New Year Newsletter
The last few months have been a rollercoaster at the Cinemagic. It’s been so long since the last newsletter because every time we finished a draft, it was already out of date. There were highs, lows, meltdowns, narrow escapes, weather disasters, and a surprisingly well received show of Santa with Muscles.
To each their own.
And where did this all lead us? A pretty good spot, somehow, even if unexpected challenges put us way behind schedule. This is a long one, so TLDR: A whole bunch of crazy stuff happened, but things turned out mostly OK. It put us behind schedule and used up most our savings, so we’re dusting off the GoFundMe for another push.
The Expansion
The expansion is a serious case of good news/bad news. The bad news is that, as you probably noticed, we’ve blown right past our target opening date. The good news is that we’re going to open a better space because of it.
A big part of our original plan was re-using existing infrastructure to avoid complicated permitting, and the delays that can bring. But when we cracked into the wall with the intent of re-opening an old, boarded up doorway, we found something no one expected (which is saying a lot, the theater is 110 years old, and we’re used to finding nonsense). The door was not in fact a door, but the edge of a 10-foot-wide window that had been framed like a door. Better yet, beyond the window was a second, bonus wall. Neither of these things were on any version of the blueprints that we’ve seen.
That sent us back to the drawing board, and more importantly, to a structural engineer. The bad news is that this is a costly delay with new, time-consuming permit requirements. The good news is that we can put the opening wherever we want now.
And if anyone remembers why there was a giant window between our lobby and the neighboring office space, we’d love to know.
The Projector Meltdown
We’ve already talked about this a couple times, but it’s worth mentioning. In late October our digital projector finally kicked the bucked. It was a first-generation digital projector, and quite possibly the oldest operating digital projector in the state. The good news? We knew we had a very old machine, and we were prepared. It did take Nick (our in-house technician) off the expansion for most of a month, and put that further behind schedule, but in the end, we came out of it with a much better projection system.
The Break in
We’ve had a lot of break-in attempts since 2020. At this point the building is mostly a waste of time for would be burglars. We’ve had so many helpful strangers come along in the night to highlight potential security flaws (that’s what they’re doing, right?), that we’ve learned a lot about how to lock the place down.
Unfortunately, for the first time in 4 years, someone got in. The good news? Even once someone gets in, the interior is pretty compartmentalized. They never got to any of the good stuff. The bad is that it happened while we were doing construction work, and they made off with a pretty generous haul of tools and equipment.
Almost all of those tools didn’t even belong to us, but rather to Nick’s father-in-law, an electrician who’s been helping us with the remodel pro-bono. We really want to compensate him for those tools, and this theft was the main motivator to keep the GoFundMe up and running.
This damnable weather
It’s hard to think of a worse week to get snowed out. The Gamera Trilogy was supposed to be a tentpole weekend to help us through a sleepy January, but we all know how that turned out. Thankfully, Q&A guest Ayako Fujitani made time to come back in about a month, so we can take a mulligan and try again.
Anyone missing a muffler? We watched someone peel this thing right off the bottom of their car in the ice.
We’re also looking to re-schedule the series of Mel Brooks films that were cancelled, but don’t have anything to announce yet.
The GoFundMe
Our original plan was to launch the fundraiser, make some noise about it, let it fade out, and shut it down last November. But for a whole bunch of reasons we’re about to get into, we’re going to dust it off and make one last fundraising push.
The usual disclaimer applies: Somehow, despite all this, we’re doing OK. The Cinemagic Theater is safe. But there are standards we want to meet in terms of how we treat our staff, our customers, and the films we play. Further support will ensure we can meet those goals.
We aren’t going to use the GoFundMe money for anything outside the stated goals of the fundraiser. Despite a much more expensive year-end than we’d planned, the expansion is still moving ahead, thanks entirely to the support we’ve received.
That’s nice, what about movies?
This newsletter is already way too long. You can expect regular, film-focused updates over the next couple weeks. For now, check out our coming soon page to see what’s on the horizon. We just rolled out several killer events, including the release of Godzilla Minus One/Minus Color, and there’s more to come.
