When Jo Ann Morreale hinted a few months ago that she might
be getting out of the movie business, scores of city residents balked. While
Morreale has operated the one-screen theater at the Clinton-Goodman
intersection for more than two decades, the building itself has been a movie
house for almost 90 years. Many who grew up frequenting the neighborhood haunt
— known nowadays as The Cinema — can’t imagine life without it. But time
has begun to take its toll.
One of the two air-conditioning units has problems, and
maintenance costs in general have been rising. Late last summer, Morrealle put
the building up for sale. The media flocked to her side, a grassroots “save the
theater” group (coordinated by the South East Area Coalition) took hold,
tickets sales jumped, and a surprised Morreale began to rethink her options.
Morreale charges only $3 for her back-to-back features, and one
solution could be to raise prices. But Morreale says that would compromise her
mission. “I wanted the intelligent, adult crowd that appreciated a reasonable
price,” she says, “a place to spend an evening and still have change back from
a $5 bill.”
To maintain her low ticket price, Morreale has always shown
second-run movies — a policy that would seemingly place her in competition
with the newer, larger Movies 10 discount theater on West Henrietta Road.
Morreale’s clientele disagrees. They like going to the movies in their own
neighborhood, they say. And while other area theaters charge several dollars
for candy and popcorn, Morreale still sells candy bars for 50 cents and large
popcorns for $2.
“There are no places like this anymore,” says Mike Thompson,
chair of the Ellwanger Barry Neighborhood Association. Joel Kunkler, community
development coordinator for the South East Area Coalition, says Morreale, a
science teacher at Edison Tech, didn’t go into the movie business for the
money. Rather, he says, it was for love of the trade. “Her primary thought
process is not that the theater is a business,” he says. “It’s just a service
she provides to the community.” With its resident cat, a room where people can
store their bikes, and a baby room for families who don’t want to disturb other
patrons, Morreale’s theater is indeed an old-school movie house.
A study conducted by SUNY Geneseo faculty and students last
year indicated strong support for a movie theater in the Cinema’s southeast
city neighborhood. “It complements the nightlife,” says Dan Buyer, executive
director of the South Wedge Planning Committee. In the survey, the Cinema was
listed as key to “the larger experience that people want to have when they come
to the South Wedge,” says Buyer, “along with going out for a drink at Beale
Street or going out to Lux.” While bars like Beale Street and Lux typically
attract people in their 20’s and 30’s, Morreale draws an older audience. And of
the 20 or so people attending a SEAC save-the-theater meeting recently, less
than a handful were under age 40.
Morreale herself seems more concerned with maintaining her
current audience than tapping a new generation. “Currently my target audience
is not the college crew,” she says. “Kids don’t have time for a double feature.”
And teens are even harder to draw, she says: “They want to see movies the first
night they come out or the second night. After that, it’s old news.”
Nonetheless, Morreale and her supporters are looking for
ways to diversify the Cinema’s offerings. Ideas floated at recent SEAC meetings
included working with Rochester Institute of Technology students to create a
website, expanding the theater’s offerings to include live performances, and
hosting a lecture series.
Kunkler adds that while SEAC typically refrains from being
involved with private business affairs, his organization believes both in the
theater’s viability and in Morreale’s vision. “I think she does this because
she loves movies and because she loves her community,” Kunkler says. “She doesn’t
want get rich and fat from this.”
This article appears in Jan 25-31, 2006.
