Art Films, Blockbusters or Both: The Future of the City-Owned Co-Ed Cinema
Brevard City Council will decide whether to extend the lease of the current tenant, who has been praised for her work during Covid-19. But should the theater show a wider variety of films?
BREVARD — Ann Zelle showed off her dessert in the dim light of the Co-Ed Cinema before the start of a recent Saturday feature presentation: Twizzlers.
She and her sister, Susan, paired it with Diet Coke and entrees served in large, colorful paper bags.
“It’s what you do if you’re a true movie buff,” said Susan Zelle, of Brevard. “Popcorn for dinner.”
Strange as this meal choice might seem, it’s completely in the spirit of the once-common ritual of “going to the movies” — leaving behind ordinary life and embracing the sights, sounds and tastes exclusive to the miniature world of the theater.
That this is a more transporting and satisfying way to spend an evening than streaming a film at home is one point of widespread agreement in a debate about the future of the Co-Ed that the Brevard City Council will take up at its meeting next Monday.
Everybody interviewed for this story also believes the 83-year-old, city-owned Co-Ed on West Main Street is a landmark institution that should remain a vital community hub.
But how should that be accomplished?
Since the city bought the Co-Ed in 1980, it has leased it to for-profit operators such as current tenant Abby Steel, of Take One Entertainment LLC, who shows mostly first-run studio releases.
Council will vote next week on renewing a lease that will allow Take One to continue to run the theater for as many as 10 more years at a nominal cost. Steel has done a great job keeping the Co-Ed up and running during the Covid-19 pandemic, Mayor Maureen Copelof said at a January meeting, and Susan Zelle praised Steel for welcoming community groups that show fundraising films at the theater.
But maybe it’s time to copy the approach of other historic theaters, which typically show a broad mix of features, including independent films and documentaries, several residents say. That’s especially true since Covid has forced the Co-Ed to reduce its schedule to three showtimes, three days a week.
“I think (the Co-Ed) should be used to the maximum,” said Michael Dexter-Smith, a semi-retired venture capitalist and president of the Brevard Rotary Club. “I think just offering the same movie three times (per day) over the weekend is not a good use of that facility. I think it could be used maybe five or six days a week.”
The Era of Thunder Road
Dexter-Smith, who said he is speaking for himself, not the Rotary, also called the Co-Ed “a focal point of the west end of downtown.”
Appropriately, it's a part of the city that almost looks like the set of a nostalgic movie. The Co-Ed’s neighbors include Brevard City Hall and an old-fashioned bakery, barber shop and hardware store. The cinema building, its facade featuring bold vertical lines characteristic of the pre-World War II Art Moderne architectural movement, was completed in 1939. Its ornate, bright-red ticket booth was salvaged from the even older, long-shuttered Clemson Theater, the site of which — next to the Co-Ed — is now being converted to a city park.
Both were originally owned by the father-and-son team of Frank and Verne Clement, and both carry somewhat misleading names, said Charley Carter, son of a later Co-Ed owner, C.B. “Dick” Carter.
Clemson had no association with the nearby university, and the name is a contraction of “Clement and son,” while “Co-Ed’ was formed from the shortening of two other names or nicknames.
“I'm not sure where they got it exactly but it’s not because there was a college in town,” Carter said.
Adding to the confusion, the Co-Ed is called a “Cinema” on its marquee and a “Theater” in city documents, while Dick Carter insisted that it be spelled “Theatre,” said his daughter, Margaret Carter McKinnish, of Aiken, S.C.
Carter and other family members, who also owned a drive-in east of downtown, bought the Co-Ed in 1942, said McKinnish, who along with her brother remembers the privileges and duties that came with membership in Brevard’s first family of cinema.
McKinnish sometimes was roped into helping out at the concession stand, she said, while Charley Carter recalls that he “started working at the theater part time — I guess, legally, I shouldn’t have been — when I was 14 or 15.”
But they and their friends were allowed to slip into the theater without paying, and McKinnish said the standard joke between her and her longtime husband is that “he started dating me because he could see movies for free.”
Their father navigated one crisis, the growing popularity of television, in the 1950s, and another, integration, in the mid 1960s.
