The Bijou organizers plan to first raise money to purchase what Rea terms a “superior transfer machine” to start a business of transferring people’s old Super 8 films. “We’ll have live music and we’re hoping to get a good crowd so people can maybe get a sense of Beatlemania.” “No one’s seen a version of this film looking this good since 1964,” Rea says about the Richard Lester-directed classic. The first event will be a showing of the Beatles’ film “A Hard Day’s Night” (1964) at the Byrd Theatre, a joint fundraiser to support the Byrd’s Journey to the Seats and the Bijou film center. Instead of opening the theater, the pair is going to rent space at Anchor Studios on East Broad Street next to Tarrant’s so the Bijou has an office while continuing to hold pop-up events to raise money. There have been potential interested partners, but it’s “slow-cooking.” So far, he says, VCU isn’t involved. “In Richmond, we’ve been surprised at how vibrant the art film crowd is year round,” he says - “instead of just when students are in town.”īut the Bijou wants to be a hub of information for film production and a place to help facilitate local filmmaking, Rea says, for people who want to “see movies, show movies and make movies.”Īfter looking at three commercial spaces in the arts district to house their planned 120-seat theater, Parrish says, they’ve yet to find a suitable partner for the storefront cinema and cafe. Joseph Masher, chief operating officer for Bow Tie Cinemas, says that audiences have been improving.
You might think that Criterion Cinemas at Movieland - open nearly two years now - has the local art film clientele covered with its four small screening rooms. “I think we can find a niche having a place that promotes alternatives to the Hollywood-centric model. “Richmond is a lot more diverse a place than people give it credit for,” says Parrish, who recently taught a world cinema course at Virginia Commonwealth University, where he works as director of foundation relations. (He sold it, as well as another chain of theaters, and later committed suicide during a trip to the country the Bijou was run into the ground as a bowling alley during the Depression.)
#BIJOU THEATER RICHMOND MOVIE#
The name comes from the first operating movie theater in Richmond at Seventh and Broad streets, owned by former major league baseball player Jake Wells. The duo is ramping up plans for a new art house cinema and cafe called the Bijou Film Center. They are James Parrish, co-founder of the James River Film Society and founder of Richmond Flicker, a bi-monthly screening of short Super 8 and 16 mm films by local filmmakers that ran for a decade, and Terry Rea, former manager of the repertory Biograph Theatre. Yes, they want your old Super 8 home movies. They want to open a new community art theater and film education center that embraces the wider world of cinema, showing films that aren’t coming to Richmond as well as small-gauge home moviemaking. Two local film veterans hope they soon can offer an alternative to Hollywood’s endless parade of big-budget noisemakers and gimmicks. Maybe people miss storytelling not geared to 13-year-olds. Who knows why the latest rash of comic-book sequels, fantasy trilogies and Bible epics failed to rake in billions at the box office? Maybe people are tiring of mindless tent-pole franchises, everything in 3-D, everything shot digitally looking the same with just the special-effects money shots changing - and even those not much. It’s almost enough to make you cry into your home-popped bowl of sludge-less popcorn while inviting friends over to watch a DVD, or purchasing that acclaimed on-demand film that has no chance of ever playing locally.
#BIJOU THEATER RICHMOND CRACKED#
No films cracked the $300 million mark domestically in the worst box-office season since 1997.
It was the summer of the bummer for Hollywood.
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