Development has hung the sign of its approach
on the red-brick frontage of the Prytania Theater, only a yard away from the coming-soon
poster for Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. The development sign
reads: For Sale. Tommy Crane Inc. 483-0977. Listed by Rick Tusson 891-2116.
There's no movie scheduled for tonight, though there's popcorn
bubbling up from its shiny cauldron while bars of Ghirardelli chocolate stand
sweetly nearby. But the teenaged concessionaire just waits and waits.
Taped to the front of the concession stand is a sheet whose
headline pleads, "Please help!" It asks that anyone interested in preserving
the Prytania as a movie theater please come to tonight's meeting and make that
interest known.
Inside, the movie screen hangs red and blank. On the stage
apron, a little podium had been set up in half-shadow. Behind it stands Rene
Brunet. Rene is 81 years old, but has none of the shabbiness that often attends
old age. He is as clean and crisp as a Mormon elder on the day of his granddaughter's
wedding.
For most of his 81 years, Brunet has been involved in the running
of movie houses in New Orleans. Six years ago, he took over managership of the
Prytania, then on its final reel. He's done some good things with it since then,
but development has come knocking again. This time it has a half-million price
tag.
"Most of you already know that this is the
last single-screen theater in the New Orleans area," he says from behind the
little podium. "Not only that, but more importantly, the last neighborhood theater.
Neighborhood theaters are important to the history of New Orleans."
Once there were many. Mostly ragamuffin temples
of pop-cultural visions, but we groundlings were drawn to the idea of them.
They were not art, but there were ours. What we were buying for a buck may have
been a world view honed down to crude simplicities by the sensibilities of California
and Eastern Europe, but it was a world view we could share or reject with our
neighbors, our colleagues, our classmates. And in the darkness of a building
on a street where we lived, in the glow of lurid Technicolor, we could pull
a two-hour trade-in of our ordinary lives for the extraordinary lives of pirates
and chorines and frontiersmen and seducers.
Gradually, as neighborhoods went, so did their
theaters. We traded cinematic intimacy for the anonymity of the herd, for sound
systems and skyscraper screens. One by one, they went: The Escorial, Cortez,
Happy Hour, Beacon, Bell, Fox, Clabon, Dreamland, Rivoli, Tivoli. They all flopped
exhausted in their graves with the sound of approaching progress in their ears.
A cameraman from a local TV station shows
up, but he's got to do some creative camera work because only eight of the Prytania's
287 seats are filled. "We didn't do a very good job getting out the word about
this meeting," Rene's son Robert says apologetically.
Comments are invited. A preservationist steps
up. He says he can't stay because he's got an invite to a dinner party, but
he offers three ways to buy and save the Prytania: (a) forming a nonprofit corporation,
(b) a stock sale or (c) a combination. "We saved the Saenger and the Orpheum;
we can save the Prytania," he exclaims before hurrying off.
One lady suggests tapping a private foundation.
A slender young man with a red Wilson satchel in hand asks about involving City
Hall. Robert Brunet says hopefully that sometimes politicians can be swayed
by community opinion and he believes Renee Gill Pratt is the area's representative.
Whoever comes up with a plan for salvation, Robert adds, "My dad wants to be
the guy who stands at the door and tears your ticket and welcomes you to the
Prytania."
Rene Brunet comes back to the podium. He starts
to talk of the history of the movie house at the corner of Prytania and Leontine,
which began in 1915. There was a Prytania streetcar then, and its passing would
jar the needle out of the phonograph sound system when talkies came in. There
was blue velvet curtain with rhinestones and crystal chandeliers. A fire in
1927 and another in the '70s.
Then he talks of metroplex theaters and complaints
he's heard from customers that they're treated like cattle. He speaks with vague
optimism about angels of generosity who might help buy the place. Finally, he
holds up a brick and says maybe we'll sell bricks to raise money.
A woman in the front row asks why the Prytania
hasn't been advertising in the daily paper. Robert Brunet says sales have been
poor, but Harry Potter is nearby.
Rene Brunet tries to smile as he says good
night. "Be careful rushing out the door in such a large crowd," he says.
The movie screen hangs red and blank.