“He had to walk a fine line. There were people who disagreed,” McKinnish said of integration. “He never mentioned that he lost customers, but I remember him being concerned how people would react.”
Charley Carter recalls showing a wide range of movies, from westerns to early James Bond films, and, repeatedly, one sure-fire crowd pleaser — the 1958 crime drama about moonshiners, Thunder Road, parts of which were filmed in Transylvania County.
“Dad would bring it back and fill the house and make a bunch of money,” he said.
But by 1980, Dick Carter was not only ready to retire, his son and daughter said, but he and other owners worried about the fate of the cinema as mall-based, multi-screen theaters began to dominate the industry.
“They were afraid in that time frame that somebody would turn it into an art house or a porn house,” Charley Carter said, “something they didn’t want.”
. . . and of Covid
Council members didn’t mention concerns about other uses, or any specific plans for the theater, when they agreed to purchase the Co-Ed for $79,500 on March 26 of that year, according to the minutes of their meeting.
Two months later they voted to rent the theater to an operator for $500 per month. In the 1990s, meeting minutes show, the monthly rent was as high as $900. Other leases required tenants to make major upgrades, and Steel’s immediate predecessor as the operator of the Co-Ed, Mark Peddy, invested about $250,000 to revamp the interior and install digital projection equipment.
Steel, who took over operation of the theater in 2015 at age 19, will pay $100 a year to rent the theater, according to terms recommended by Council in January.
Her proposed lease, which the council will consider next Monday, will run for five years, followed by one-year renewals for another five years with the Council’s approval.
The city is responsible for structural improvements, such as the recent $12,000 repair of roof supports, while Steel must make interior upgrades such as recent ones she listed in a letter to Council — repainting the interior and replacing toilets and a hot water heater.
If she is getting a better deal than previous tenants, none of them had to deal with the threats of streaming and Covid-19 that make the advent of television or multiplex cinemas seem benign by comparison.
The increasing dominance of Netflix and similar services began cutting into her business well before the start of the pandemic, Steel said.
Covid then forced the closure of the theater from March to October of 2020, she said, while she continued to pay utility bills and other ongoing expenses. And after being denied government payroll protection funds, she was forced to let go of all her staffers.
“I basically had to spend everything I had just to keep from going under,” she said.
She saw a mini-boom over this year’s Christmas holidays with the showing of Spider-Man: No Way Home. And though she sold fewer than 50 tickets for Uncharted two Saturdays ago, she called it “not bad” for a 4 p.m. showing. Seen from inside the 250-seat theater, the crowd was large enough to prevent a feeling of emptiness and to generate collective gasps during action sequences.
“(Business) is slowly building back up,” Steel said afterwards, and in an earlier letter to Council she asked for the chance to “ensure that the long history of our hometown theater (doesn’t) stop with me.
“I would like to continue to maintain our place as an integral part of downtown Brevard, while working to rebuild and recover from the massive losses taken during the pandemic.”
The Old Cinemeccanica
The City seems inclined to do this partly because, Council member Mac Morrow said in an interview, “Abby obviously has a passion for movies.”
Her family’s interest in film is what brought them to Western North Carolina in the first place, she said. Her father led them on a vacation to visit locations used for one of his favorite movies, The Last of the Mohicans, and they liked the area so much they decided to stay.
A fascination with film and an appreciation of the history of the Co-Ed is also what convinced Steel to take a job there as a teenager and, later, to take over its operation.
Between recent showings of Uncharted, she walked up a steep, tightly wound spiral staircase from the lobby to the projection room, where she showed off the digital projector, the open laptop that controls it, and an aluminum-covered cassette, roughly the size of a VCR tape, that contained the movie.
“It’s basically a great big flash drive,” she said, “a big brick of memory.”
Next to it stood a hulking, Italian-made Cinemeccanica projector fitted with a towering pair of reels, each one four feet in diameter. These were once fed by projectionists who were also responsible for splicing together trailers and advertisements.
“They were up here all day,” she said. “It was a full-time job.”
Neither the Cinemeccanica, nor the table-mounted crank used to rewind the films by hand — nor, certainly, a reel of one the last actual films shown at the theater, 2010’s Shrek Forever After — has any practical use.
