS IN ELK RAPIDS
Joe Yuchasz takes a different approach to the theater business in Elk Rapids.

His Elk Rapids Cinema has been basically a one-man show for 44 years, and as owner and sole full-time employee, he says business is good. But that’s not come without sacrifice. Yuchasz, who bought the theater in 1973, said he’s been so busy running the theater the last several decades that he never found time to settle down and start a family.

Now 76, Yuchasz is something of a proud parent when talking about his theatre. He remembers the first film he showed — Fiddler on the Roof. He’s been programing films, taking tickets, and serving concessions ever since.

He’s gone through several generations of projection systems and replaced almost everything in the building, from the doors to the sound system, which once featured a couple speakers and now includes 69 with 10 amplification channels. All seats have been replaced, and he’s in the process of switching out all of the fluorescent fixtures for LED lights to conserve energy.

Despite the changes, however, Yuchasz’s theater remains, in a way, fixed in an earlier era. He said he doesn’t pay attention to other theater chains and largely runs his place the same way he did in the 1970s. He negotiates directly with distributors and won’t take deals for first-run blockbusters that lock him into showing the same movie for three or four weeks at a time.

Another relic from a different era is Yuchasz’s concession stand. The prices have hardly changed over the decades. Yuchasz sells a small popcorn for a dollar and a small pop for 50 cents. He keeps in stock small candy bars that sell for five cents.

“That’s so if a kid’s got his last nickel, and that’s all he’s got, he can spend that if he wants to,” Yuchasz said. 

The theater opened in 1940; when Yuchasz, only its third owner, bought it, there were only three screens close enough to be considered competition — two on Traverse City’s Front Street and a drive-in south of town. Over the years there’ve been as many as 22 screens showing movies in Traverse City. Today there are 16.

Yuchasz isn’t worried. He trusts in his instincts to select movies his local customers want to see —films worth keeping them from traveling out of town — and he’s confident he can stay in business as long as he’s able to run the theater.

“I really read a lot of reviews,” he said. “You know, Rotten Tomatoes is a home page for me.”

MOVIE AND POPCORN: $1
Earlier this year, business students from Baker College in Cadillac released an economic impact study to determine what effect the Vogue has had on Manistee.

“They found that about two-thirds of the folks who came to movies also patronized other businesses in town on that trip,” said Frank Greco, a retired lawyer and member of the nonprofit’s board of directors who first volunteered to help when he learned of restoration plans in 2011. 

Greco said it’s impossible to quantify exact cause and effect, but the Vogue is undoubtedly a part of a revival currently unfolding on River Street, the town’s main street.

“It’s changed. It’s a lot of people to get downtown. And it makes the town feel more alive, just to have people around,” Greco said. “I’ve been here since 2005, and it certainly seems different to me.”

Indeed, downtown Manistee seems to be experiencing a resurgence with several new businesses that have opened recently in the blocks around the theater. A new brewery is expected to open across the river next.

Tim Doyen, who with his wife, Shelly, has owned the Ideal Kitchen for 11 years, recalls looking down the street and watching construction workers driving Bobcats in and out of the Vogue building, hauling loads of dirt. Doyen questioned the sanity of the project as bricks fell off the side of the 1938-built building that houses the Vogue.

“When they first said they were going to put a bunch of money into that theater, I was skeptical that they were going to do it right,” Doyen said. “The finished product is just amazing. I mean, they did a great job.”

Doyen believes the Vogue had been good for business.

Tina Fisk, a cider and wine tasting room host at Douglas Valley cider in summer and teacher at Trinity Lutheran Manistee during the school year, said the Vogue adds life to Manistee all year-round.

“It’s right there in the middle of town. It makes it look like something’s going on here,” Fisk said.

She said the Vogue makes a great field trip for her students, who, on a weekday morning get to see a $1 movie and get a bag of popcorn and a water.

SMALL THEATER RENAISSANCE
The Vogue is the only movie theater in Manistee County, so its nonprofit operators believe their mandate is to show mainstream films.

There are currently two screens at the theater, but there is room for at least one more that could be used to screen films that are less commercial. That would take lots of money, though, Greco said.

“That would let us do what some people want, which is to show more independent and art-type films,” he said. “It’s really tough to do with just the two screens when we’re trying to show the broad range of films that the community needs.”

One of the great things about the Vogue, Greco and Herberger said, is that it gives kids in school a chance to see movies in a theater.

“They are growing up, and that was something that started and was established, and now they come back to the Vogue, and they know what it is, and they know what it means,” Herberger said.

Greco isn’t sure whether the Vogue would have been restored if the State Theatre in Traverse City hadn’t been restored and re-opened. At the very least, the State proved that a nonprofit theater model could work in northern Michigan.

“If that wasn’t there as a model, I think there would have been less confidence. And of course, we were able to draw on their experience and get their advice on things,” he said. “So, no way to know, but much less likely.”

Schmitt, at the Garden in Frankfort, agrees that there is a sort of renaissance right now for small-town theaters in northern Michigan, especially ones that operate as a sort of public service. She’s glad the Garden is part of it, and she thinks others have been inspired by what’s happened in Frankfort and with the State in Traverse City.

She said Michael Moore has been part of the impetus to in the theater revival, and that his enthusiasm for cinema is infectious.

“Michael Moore has been a big champion of small-town cinema,” she said. “He’s championed us and other theaters.”