“But I just don’t want to get rid of this stuff,” she said. “I love to see it. It’s been here so long that it’s a piece of history and it feels like part of the building itself.”
She likes all movies, she said. And though the PG-13 action film Uncharted is typical of the theater’s offerings, she is also open to showing any films the community requests.
That includes, she said, the more artistic movies advocated by Dexter-Smith and the most vocal proponent of a new direction for the Co-Ed, Doug Denton.
“He’s never reached out to me,” she said. “I feel like this could have been avoided if he had just spoken to me and we could have worked something out.”
Legacy of the Film House
In a letter to the Transylvania Times, Denton called for Council to hold off on renewing the lease and form a committee of community members to “explore a non-profit business model for Brevard’s only downtown cinema.”
But he also said he would be willing to work with Steel — and has tried unsuccessfully to contact her — to advance his goal of making better use of the theater.
That could include “live music and children’s events,” as well as “independent, classic, foreign, documentary, and animation” films, wrote Denton, who previously volunteered at the Pisgah Film House, a nonprofit that showed a range of movies in small spaces downtown.
Though the Film House shut down during the early months of the pandemic, he said, it demonstrated the presence of an audience for quality features in Transylvania.
So have cinemas across the country, he said, where showing a diverse selection of film has been key to “preserving historic theaters that were pretty much on the outs because of the influx of multiplexes.”
Examples of this in North Carolina include city-owned theaters in Cary and Durham as well as the privately owned Tryon Theatre, in Polk County.
Like the Co-Ed, the Tryon dates from the 1930s and serves a small town in a sparsely populated county. And though it’s owned by for-profit operators, their “intent is to have it function as a space beyond just making a profit,” said its manager, Evan Fitch.
“It has always, in its mission statement, been very much oriented as a community theater.”
The Tryon’s basic strategy, which successfully carried it through the pandemic, is to offer movies that can’t be found by driving to a multiplex, in surroundings that can’t be duplicated at home.
“We’re selling an experience,” Fitch said.
Though the Tryon does sometimes show blockbusters, it has also recently offered English-language and foreign-language Oscar-nominated films, independent movies and documentaries.
It serves wine and craft beer as well as conventional concessions. The ticket takers are likely to know the names of the customers, Fitch said, and when the lights go down there are no cellphones, refrigerators, pets or family members to distract audience members.
“There’s something to be said for those experiences of the sublime, whether it be in nature or art, where you allow something greater or grander to wash over you,” he said. “You are completely ceding control.”
Right in Town — an Escape
Uncharted, based on a video-game series and heavy on computer-generated imagery, is about as different as a movie can be from, say, the Indian independent film, Parallel Lines, recently featured at the Tryon.
But in other ways, going to the movies in a small, downtown theater seems pretty much the same in both places.
You sink into your seat with treats you might not allow yourself at home. For two hours, you hear and see nothing but what’s on the screen. You become so absorbed that, afterwards, the familiar sight of a hometown street seems slightly disorienting.
Susan Zelle knows Steel well enough that, while loading up on concessions before the movie two weeks ago, she chatted with her sympathetically about the lease controversy. She and her sister, both of them retirement-aged, are Co-Ed regulars because it’s convenient, she said, and because “we want to support Abby and we need to get out.”
She liked Uncharted, she said as she walked out afterwards, or at least she liked the experience of watching it at the Co-Ed.
“Good escapism,” she said. “There’s too much reality now.”
Thanks, Dan. The Co-Ed is a valuable resource and we are all indebted to Ms Steele for her
cause. But we can do much more. Small musical events held by BMC students can be held there. There could be a day each week for 1940s-50s film noir classics such as those shown on Turner Classic Movies . There could be a discount pizza night offering pizza that is ordered and paid for in advance like the great service being provided by Global Chef.
Now, now Russell. Your indiscriminate lumping of artsy snobs and retired folks is tired, well worn out and not appreciated. Being a member of the latter group I can say that I know of no retirees who want Brevard to change. That is a fallacy that's been suggested for years. We like it here the way it is. Keep in mind that every city, county and general election cycle the "locals" have voted the party line. You have gotten what you've voted for. I vote for no sterilization. Keep the Co-Ed as is.